Weird Konami GX Bootleg

[mikejmoffitt]

I'm really running out of places to ask here! It's not particularly NES related at all, but this place has lots of knowledgable hardware folks so it's worth a shot I suppose, even a shot in the dark.

Copied from the description I've already written:

Wound up with this thing, when I thought I was buying a Sexy Parodius PCB.
It looks like the hardware has been mostly recreated using FPGAs and other PLCs. That's cool and all, it's neat to see someone do it, but the game suffers slowdown seemingly at random, and more importantly, the audio system looks 100% reimplemented rather than simulated - what sounds like sampled audio is called by the game engine, and a lot of tracks are cut off and don't loop properly. Many songs play at the wrong times too (Mambo/Koitsu's theme plays when Vic Viper's should play). No audio loops properly, and it sounds like someone held a mic up to the game for all audio. A lot of samples are missing too, like voices.

The ROM, modified as it is, seems to incorporate both the asian release and the japanese release (confusing designation, I know, but bear with me, that's how they are named). The title screen is the english sexy parodius logo, but the cutscene text is still japanese... weird.

If anyone knows anything about this, that would be awesome.

I've taken some pictures viewable here:

http://mikejmoffitt.com/img/fakeparo

If anyone can translate the korean and chinese (yes, both!) that would be helpful.

Here's a video of it in action. Anyone familiar with the game will know that this sounds absolutely awful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugtUpldW ... t_received

If anyone knows anything, that'd be super cool to share some info.

[AWJ]

It's very, very common for bootleg arcade boards to substitute the original maker's sound hardware with a cheap ADPCM decoder (typically an OKI 6295 or something similar) playing loops recorded from the original board. Konami GX has rather beefy sound hardware--a Konami custom wavetable synthesizer and a TMS57002 DASP, driven by a 68000--so it's not surprising at all that the bootleggers used this approach.

You should get in contact with MAME, as I don't think any Konami GX bootlegs have been dumped and preserved.

[tepples]

It's very, very common for bootleg arcade boards to substitute the original maker's sound hardware with a cheap ADPCM decoder (typically an OKI 6295 or something similar) playing loops recorded from the original board.

You'd think the bootleggers would substitute an OCRemix or two, given that they have access to what is essentially a PlayStation 1-class music player. But that doesn't happen because it'd be too awesome.

[mikejmoffitt]

It's very, very common for bootleg arcade boards to substitute the original maker's sound hardware with a cheap ADPCM decoder (typically an OKI 6295 or something similar) playing loops recorded from the original board. Konami GX has rather beefy sound hardware--a Konami custom wavetable synthesizer and a TMS57002 DASP, driven by a 68000--so it's not surprising at all that the bootleggers used this approach.

You should get in contact with MAME, as I don't think any Konami GX bootlegs have been dumped and preserved.

Once my 16-bit EPROM adapter for my Willem arrives, I plan on dumping all of the roms, which claim to be the "EAA" version.

I've fixed the video issues, this is how it plays:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUg5cjwkJko

A few notes from the description:

version EAA
mask rom check fails
skips most of boot tests
Hast real 68020, other chips done in FPGAs
Has no dip switches
During palette fade at the start of level and also character death, lag occurs
English title, everything else japanese
All text missing from intro sequence
Flipbook effect has layering issues in character select
Not seen in the video, but backgrounds missing on stage 2 (just like in MAME...)

Also, there's no scanline counter, as the underwater palette doesn't change for the water stage.

[Gilbert]

If anyone can translate the korean and chinese (yes, both!) that would be helpful.

I cannot help with the Korean text but I can translate the Chinese text for you, which are nothing spectacular.
2528: (Warranty) voided if taken off. Year Month Day
2529: Salamander*
2530: Sexy Crazy Great Shooting (this is self-explanatory)
2531: Quality Logo, (Warranty) voided if taken off. Year Month Day

*Note that since Salamander was extremely popular in Chinese-speaking places, games in the Gradius series were sometimes regarded to be from the Salamander series (which is the exact opposite of the official classification), so Gradius 2 and Gradius 3 were sometimes called Salamander 2 and Salamander 3 (that a real Salamander 2 existed didn't matter, as that game was not that well known to begin with), and that Parodius was almost always referred to as SD-Salamander.

[koitsu]

I can help with the Korean, and could have helped with the Chinese but Gilbert got to it already. Gimme a bit to work on it; wanted to get a reply in first.

BTW -- I do own a Sexy Parodius PCB and it's a real/legit Konami GX board. So this thread really interested me since I'd never seen a bootleg Konami GX board before. I also have Salamander 2 as well (in fact I think I have two boards, one which doesn't work and another which does).

