so yeah I have a friend with a ketsui pcb and he lets me play it for free. After deciding it's the greatest game of all time I went around keeping me eye out for a copy of it for sale. I found one on ebay for a price I liked and bought it. So anyway....It was hard finding information about this pcb. I already know it doesn't use a suicide battery (thank god) and that it's a custom pgm board. Also the official manual shows that it doesn't use -5v (yay). There's a few things on the board that I'm trying to figure out what they are. Here's a picture of the board in high detail http://www.world-of-arcades.net/Cave/Ketsui/Ketsui_pcb.jpg and here's the manual for the game http://www.world-of-arcades.net/APPA/KKK/Ketsui%20(Cave,%20AMI%202002)/Ketsui_Manual.pdf so yeah....I don't read japanese so help translating that booklet would be great. From what I can understand in the booklet the dip switch only uses the first switch which simply puts the game into the test menu. And the orange thing you turn with a screwdriver I'm guessing is a sound volume control. So here's my question....There's a small black button and a red switch both next to the battery on the board. What do the button and the switch do? Anyone who could help or who could point me in the right direction with this would be greatly appreciated. I'm sure the guys on shmup forum would know more about this but I don't like that forum very much.
The button seems to be a test switch and the switch seems to be a battery back ram clear, which you shouldn't touch. Dip 1 puts the game into test mode and that's about it.
Nice of your friend to give you free play. :thumbsup: This is a great Cave resource. http://www.cave-stg.com/forum/ Btw, the links aren't working. ^_^_^
wow thanks for all the great info. Yes my friend is awesome. He's a lot like me, he collects games to play them. And he has a GREAT taste in games. He introduced me to some of the best arcade games I've ever seen. The links are working. When you first click them it won't open. Simply copy the link, open a new internet window, paste the link, and then it works. So that button is a test switch? I wonder what it tests. Or does it just put you into the test menu? And what would be so bad about clearing the ram? It would just reset the game settings correct? *edit* did a little hunting of my own and I found a thread that answers these questions in full detail http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=9528
You know what, somehow I never knew that forum existed. Quite how I don't know! I was going to say try asking on the shmups forum, but the Cave one will likely be best.
Looking at that picture, when you see chips with the tops rubbed off like that usually means they are stolen ...
it hasn't come in yet but from the pictures the eeprom looks like the first revision that has a few bugs. Luckily it's easy to get around these bugs and still happily play the game. Much less annoying than some other bugs I've seen. My buddy had a mushihimesama pcb for a while and it was the first revision. Me and another friend credit fed to the end of ultra mode using 2 players and sure enough......we got the glitch where the game reset at the final boss. That has to be the most frustrating bug I've ever seen....a game that resets when you make it to the final boss on the hardest difficulty. oli_lar....over half the guys on cave stg are also on the shmup forum. So I consider that to be the same thing. And yes that picture is NOT the pcb that I bought. That's just an example picture. It's the highest quality picture of a ketsui pcb that I could find. *edit* I just looked at pictures of the pcb I'm getting it looks like the guy did the same thing rubbing off the chips. I don't see why someone would steal chips for a ketsui pgm pcb. I think ly-colizer is correct on this one. The whole reason cave put ketsui on a dedicated pcb would be so nobody bootlegs it. And I've certainly never heard of a bootleg ketsui. Don't forget people ketsui is running on pgm hardware and pgm is meant to be cartridge based. But I've read that cave put their games on dedicated pcbs with a custom bios to prevent bootlegs (and it seems to have worked, I've NEVER heard of any form of cave bootleg)
Both Ketsui and Espgaluda have IC's that have the markings removed/sanded off. All the pics I have seen of these boards are like this, so your PCB is probably legit. Yeah they work on there own, must be a problem with the post formatting the URL's incorrectly. ^_^_^
absolutely it is. Check out this site http://www.arcade-system.com/collections.htm it's french but if you look at the collections a lot of these guys each own their own ketsui. And they each have a picture of their own ketsui....and each one has those numbers scraped off. So I guess it's something with all ketsuis and yeah I don't know why clicking those links from the forum doesn't work. They even show up in the browser window as the same thing.
There's a thread on that switch (SW1) at shmups. Don't flip it, as the game won't boot as I understand it. Just about all Cave games have their settings changed from the service menu, which is generally activated via a service button on your Supergun/Cab, or in some cases directly on the board. The orange screw (R27) is indeed volume. None of the bugs kill the game. 1: Don't use freeplay. 2: Don't mash buttons after the 4th stage boss and you should be okay. I believe the bug-fixed boards have the Kizuna Jigokutachi kanji upside down. Well first, that's the stock photo (for archival purposes) at WOA. Second, this particular hardware isn't cracked yet, so all the boards are legit. Guru has even been given one, and it's not been successfully dumped. The only Cave PGM board that *might* be non-legit is DOJ:BL, as there is at least one person that can make a white label board a black label one (in theory). He has stated he has no interest in doing this though, and only uses the knowledge to ressurect dead Black Labels. You have to sift through far more garbage at shmups (and you might not get an answer... you will quite often get something not even related to the issue, like a long-winded COOL! GOOD BUY! reply). As long as you have rtw's attention, you'll get all the info you need, and he watches cave-stg. EOJ knows quite a bit about what versions are what as well... he's just not as technical as rtw. Most people aren't though.
I've had the game for a while. I've been happily playing around the bugs. So hitting the toggle switch causes the game not to boot? Is there any way to fix it if you hit if by accident? and my board has the stuff scraped off of the chips. In fact every picture of a ketsui pcb from peoples private collections I found had the chips scraped.
AFAIK, you just turn the switch back and it will work. I'm going off of memory though. Search around at shmups -- I know this was addressed at least once (but it might have on the old boards, before the crash). It's silly as that switch basically looks at you and says, "flip me!".
everything has been answered already but just thought id chime in and say the Ketsui really is one of the best games of all time, congrats on scoring a copy of your own and yeah all cave PCBs have the chips scraped with DDP DOJ occationally being the exception since it was delivered in a steel cage, dont wory about it.
thanks sven. I was lucky enough to have a friend with the arcade pcb who let me play it. Otherwise I probably would have never discovered how awesome it is.
