by Flack » Mon Aug 15, 2011 7:13 pm
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Also, I am not getting any sound. Might be a cab problem. I can live without freeplay. Friends I cannot live without Tetris sound.
It's amazing to me that a game developed in a second-world pinko commie socialist paradise doesn't have freeplay, by the by.
Boy, are you not going to like this.
Do you remember me telling you about Shinobi and suicide batteries?
(For those of you who weren't standing there in my arcade, which would be everybody on the planet except for me and ICJ, allow me to expound. In the 1980s, a few dozen arcade games began encrypting their chips. The encryption code was stored on another chip which was connected to a battery. This was done so that if the chip was removed from the PCB, it would be unreadable; this made it impossible (or at least more difficult) to bootleg these boards. They have become known as "suicide batteries" because they don't last forever. When the battery dies, the encryption chip dies with it, and the whole game becomes unusable. In other words, it commits suicide.)
The reason I told this story to ICJ is because I once purchased a Shinobi game that (get ready for it)
didn't have any sound. When I inspected the board I found that the battery had been leaking battery acid all over the sound chips.
It's funny, the things one remembers in this hobby. When you said Tetris and "no sound" I hit Google and went and looked up the list of games that used suicide batteries.
http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html
Spoiler alert: both revisions of the Tetris board are on the list. I say "both" because there are two; if you're lucky, maybe you have a later revision that doesn't have a suicide battery?
I'd pull that board out and take a good look at it. See if you can find the battery, and look for any damage around it. If there is some ... well, what can you do at this point, right? For the right price, I can record an mp3 of me singing the tune to Tetris, which you could somehow loop as you played.
[quote="Ice Cream Jonsey"]Also, I am not getting any sound. Might be a cab problem. I can live without freeplay. Friends I cannot live without Tetris sound.
It's amazing to me that a game developed in a second-world pinko commie socialist paradise doesn't have freeplay, by the by.[/quote]
Boy, are you not going to like this.
Do you remember me telling you about Shinobi and suicide batteries?
(For those of you who weren't standing there in my arcade, which would be everybody on the planet except for me and ICJ, allow me to expound. In the 1980s, a few dozen arcade games began encrypting their chips. The encryption code was stored on another chip which was connected to a battery. This was done so that if the chip was removed from the PCB, it would be unreadable; this made it impossible (or at least more difficult) to bootleg these boards. They have become known as "suicide batteries" because they don't last forever. When the battery dies, the encryption chip dies with it, and the whole game becomes unusable. In other words, it commits suicide.)
The reason I told this story to ICJ is because I once purchased a Shinobi game that (get ready for it) [b]didn't have any sound[/b]. When I inspected the board I found that the battery had been leaking battery acid all over the sound chips.
It's funny, the things one remembers in this hobby. When you said Tetris and "no sound" I hit Google and went and looked up the list of games that used suicide batteries.
http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html
Spoiler alert: both revisions of the Tetris board are on the list. I say "both" because there are two; if you're lucky, maybe you have a later revision that doesn't have a suicide battery?
I'd pull that board out and take a good look at it. See if you can find the battery, and look for any damage around it. If there is some ... well, what can you do at this point, right? For the right price, I can record an mp3 of me singing the tune to Tetris, which you could somehow loop as you played.