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I bought one a couple of weeks ago; it's almost here. I'll post up some pics and thoughts when I get it
 
I bought some spare *untouched* A boards off a seller on Taobao. No issues with those and a good value at less than $50 each. They were also extremely clean.

Everything else with hacked up audio and those cheap red replacement dipswitches is total fucking garbage. Usually filthy as sin/yaton as well.

My suggestion - stay far away from all the Chinese ebay shit. Serves a higher function as landfill.
 
I don’t know, it’s not like they’re making new cps1 boards...
 
The toaboa people are selling more or less the same thing as the ebay vermin but you can also just get a motherboard and it won't be all muddy with hacks. Tbfocus is you are interested.
 
Anyone with experience with the legendHK converts? Man, the market has gone to crap; ebay only has bootlegs or super overpriced 'collector grade' boards for 5X the price of what's socially acceptable. I regret not buying more boards back in the days, but I didn't want to be like those pcb hoarders who buy tons of pcbs but never play with them. Ugh.

Sorry for the random rant. If anyone has interest with those legendHK convert jobs, i'm all ears! Are there audio problems?
I have a legendHK daimakaimura conversion.

The Sound failed after about 30 minutes of use.

The A board appeared to be stock.

He sent me a replacement A board and it's been working fine for about a year now *knock on wood*.
 
Pictures inbound. Got my Forgotten Worlds from ebay seller "LegendHK" Based on the generic auction pics, I was hopeful that this wasn't a total hack job.

First, the packaging was encouraging. Bubble wrap around box, PCB inside box also bubble-wrapped:
9C21FD5C-BDAB-40DD-BFF7-ADD341FC3418.jpeg



Note the business card; at least they have contact info. Interesting they took the time to include a xerox of the manual:

BADF9464-B7F8-42D0-9CD2-F9CAAC14E10D.jpeg


Here we are; i'll give them credit for nice EPROM stickers that look legit.
A7E38AF8-4FE3-41FD-9A19-7369091BFC46.jpeg


Arg, the pics in the auction show a regular audio section. This one is the crazy hackjob amp replacement version with that Diode attached we've seen in other examples from @Kujako. If I ever think my soldering is shit, i'll look at this picture and feel better about myself:
11C76889-8A1E-4248-A740-B1C0749354C8.jpeg


Interesting enough, this is a 12mhz crystal board, but the red dip switches don't say "cps-dash" to me. Likely this is just parted together like we thought:

BA0C025D-9E85-4A8B-B3E4-0928D8D926D9.jpeg

The board has a lot of gunk around the CPS-A-01 and CPS-B-01 chips. I tried my best to clean it up after these pics:

D6991380-B934-4498-8F23-23D85789692C.jpeg

As expected this is a B-21 based romhack.

604A4DCB-1290-472E-B4A8-67C7467D6C76.jpeg

So all that being said, the board does work fine. I played though the entire game without issue. The volume pot is really off, it's almost like it has 3 settings, off-whisper-fuckingloud. lol.

I don't mind the hackery, worst case is that I have some spare parts. As it stands I have 3 of 4 CPS1 boards with issues. I love the platform and game library, but the hardware is really unreliable.
 
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@duffcon yup that's same weird audio bodge job we've been seeing.... mine failed, but yours may stay alive longer. The issue I have, is that I can not for the life of me figure out what they're doing. There are diodes where capacitors should be, the weird powering of the knock off Yamaha chips, etc. So not had any luck fixing it.
 
Pictures inbound. Got my Forgotten Worlds from ebay seller "LegendHK" Based on the generic auction pics, I was hopeful that this wasn't a total hack job.

First, the packaging was encouraging. Bubble wrap around box, PCB inside box also bubble-wrapped:
9C21FD5C-BDAB-40DD-BFF7-ADD341FC3418.jpeg



Note the business card; at least they have contact info. Interesting they took the time to include a xerox of the manual:

BADF9464-B7F8-42D0-9CD2-F9CAAC14E10D.jpeg


Here we are; i'll give them credit for nice EPROM stickers that look legit.
A7E38AF8-4FE3-41FD-9A19-7369091BFC46.jpeg


Arg, the pics in the auction show a regular audio section. This one is the crazy hackjob amp replacement version with that Diode attached we've seen in other examples from @Kujako. If I ever think my soldering is shit, i'll look at this picture and feel better about myself:
11C76889-8A1E-4248-A740-B1C0749354C8.jpeg


Interesting enough, this is a 12mhz crystal board, but the red dip switches don't say "cps-dash" to me. Likely this is just parted together like we thought:

BA0C025D-9E85-4A8B-B3E4-0928D8D926D9.jpeg

The board has a lot of gunk around the CPS-A-01 and CPS-B-01 chips. I tried my best to clean it up after these pics:

D6991380-B934-4498-8F23-23D85789692C.jpeg

As expected this is a B-21 based romhack.

