In the Hunt bootleg arrived last week.
It's the Japanese version; so, it's actually Kaitei Daisensou.
The construction of the PCB seems pretty good.
There were some issues with it, when it arrived. Applying De-Oxit to all removable parts and sockets cleared everything up.
I usually apply de-oxit to most of my PCBs, when I first get them.
Apparently, this PCB contains 2 FPGAs (Actel A42MX09-FPQ100 and A40MX04-FPL84)
One of the removable parts is an NEC V30 processor, running at 10mhz, that is Intel 8086 compatible.
The other 2 removable parts are 2 of the game ROMs.
This PCB is pretty cool, but also a little frustrating.
Before I begin talking about gameplay, I have to state that I have NO experience with the original PCB.
My only experience with In the Hunt / Kaitei Daisensou arcade game comes from MAME and FBNEO.
While I am a fan of these games, I am not an expert.
The first thing I noticed is that the aspect ratio is slim from left to right. I am running this PCB on the Minigun Supergun to a Sony Consumer CRT. There are pretty thick bars on the left and right sides of the screen.
The Hook and Ninja Baseball Bat Man bootlegs are exactly the same.
Gameplay is pretty faithful to the original, with a few exceptions.
The game utilizes 2 action buttons, just like the original.
Button 1 - performs the equivalent of buttons 1 and 2 on the original. It activates your forward atack, and your vertical arracks at the same time.
Button 2 - activates the sheild that appears around your sub after you return from losing a ship. You can use this ability 3 times per life.
I find the changes to the button actions to be pretty cool. I really like using the forcefield. Some parts of arcade games are clearly aimed at taking a quarter from the player. The shield makes it feel a little more like a console game. It feels a little more fair, at times. I'm not good at shooters. I need all the help I can get.
Because this is Kaitei Daisensou, and not In the Hunt, the levels are played in this order: 1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 6.
The frustrating part - The game runs at a decent speed; until you press the fire button. Pressing the fire button causes the game to slow to Metal Slug 2 levels slowdown. The slowdown does not seem to be related to the number of sprites or objects on the screen. It's almost like a switch is thrown: fullspeed / slowdown. When the game is running slow, it runs consistently slow. The speed of the slowdown does not vary. Adding a second player, or more enemies does not impact the speed of the game; firing your weapon does.
I don't believe the slowdown is related to input reading, I believe it's related to a specific sprite appearing on the screen. This is just how it seems, to me. I need to pay closer attention.
Even with the slowdown, I still enjoy the game. That said; I'd enjoy it more without the slowdown.
I'm wondering if it's possible to change the oscillator(s) and possibly speed things up a little bit.
I'm also interested in playing this ROM in MAME. I haven't seen it anywhere. It may not be dumped.
The PCB has 2 ROMs that are socketed. They are labeled SW-B and SW-C. SW-A seems to be the same type of ROM but it is not socketed.
SW-D, SW-E, and SW-F are a different type of ROM from SW-A, SW-B, and SW-C.
I dumped SW-B and SW-C. They are 128KB in size. They closely match ith-l1j.bin and ith-h1j.bin, from the mame romset, respectively. Each file has 333 Bytes difference, in roughly the same location in the file.
If anyone has advice on overclocking something like this, or dumping the rest of the SW chips, I'm interested in what you have to say.
If anyone is thinking about buying one of these, now there's some information about them. I couldn't find anything before I made the purchase.
