Jolt Country

Zoo Keeper is an amazing little game that came out in 1982. It features a zookeeper named Zeke, a bunch of wild animals, and his girlfriend Zelda.

There are three stages that I am aware of. In the first, you build bricks around escaping monsters. The second has you going over a bunch of ledges to resue the girl and the third is the escalator screen.

It is somewhat inspired by Donkey Kong.

Mine needs a new marquee (the original is flaking) and the side art is generic Taito art, not the orange-as-the-sun classic Zoo Keeper bit, with the lion. People have been working on stencils for years, but honestly, I doubt anything will come of it. It requires going into Adobe Illustrator and there are NDAs involved with the scans that people have, and there has been little progress in 3 years and so on and so forth. Ah, well.

I'm debating taking it into the garage and just doing the sides orange, in anticipation of a stencil. Maybe later.

At any rate, I love the game and I am officially out of room downstairs - the MAME cabinet had to move behind the couch, and that's not ideal. Xenophobe is the odd man out, I've just had no interest in anyone buying him.

I have the worst luck with these when it comes to saving games.

So yeah, Zoo Keeper is acting up as well. It has a long, documented history on rec.games.video.arcade.collecting.

My problem seems to be that the battery is sketchy. When I got it home, I had it on for several hours. It saved my settings and scores just fine.

The next day, I had it on for maybe 20 minutes, as I was dorking around with the jump buttons. That's when I got a new screen coming up. It says, "MEMORY FAILURE." It says some other things, like dorking about with the coin door switch, but the one thing that ZK and I have in common is that our (wait for it) (wait for it) memory stinks.

After doing what it says, I get the option to input the Location Name. In Zoo Keeper, you can tell it the name of the arcade, and that appears on the high score screen. This is all normal when the battery was not working. I can then play the game just fine.

Here's the kicker, going forward - sometimes when I boot it up, my settings were saved and restored, and sometimes they aren't. Christ! It seems like it happens when I don't leave the game on for hours at a time, but that's not 100% certain. I read that the batter needs 30 seconds to charge.

And actually, it's not the original battery. The guy who had it before Exidy Jon installed a 3.5v phone battery in there. I'm guessing it might be dying, and certainly that'd be the thing to look at and change first.

So how many arcade games do you now own?



Man, you gonna run out of quarters.



THE
DOLLAR CHANGER NEXT
AARDVARK

There are nine down there, which is too many, not enough room. I tried selling Xeno at the KLOV forum, but didn't get any replies. I'll shunt it over to craigslist when I start my Christmas vacation. With the dolly I bought, I think there is an actual chance that I could get it out of the downstairs area with help... as opposed to before, when I did not have the dolly. There was zero chance I was going to get it out.

HELLO, DOLLY.

If you get Top Skater you realize I'm going to be squatting on your front lawn, right?

Worm, you might just get yo ass GOIN' TO HELL.

Yeah, but I'm also going to send him my Sega Saturn after I play one game on it. So I'm pretty sure that blanks out any misdeeds with the guy. Honestly, I almost feel like I oughta spam JC with horseporn simply to get the most out of the magical effects of sending Robb Sherwin an old console.

That comic is hilarious. I wish the guy would do a version that had more pixels than laughs (and there were many laughs. I'm just saying it's like a 2x4 pixel comic).

Maybe he did do a version and Worm was just being a nice guy and not horseporning the phpBB borders on us.

I know it's getting ridiculous downstairs. I'll eventually find a taker for Xeno and things will be back to normal.

All right, gonna try one more thing before I get parts, for the CMOS issue:

The manual doesn't say whether a blank screen is a symptom or not, but
this is the workaround for CMOS ram problems:


Open Service Door and pull out Interlock switch to power game on.


Pull out the W1 (blue) jumper next to the battery on the video board.


Push Inetrlock back in.


Wait 2 minutes, power on and insert W1 back in.

From Usenet! Here's hoping.

OK, while I have it out, here are a couple photos:

Added a new page for Zoo Keeper (no real new info if you have read this thread) and then a separate page for navigating all the various arcade games I have.

Huh, what did Qix ever do to anyone?

I think Qix made a lot of people money, but - and this is just a guess - it wasn't that approachable. Not because of the gameplay (draw boxes, don't get hit) but because, what the hell is a "Qix"? Everyone back then could understand Mr. Do!, so when an operator got his Mr. Do! conversion kit and looked for a victim, well, there's this weird-ass drawing game that's past its prime. I love Qix, but Qix will play nicely when I get that MAME cab finished.

Zoo Keeper had to be considered a flop financially, but it wasn't its fault; it came right before the video game crash. It was never made for a home system, before the Taito Legends thing for Windows XP in 2005/6 (which is just the MAME version with a pretty front end).

And actually, I am not sure if they made 1900 dedicated cabs, or 1900 units total. Seeing how some people have posted on Usenet that they have 10 sets of circuit boards and such, I am guessing the 1900 number means dedicated cabinets.

And yes, the next time I open it up I will adjust the volume. It is the loudest game I have ever heard, outside of that one where you fire up a jet engine during gameday at the Seattle Seahawks' stadium.

Trying to get the thing to save settings has been a hassle. This is just a log, in case anyone finds this place through a Google search.

I bought a 3.6 volt, 300 mah NiCad battery that looked exactly like the one that was in the machine. I also bought two 5114 chips, because the two chips at U85 and U86 go bad (and when they do, it's a MEMORY FAILURE, the likes of which I have been getting when I restart the machine).

I installed the new 5114 chips and soldered the new battery in - didn't have any luck. It worked the first time I restarted the machine, but that was it. Subsequent attempts didn't work.

So today I said, "screw it," and went in with vinegar and a desoldering wick, as per instructions I got through the Killer List of Videogames forum. The game's original battery sat on the board. Someone had placed a second battery on, so mine would be the third. I cleaned the area up, put the battery back on and then took a look at all the socketed chips on the entire board - there were two that were kind of in awkwardly. Re-seated those.

I've had it on for about twenty minutes. I'd like to think that's enough time to let me know if the NiCad has a charge. I put in a 213,000 score and am going to turn it off and then back on right.... now.

And, it didn't work. Mother FUCK! Jesus Christ this is a fucking pain in the ass.

why are the batteries piggybacked? try your new one only.

So how's that new high score save ram project going?



THE
1] 999,999,481------VRK
2] 735,398,231------VRK
3] 645,236,756------VRK

ECT...

AARDVARK

AArdvark wrote:So how's that new high score save ram project going?

I wrote the guy who made the Taito kit, and he never wrote me back.

I then ordered it from QuarterArcade.com, and have not received any confirmation that they received my order and are getting ready to ship it.

So, I would say that this project is progressing nicely at the speed of a couple of snails fucking their way through the alphabet.

Hey, that's your 11,111st post!