One thing I’ve mentioned in the past is that every country where arcades played a significant factor back in the 80s / 90s ended up with their own versions of the classic games, some official, some unofficial, but always remembered by the people who played them back in the day.
Spain is no exception to this, the country had a thriving arcade industry throughout the 80s and 90s, with companies like Gaelco becoming big players in the industry, especially within Europe. It’s therefore no surprise that Spain also had a selection of bootlegs and licensed games created specifically for that market.
What is more surprising is that until now many of them have remained undumped; one of the earliest sites with arcade ROMs was actually a Spanish site (Spaindumps I seem to remember) but I guess general interest in some of these bootlegs was lower back then.
MAME is a documentation project, so it is important that it documents how the industry was, the good, and the bad, it therefore pleases me greatly to see members of the Spanish AUMAP group going through their collections and dumping the older Spanish versions of games they have, what makes many of these even more noteworthy than some of the bootlegs you find is that in most cases a decent amount of effort was put into localizing them, with Spanish translations of most text.
Some of the games appear to be official, like Bomb Jack, where Tecfri (a company known for various original products) held the license for the game in Spain. Unlike many this one hasn’t really been translated beyond the string on the title screen, but it’s still good to see it dumped. For this one thanks goes to ‘F.J.Jimenez (Gijon)‘
For the next one we should thank Roselson (from AUMAP), the game in question is a Spanish version of Pac Man known as Pacuman. It actually appears to be closer to Puck-Man in code, so I class it as a bootleg of that instead, but it has a couple of interesting properties beyond that. Aside from the translation to Spanish the actual gamecode is shifted a bit (extra code inserted, all offsets changed) compared to all of the original sets which is unusual for a bootleg, furthermore the coinage has been changed to accept different settings for each coin slot, and the attract mode behavior is different indicating there could be more changes beyond that. Here are some pics of the PCB, Cabinet, and game running in MAME. It’s worth noting that this is one of those bootlegs where neither the new title nor manufacturer appears in the game, but was common enough it is confirmed to be correct.
Also dumped was a Spanish bootleg of Phoenix from ‘Sonic’ again, fully translated, credit for this one goes to Enricnes (from AUMAP)
This is also a Moon Cresta bootleg from Petaco S.A. a common name to see on bootlegs in Spain. In terms of code this seems to be close to the Super Moon Cresta set. Credit here goes to Ricky2001 (from AUMAP)
A bootleg of Galaxian from Recreativos Franco S.A. the manufacturer of Pacuman featured above was also found and dumped. This is very similar to the Zero Time bootleg in that the Bonus Life dipswitch also controls the enemy bullet speed (not documented for that set in MAME at present) but the bonus values are different here at least. Credit this time goes to Roselson (from AUMAP)
Now, while it’s true most of these aren’t complex bootlegs on the level of some of the completely rewritten games in Brazil (and the new Time Pilot bootleg found there is along the same lines) they do form an important part of the history of arcades in Spain, showing how bootleggers often filled the void when official versions weren’t available, or weren’t properly adapted for the market. I imagine most of what is covered here isn’t going to be of interest to anybody outside of Spain, but I’ve always said that MAME is a project for everybody, without being for anybody specific.
There are certainly more of these to locate and dump, as well as at least one completely unique Spanish title I’m keeping my fingers crossed over.
*edit*
Another bootleg of Pac Man (Puck Man) was dumped as well, this one appears to be a slightly later production, with the code and graphics on 2 roms only, and a crude feature to allow name entry for the highest scoring player. Like the previous one it’s all in Spanish, although the PCB has very visible ‘MADE IN GREECE’ markings on it. Slightly strange is that the difficulty dipswitch affects the ghost movement on the title screen, causing Pacman to die before the animation completes, and the game to fail, I guess the bootleggers didn’t test that option?
Thanks to F.J.Jimenez (Gijon) for dumping this one.
Hey! Did you hack the last one to show your nick in the attract screen, or is it really showing HAZE in the original Spanish game? ;)
it lets you enter your name if you get the high score, so I got a high score and entered my name ;-)
by default it’s a blank entry, and just says the “El Super” so the feature surprised me
the last pacman clone, the names are from “the marx bros.”
“the difficulty dipswitch affects the ghost movement on the title screen, causing Pacman to die before the animation completes, and the game to fail”
That’s hilarious.
Equally hilarious is that fuckin pinnochio nose on the Pacuman side art. Looks just too much like a dick for american audiences, and would surely have been not only the source of general ridicule, but probably perceived obscenity by grown-ups. And it just looks bad….but I can see south euro audiences digging it……(BA-DAMP)
” I imagine most of what is covered here isn’t going to be of interest to anybody outside of Spain, but I’ve always said that MAME is a project for everybody, without being for anybody specific.”
On the contrary. I have always liked bootlegs (NewPuc2, HanglyMan etc…) and always fascinated to see what people in other parts of the world were playing. Please keep going!!
I think the Pacuman side art, like the game, is based on Puckman. The Pac-Man representation was presumably adapted by Midway, although even their flyer shows a long-nosed Pac-Man, it’s only the more recent representations that appear to have a nose more in proportion with the rest of him.
http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=765&image=2
If you look at even PacLAND you’ll notice that the character in the Japanese version has a much longer nose than the other releases, so clearly by that point an intentional effort was being made.
