Gorf High Score Save Kit

[Scottacus]

I would like to be able to keep the high scores on my Gorf game when the power is shut off so I looked around and came across a high score save kit from Arcade High Scores in Germany.  I sent several e-mails to get answers to my questions and ordered a kit for my machine.

The kit is a daughter board that plugs into the Z80 processor socket.  The Z80 then goes into a socket on the daughter board and the ROM board is removed from the rack because the ROM now resides on the daughter board.  There are software DIP switches included that take over for the DIP switches on the CPU board.

Because the Gorf game uses a Bally rack system, there are several standoffs included to get the board far enough away from the rack to prevent shorting of pins in the metal rack.  The pins on the Z80 are standard thin chip pins but the pins on the standoffs are larger and round.  This prevents the pins from seating well in the socket and makes the board very prone to disengaging (I couldn't achieve good continuity without a fair amount of pressure on the sockets). 

I solved this by buying an 40 pin socket from Radio Shack and I used a couple of pieces of wood to permanently glue the round pin socket into the Radio Shack Socket so that there was good continuity between the socket pins.



This socket fits snuggly and securely to the Gorf board.  I also added a wooden standoff to the edge of the rack to allow me to screw the daughter board to the rack so that I am sure that it doesn't disengage should the rack get jostled.



The high score board now can be secured to the cage.



The kit works very well!  There is a splash screen when you power up the game that allows you the option of entering the set up screen by pressing the one player button.  In this screen you can set the number of ships, coin options, free play, language (English, German, French) and difficulty of play (Gorf had two ROM versions).  I really like playing the game in German because the speech synthesizer chip uses all of the same phrases as the English version only it now taunts you in German "Raum Kadet!"

With the mods I mention here, I recommend this kit to anyone who wants to keep high scores saved when the game is powered down.  I should also mention that the kit is also offered with internet capabilities so that high scores can automatically be uploaded to a high score page.  A CAT5 cable and router is needed for this.