Re: Italian Cinematronics Game Boards

On Fri, 28 Nov 1997 12:53:26 -0800 (PST), aek@goonsquad.spies.com (Al
Kossow) wrote:

>The REALLY interesting thing is this
>company didn't use the Cine monitor design THE ANALOG
>SECTION IS ON THE SOUND BOARD! and they designed their
>own power supply and X/Y monitor (at least the monitor
>schematic has all SGS part numbers for the transistors)

This sounds like the Japanese clone of Star Castle. Cinematronics sued
to have all these machines destroyed, and won, so there's not very many
around. According to a an ex-Cinematronics technician, it was a better,
more reliable design. One of the biggest reliability problems
Cinematronics had was the sensitive analog parts being blown by HV
discharges as the monitor was powered on/off.

Moving the analog section off the monitor was good for reliability.
Though I'm sure the reason the Japanese did so was to allow them to use
off the shelf X/Y monitors. It's cheaper to design a PC-board than to
go into production with a new monitor (you know, winding special purpose
yokes, etc.) Of course that doesn't explain this company if they went
through the trouble off designing their own monitors. Was this game
*really* popular enough to design your own monitor for? And still turn
a profit?

BTW: I played both version on my emulator for a while, they both seem to
play like the original (Version 1) of Star Castle, with nothing but the
titles changed. All the score and game play is still in English, looks
like a hack to me. I wonder if Cinematronics made the hack, or whether
this was done illegally. I would think it would have to have been done
by someone in the know, I can't imagine reverse engineering the whole
CPU board just to change a title.

-Zonn

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Received on Mon Dec 1 15:36:16 1997