EDIT: About done with the Korean shown here except the picture is too blurry for me to read 4 or 5 of the Hangul. Can you please get a better shot (specifically better focus)?

EDIT #2: Never mind, I figured it out, I think. A clearer shot would be nice but I'll try to go off of context. :-)

The Korean, reading it as best as I can given the blurry shot. There's one Hangul I can't read with reliability (looks like 필 but could be 펄 or 괄) so I put (?) after it:

Code: Select all

제명			색시바로디우스
이용등급		전체이용가
등급분류번호	2002-P0151
일련번호		2002-0768

본 게임물은 음반,비디오물 및 게임물에
관한 법률에 의해 둥급분류필(?)함.
2002. 09. 03.
보보스인터내셔날 (인)

English:

Code: Select all

Title           Sexy Parodius
<unknown>       <unknown>
Product No.     2002-P0151
Serial No.      2002-0768

This is the music, video, and game, per <unknown> and compliance with law.
2002 / 09 / 03
BOBOS International

Sorry about the <unknown> bits -- I'll get those translated tomorrow, will need to ask some Korean friends of mine since my dictionaries nor Google has proper translations for those. I imagine the 3rd <unknown>, which is 둥급분류필 (or 둥급분류펄 or 둥급분류펼함 or maybe 둥급분류괄), is probably some legal/government word. The guy I'd normally ask right now is in Iksan and won't be back until June; I don't think his wife would know the word. If you could get me a picture with better focus that would be really helpful.

Anyway, that paragraph just looks to be a disclaimer stating the seal/approval for distribution/commerce is provided, blah blah... you get the idea. Japan, China, Taiwan, US, etc. all have the same crap. :-)

As for the game oddities itself (wrong music being played, etc.) -- those are probably a result of the checksum failure that you see here (00:55 onward). So either the ROMs are bad, the board has some kind of internal problem, or some other anomaly. One of my Salamander 2 boards has this same problem and it's not a bootleg.

[mikejmoffitt]

I'm pretty sure the music is simply because of how they handled audio - the entire M68000 that normally controls audio is entirely missing, and it seems they implemented their own hardware to listen for the audio cues and respond appropriately. Of course, this solution relies on shitty sample playback and they probably just skimped out on doing a good job.

Once I dump the roms I'd like to see if it's a fairly normal sexy parodius ROM, or if it's been modified to make these audio calls.

I'm impressed with the level of gameplay and graphical accuracy this thing produces for being an FPGA re-implementation. There are a lot of layering issues on the character select screen, an entirely missing intro background in Stage 2 (exactly like MAME...) and the coins are the wrong color.

I managed to get a 50% refund, so for the price I've effectively paid now it's cool to have an ultra-rare un-documented un-emulated board.

Not that I wouldn't sell it at an instant


EDIT: A friend said the second line of korean simply has to do with age group, like "good for all ages", etc - nothing interesting.

[AWJ]

I'm pretty sure the music is simply because of how they handled audio - the entire M68000 that normally controls audio is entirely missing, and it seems they implemented their own hardware to listen for the audio cues and respond appropriately. Of course, this solution relies on shitty sample playback and they probably just skimped out on doing a good job.

The two QFP44 chips labelled "AD-65", near the leaking capacitor, are almost certainly OKI MSM6295s, judging from the "6295" printed on the PCB. Each is a 4-voice ADPCM decoder with an integrated mixer and DAC. The '6295 is an extremely common sound chip on both original and bootleg arcade boards--for example, it's used to play drums, voices and sound effects on CPS1 boards like Street Fighter II. Each chip will have its own ROM containing the ADPCM data. Presumably one '6295 plays the music and the other plays the sound effects. The reason for using two chips is that the '6295 can only address 256kB of ROM. Of course you can add some bank switching*, but each individual sample is still limited to 256kB (about 65 seconds at 8kHz), and you can't use the other three voices for anything while one voice is playing a sample that takes up an entire ROM bank.

*Anything from a simple latch, to a latch + multiplexer to provide both a fixed bank and a switchable bank (comparable to a NES UNROM board) to something like the NMK112, a chip devised by the now-defunct arcade manufacturer NMK that was a full-blown MMC for a pair of 6295s, allowing you to select a different 64kB ROM bank for each of the eight voices on the two chips.

[mikejmoffitt]

Well, I've dumped all the roms for this. Looking in a hex editor, a few do squarely correspond with some real Sexy Parodius ROMs. If anyone is interested in the images for some comparative work, let me know.