See the World

Most of what we end up emulating these days is incredibly obscure, often forgotten or never even really noticed in the first place.

Arcade game developers didn’t only make traditional arcade games, there is a whole pool of other material that was produced back in the day, as we saw with things like the Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, and Sonic Popcorn Shop when they were emulated a few months back.

Those were from Sega, but Capcom was no exception to doing this and a PCB for one of their ‘ride’ machines was found a couple of days ago by a user over at the Arcade Otaku forums.

You can read a bit of background, including a photo of what the cabinet would have looked like, here, but long story short forum user ‘sylphia’ picked up a Capcom CPS1 PCB and the game running on it was not one we knew to run on that hardware, it was an unemulated title quickly established to be ‘Pokonyan Balloon’

Oddly the stickers on the ROM are dated 2002, but all the ingame strings and date code indicate it to be a 1994 release. Anyway, with the game dumped I added it to MAME, CPS hardware is well emulated at this point so it wasn’t a tricky addition. There’s not a great deal more to say about it really because it is meant as an experience for kids (Look at all the backgrounds, look at what’s happening etc.) but the production values are very good, much better than the Sega title IMHO.

Either way, even if there’s not much to ‘play’ that’s never the point, it’s really nice to see this found, dumped and documented, so thanks must go to the generosity of ‘sylphia’ for allowing this to happen.

Here’s a video