604A4DCB-1290-472E-B4A8-67C7467D6C76.jpeg

So all that being said, the board does work fine. I played though the entire game without issue. The volume pot is really off, it's almost like it has 3 settings, off-whisper-fuckingloud. lol.

I don't mind the hackery, worst case is that I have some spare parts. As it stands I have 3 of 4 CPS1 boards with issues. I love the platform and game library, but the hardware is really unreliable.
Mine does not have that audio hack. Not from legendhk anyway.

Test all the DIP switches. Every A board I've received with those red switches on them have had at least 1 that doesn't work correctly.
 
So curiousity got the best of me and my wallet, and I ordered one. It seems alright so far, gameplay feels the same. BUT - It seems that Overall, the audio is not very loud. Also.. There's this weird issue with the music in Sagat's stage. The music seems also a bit off in Vega's stage. Almost as if it's missing instruments? It's hard to explain.

It's not very annoying, but I noticed it. Sorry for the poor quality of the footage, also the bass is a bit loud on my system.
 

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Sound ok to me. Your audio section seems original, so that's good. Is this "legendHK" on ebay as well?

My audio is a hackjob and the volume pot is very weird, in the space of 1/10 of a turn it goes from off to quiet to loud.

Your A board seems to be more original overall; did you check to see if it's a 10 or 12mhz crystal? If it's a 10, then that might explain your 'slightly off' feeling.
 
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Sound ok to me. Your audio section seems original, so that's good. Is this "legendHK" on ebay as well?

My audio is a hackjob and the volume pot is very weird, in the space of 1/10 of a turn it goes from off to quiet to loud.

Your A board seems to be more original overall; did you check to see if it's a 10 or 12mhz crystal? If it's a 10, then that might explain your 'slightly off' feeling.
Was gonna say, that A board does NOT look like the weird ones we've been seeing. The ROMs look like they're from the same place I got my "dash" A board from and they were 100% original. The guy just replaces the ROMs on the B board and modifies the C.
 
Some more interesting things. There seems to be 2 sellers on ebay "legendHK" and "arcadefunny66". I bought my board from 'legendHK' but in the app, it says that "arcadefunny66" is a "seller you've bought from". Also their board pics seem to be the ones where the audio sections are replaced where "legendHK" seem to be original. That being said, my legendHK board has a replaced audio section. So maybe both sellers are the same company in two places?
 
Some more interesting things. There seems to be 2 sellers on ebay "legendHK" and "arcadefunny66". I bought my board from 'legendHK' but in the app, it says that "arcadefunny66" is a "seller you've bought from". Also their board pics seem to be the ones where the audio sections are replaced where "legendHK" seem to be original. That being said, my legendHK board has a replaced audio section. So maybe both sellers are the same company in two places?
Could be, I've purchased from both over the years.
 
Mine came from Legend.

I'll update about the crystal speed later when I get home
 
I have also bought an A board from Arcadefunny as a spare, so i'm interested to see the audio section on this one as well.
 
So I complained that the depicted board has an original audio section vs what I got. The seller offered me $10 off or $20 off another item. what Do you think?
 
Get what you paid for. The boards with dodgy sound sections will prove troublesome over time.
 
Get what you paid for. The boards with dodgy sound sections will prove troublesome over time.
Agreed but the question is why are they doing it. It’s not like they had a bad board and bodged in a fix. They designed a totally new circuit and seem to be putting it on working boards
 
the question is why are they doing it.
It's not a mystery.

These A-Boards appear to be from "Q-Sound" games which does not have the Sound Section populated on the A-Board from the factory, So they're populating it after the fact for these conversions and using the cheapest parts that they have on-hand to do it.
 
Indeed, was confused until I looked at the A board thread and learned the qsound version had another board in the sandwich all together.

Got the other a board and it is almost identical to the other I posted.
 
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