Last year I nabbed an EX-BOARD tested and not working off ebay for 50 bucks, figured I'd hang it on the wall of PCBs and mess around with it. When it arrived I found it lacked a game cart dongle, when powered on with a PC monitor it fired up but hung at the mobo screen and had the 'keyboard error' message. I set the DIP to allow for a 15khz arcade monitor and figured I'd go in and change the BIOS to 'ignore all errors' but found it to be password locked. Tried removing the battery, tried the clear CMOS jumper, no luck. I nabbed an Arcana Heart 2 game cart for 40 bucks shipped via the Japan Dealer yahoo web page, when I got it in I plugged the game cart in and the game fired up--but only after I plug a keyboard into one of the USB plugs and hit F1 to skip the mobo start/keyboard error message screen. It's not a big deal to plug in a keyboard and hit F1 to play the game, for a total of 90 bucks I don't think it was too bad of a deal to have to suffer the keyboard inconvenience. Buuuuut I'd like of like to skip that. So my question is, did Examu stick a custom mobo BIOS on the tiny ITX motherboard and am I doomed to never being able to get into the BIOS due to the password protect?
Don't deal with STV (Japan Dealer). On ebay he is Arcadetower..., he ruins the hobby. Look for horror stories on neo-geo.com, arcadeotaku and shmups website.
Are there other people in Japan you can hip me to that'll go do the thing he did, buy an arcade board from one of the arcade stores and ship it to me for a nominal fee? I wanted to get Daemon Bride but his Yahoo "store" page went down, I think MAK or G-Front had the Daemon Bride game dongle for 80 bucks. I actually emailed Examu asking about the password and they never got back to me, hah.
have you tried the obvious passwords , i work in an arcade in the UK and 9 times out of 10 the password is either the game name or the game manufacturers name
The motherboard is a EPIA-LN by VIA. The bios in it seems to be custom as I've dumped it and it has a different checksum when compared to the official bios releases....other than that it's a standard motherboard. These boards are horrifically made however. I have 3 of em and they all have the same problems (dead motherboard and dead DC-DC converter...the DC-DC converter is also made by VIA). It gets way too hot inside that little case and the motherboard seems to go after a while. The only solution to repair this to be to flash it in a new one and go from there.
Hey, I'm pretty handy with BIOS's especially Phoenixbios, Try Fireport as the password (case sensitive) If Not then If you send me a bios dump I could sift through it with some tools and find the default inbuilt password. Unfortunately, since the password is coded into the BIOS Hard you can't Permanantly remove it, but I could turn it off if I knew what the password is. This will also potentially help other EX-Board Users. The EX isn't exactly the hardest nut to crack since it being nearly 95% off the shelf parts by design. those little cartridges are handy too.
