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Atari Vegas 3 Boards questions ?
ctozzi:
I'm thinking of building a Mame sort of with a medium resolution monitor and Atari Vegas Boards. My questions are does anyone have a cabinet like this that is able to switch rom eproms/ hard drives and play differnt games by simply doing this ? exapmles like blitz 99,2000, and gauntlet dark legacy, legends ? Do I simply need to buy the 2 parts of this board and voila i'm ready to go or is alot more in depth than this ?
MonMotha:
Any game that runs on Vegas can generally be run on any Vegas system. This includes Blitz 2000 (Vegas version, there was also a for more common version running on the older Seattle hardware), Showtime, Gauntlet Dark Legacy, and perhaps a couple other games.
You will need a suitable boot ROM (these are often universal), a security chip (game specific), and the hard drive (game specific, but you can sometimes find bare drives cheap). Legit kits are very hard to find, but there are lots of bootlegs out there, of course. You may find that some bootleg Vegas software kits have a security chip that'll run just about anything.
You will need all 3 boards in the set for it to be usable. There is an IO board (the one with the JAMMA harness), the CPU board (the one in the middle), and a video board (which is a standard 3DFX card).
ctozzi:
ok cool thanks for the info that's what i needed to know. any idea exactly were the security chip is located ? The reason i ask there is a local guy that has a few boards and i want to see if the security chip is in it.
Paladin:
Hey, that's a picture of my showcase build! I guess I can answer your chip question. I've attached a picture of my board with the security chip outlined in a red rectangle, and the boot chip outlined in blue. It also shows my compactflash hard drive replacement.
I was also wondering if there would be a way to make a couple small boards with a switch to swap between gauntlet legends and dark legacy since I have both sets of chips. I was suprised that the dark legacy chips I got off the guy that sells them on ebay didn't have a factory label on the security chip, as I thought they couldn't be copied.
I did think I read somewhere that some games used faster RAM on the video card, but I don't know if that's true or not.
MonMotha:
Go in to the test menu and bring up "system info". If it identifies the game as "DEVELOPMENT PIC", then you have a bootleg, which would explain the lack of factory labels. These are also likely to run just about anything. Try just swapping the hard drives. It could very well work, especially if they are both bootleg.