One of the ways that I give back to the arcade community is volunteering my time and expertise to a group known as The Dumping Union. It is a great group of people who collaborate to find and preserve video games, mainly arcade games. We have many eyes constantly looking for new game versions, prototypes, unreleased games, unique hardware, etc.
On June 25, our friend farzeno spotted an unusual version of Bubble Bobble on eBay in Germany.
He made the immediate unilateral decision to purchase this gem, and secured it for all arcade collectors. Another amazing component of The Dumping Union is the generous financial donators who have since helped farzeno recoup some of the purchase cost.
Let's talk about this board set! First point of interest: this is not a Bubble Bobble pcb!? This is Bubble Bobble software running on Tokio pcb?! This board set does not have any protection chips, not even the one normally used by Tokio (Motorola 68705 MCU). As some of you know, it took many years to finally achieve accurate emulation of Bubble Bobble due to the protection chip/mcu.
Why is this pcb in a cage and covered in epoxy? Our best theory it was a location test board, to get feedback on the game. It was not unusual back then for cabinets to be targets of theft with game boards being stolen. Epoxy was just another lay of security.
In the past, other pcbs from Taito have been found just like this one. http://www.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=54642
Once I start processing this pcb to extract the roms and their contents, I am going to share some photos and story to the work involved on this thread
On June 25, our friend farzeno spotted an unusual version of Bubble Bobble on eBay in Germany.
He made the immediate unilateral decision to purchase this gem, and secured it for all arcade collectors. Another amazing component of The Dumping Union is the generous financial donators who have since helped farzeno recoup some of the purchase cost.
Let's talk about this board set! First point of interest: this is not a Bubble Bobble pcb!? This is Bubble Bobble software running on Tokio pcb?! This board set does not have any protection chips, not even the one normally used by Tokio (Motorola 68705 MCU). As some of you know, it took many years to finally achieve accurate emulation of Bubble Bobble due to the protection chip/mcu.
Why is this pcb in a cage and covered in epoxy? Our best theory it was a location test board, to get feedback on the game. It was not unusual back then for cabinets to be targets of theft with game boards being stolen. Epoxy was just another lay of security.
In the past, other pcbs from Taito have been found just like this one. http://www.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=54642
Once I start processing this pcb to extract the roms and their contents, I am going to share some photos and story to the work involved on this thread
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I'm in love in front of such beauty 
