Jolt Country

So far this seems like the worst game purchase you've made. Am I reading this wrong?

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.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:It's amazing to me that a game developed in a second-world pinko commie socialist paradise doesn't have freeplay, by the by.

It's not when you consider that the original Tetris was written for the PC. PC games are, of course, different from coin-op, and apparently whoever designed the conversion didn't consider this.

Let me buy you two a drink. Are we supposed to continue bumping this thread?

I don't even know what the fuck's going on, but I'll take a Crown and ... well, Crown.

pinback wrote:So far this seems like the worst game purchase you've made. Am I reading this wrong?

So far, yes. Although this was just the board. I am going into the other room to see if it's got a goddamn pus-dripping battery in it like Flack said. If so, I may turn it into a fucking homicide battery.

I didn't see a battery when I checked quickly today. I did see a pot on the board, so I am hoping that's volume.

That would make sense, as I believe pot may have been involved in this project all along.

Yuk yuk yuk.

Cleverly told me that he thought that Tetris needs a +12 line for sound, and he was pretty sure it's not hooked up in my Multi-Williams JAMMA machine.

Hmm.

I think I hooked up +12 to my Moon Patrol JAMMA thing... but that doesn't have two joysticks, rendering this entire experience a miserable debacle.

So once I test it in the Moon Patrol and make sure that sound works, I'll probably just try to sell the Tetris circuit board and get my money back. Christ.

Flack wrote: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.)

You know, it's funny but L. Ron Hubbard (yes, the guy who started Scientology) wrote about something like this in his book Battlefield Earth in which the entire circuit for their teleporter device is essentially encoded as an LCD image under the console, which if you don't remove the battery connector in the correct position, wipes the image. Underneath this is a complete circuit that doesn't really perform anything, is fried before it is put into service.

If you try to open the device without knowing the secret, you blow the real device and what you see is a burned-out circuit board with non-functioning components.

Flack wrote:I don't even know what the fuck's going on, but I'll take a Crown and ... well, Crown.

I like the line from the movie Barbarians At the Gate, "I'll take a scotch and soda, no ice, no soda."

I guess he had to be funny, I don't even drink and I know enough that a normal person would have ordered a "scotch, neat."

Flack wrote:That would make sense, as I believe pot may have been involved in this project all along.

Yuk yuk yuk.

Other kids in my 6th grade class never seemed to understand when I referred (correctly) to a refrigerated rail car as a "reefer".