If the artwork with a long nosed Pac-Man never changed and was universally used on everything I doubt if any comments about it ever would have been made by anyone including ‘grown ups’. I think Pear_Lover simply has a desire to see a penis and has a fixation. Also Pear_Lover calling Adults ‘grown ups’ shows his/her level of maturity.
There’s an alternate (bootleg) version of Karate Champ Player vs Player here in Brazil, where the little girl say something different than “My Hero” after you win a match. If I remember that correctly, it was a long sentence written in Italian or French, where she says something ‘nasty’, and then your fighter gets that classic ‘shy’ face. It was hilarious!
There’s na italian dump on F205v website, but I don’t know if that one is this version or not. I would love to find one of these boards still alive here in Brazil to dump. Good memories!
about spanish arcade videogames…
is El fin del tiempo dumped?
http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=1280&image=1
Haze, have you considered that the Pacu-Man “bootleg” might be an authentic license rather than a bootleg?
If code is shifted around and all offsets were changed, that would indicate to me that the game was re-assembled from source, rather than disassembled and hacked from there. Going the extra mile to add custom coinage support for non-USA/JP regions and the fact that it still shows Namco as the original manufacturer also points towards “official licensee”.
The thought has crossed my mind, although I’d be more convinced if Recreativos Franco S.A. had more original material to their name, because the Galaxian hacks are clearly cheap unlicensed stuff.
That Karate Champ winning message should like “La ??????”.
I’m surely convinced that because I played it.
There’s also a none-VS version of Karate Champ named “Taekwondo”(Korean Text) in Korea.
Maybe there are lots of those modified games like them any other country.
La??????
YEAH, that’s it!! I remember that the message ended with a “La FIN!!!!” or something very similar to that.
I’m glad to find someone else who actually played this version! Man, I’m crazy to put my hands on one of these Karate Champ boards, if they still exist!
Maybe there are tons of games that bootleggers had modified some graphics to show they are really nerds.
How about this?
http://www.grb.or.kr/download/GameImage/1999/제779호.jpg
Good modification.
http://www.grb.or.kr/download/gameimage/2004/2004-A0850-2.jpg
insincery one.
well we know many Korean games are extensive hacks of other games ;-)
I guess sometimes they did cheap hacks too tho…
But they could never avoided their doom.
http://file.onbid.co.kr:8900/ReadEntity.jsp?FILE_POOL_ID=%B0%ED%C3%B6%B7%F9+%B9%D7+%B8%BB%B1%F8%C5%EB_1320977786253_226309588.JPG
Nowaday, gamble games got their last day.
yes.. the same thing happened in lots of places.
in some countries we were lucky, people salvaged things, sold them on ebay.. for others, they’re probably lost forever.
even here the gambling machines seem to get recalled and quickly recycled into new games, it can be hard to find some games from 1 year ago, nevermind 20-30 years ago.. that’s why it can be important to emulate them, and take photos of them while they still exist. We have non-video fruit machine games nobody even remember what looked like ;-)
the ones in the picture look like they were probably mostly PC games.. so maybe dumb terminals for network games and the network shut down? (obviously we can’t emulate those without the server code anyway)
it’s sad, but people really don’t value things once they no longer make money, so MAME is important ;-)
something is do, and others do not.
In government approval game manual, they removed network function but news always says they used remote controllers for changing winning rate.
Recently I found some unique korean games in korea GRB. Though they are not hyper-linked, digging on it and obviously data is still on their server. I will upload it in Undumped Wiki if I found some important thing like this.
Prehistorik Adventure
http://www.grb.or.kr/download/GameImage/2003/2003-P0030-2.jpg
This one makes me or you some interest. Prehistoric with 2 YAMAHA OPN or OPL2?
Hey 30yk, where did you play that ‘bootleg’ Karate Champ? Where are you from?
I’m korean. There’s over 25 years ago I had played that crappy two BIG joystick game. (over 2 inch BIG red one)
Maybe there’s possibility what you seen was imported from korea.
Hyper Olymphic (bootleg) was very common in korea. I recently notice that supports in MAME. The 100 dash referee says like “O-Dun-Ma-Tu” “Yet-Set” and no WR announcement. But It was all gone and cannot insist it is korean bootleg.
To Makaimura, I played that game in 1985 summer that was earlier than it was really out. Now I understand it was a prototype and I could remember it because it had white weapon box. I don’t know why it was in korea,(there’s no reason capcom afford it but I played it before and that game runs at least 1-5 perfectly. (I’m GnG freak and I know the first prototype Makaimura was real hard.)
One more to makaimura, I played Italian Bootleg version in 1989. (Yes, Player”1″ font is strange and hellish beginning difficulty) It can be found in Italia arcade because we didnt know the value of arcade and break or sell them all other world.
(1KG of old PCBs have $4 value in korea…)
The “La Fin” Karate champ can award Brazillian bootleg. There’s no one doubt if it was found there. But in my youth memory, a asian boy was played those games at suburb in korea.
I always believed that Recreativos Franco versions of Galaxian and Pacman were officially licensed.
In fact, RF Galaxian marquee has ‘licensed by namco’ text on it, but I’m not sure now if Pacuman has that text too.