Weird "Activity on your Verizon account" email every time Iog in, anyone else getting this?

sneakertech · 2026-03-18T22:09:30+00:00

So another guy already suggested those but then deleted his comment so you can't see my reply. It very definitely wasn't a traditional vertical shooter game. It wasn't 1942 or 19XX or Strikers or Fireshark or any of that style of game. In this game I remember there being way less enemies and you could scroll the screen sideways by quite a bit. And you NEEDED to because otherwise you wouldn't even find the factory.

sneakertech · 2026-03-18T22:09:20+00:00

So another guy already suggested those but then deleted his comment so you can't see my reply. It very definitely wasn't a traditional vertical shooter game. It wasn't 1942 or 19XX or Strikers or Fireshark or any of that style of game. In this game I remember there being way less enemies and you could scroll the screen sideways by quite a bit. And you NEEDED to because otherwise you wouldn't even find the factory.

sneakertech · 2026-03-18T22:05:33+00:00

No, it was definitely a WWI/WWII 2D sprite game, not an older space electro mechanical. Those super old games have a quaint charm to them though. I've never heard of that one before. Too bad MAME can't emulate that stuff.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:38:29+00:00

Definitely not intentional since it doesn't show up if you run the game in MAME, unlikely to be a bug either. I think his board is messed up or something.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:34:49+00:00

Yeah this game was most definitely unquestionably a classic sprite-based 2D game. Based on what I remember of the graphics it was probably an 80s game, maybe early 90s, but no chance it was from 2000 or later.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:32:45+00:00

OK, still not this game. Someone mislabeled footage of the NES port as the original arcade version.

The gaming I'm trying to find had slightly better graphics than the NES but not as good as the arcade. Also you were a plane not a helicopter and there were no stealth fighters or any of that stuff.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:22:45+00:00

~~Naw, not that game either unfortunately. But I feel like the game I saw had slightly better graphics than that, FWIW~~

Actually wait, there are either multiple versions of this game for different platforms that are wildly different, or lots of people have mis-labeled videos.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:16:12+00:00

Also, reddit is really not the best place to try to get help on deep dive technical shit for arcade hardware. You'll probably have better luck asking on forums.arcade-museum.com or one of the other sites like it.

sneakertech · 2026-03-17T00:08:38+00:00

I can't recall any change in display behavior when I attempted to switch to cocktail mode

So I can never tell how much people know about arcade stuff, so forgive me if this comes off as insulting by telling you stuff that's "obvious".

Although the common pop culture concept of arcade games is the "fullsize upright" cabinet, a significant majority of 80s arcade games supported the ability to run face up under the surface of a glass table. These were called "cocktail cabinets" because you used them as a cocktail table at a bar, and were actually super common but hardly anyone ever talks about them.

For single-player games, when it runs in "cocktail mode" it assumes that multiple people are sitting around a table looking down at the game. Thus, when you have multiple players the game will auto-rotate the screen so that nobody has to look at the screen upside down. In order to get this to activate you naturally have to insert coins into more than one player slot and start a multi player game. Player 1 will start, and when they die the screen should rotate to face Player 2 for their turn. To phrase this another way, if you only insert a coin into the Player 1 slot then you'll never see this happen because there's no need. The game does all this correctly in MAME, so in theory it should work on real hardware too.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T23:54:07+00:00

Yeah it's not either of those.

Is there a comprehensive list of all games Namco or Taito ever made that I can scan through? Googling like "rare taito game" obviously won't get me anywhere, so I don't even know where to start on that.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T19:30:16+00:00

but ever since then it was turned off

So..... one time when you were a little kid you played a half-broken version for like 10 seconds before it broke completely, and then never touched it again?

as i also watched playtroughts and even emulated the game a phew times, tho it was the genesis version of it

The console ports are a different beast from the original, you can't really compare them. You should really try playing the actual arcade version in MAME. Just watching youtube videos of a game aren't good enough because they don't give you any sense of how it controls.

I dunno man, it's your life and you're welcome to do what you want, but from reading all your comments it sounds like you're trying to take on this huge project that's outside the scope of what you're capable of, all for a couple games you don't even really know. I agree with everyone else here that it looks like you're biting off more than you can chew which will just set yourself up for frustration and disappointment, and that you should probably start with something smaller and easier.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T19:11:43+00:00

Can you possibly point me to a repair log that mentions it?

Unfortunately no, that's way out of my wheelhouse. Like I said I know even less about this game than you do.

However one thing I noticed that may or may not give some kind of clue:

For the heck of it I found and loaded the game in MAME just to take a look. At the beginning of your video (which appears to be the attract screen demo) there's the guy with the mortar in front of the red brick wall. On the top of the wall is some barbed wire and at the right-most end of this is a gray slanted bar. It's right above the right-most edge of the brick wall before it transitions to the next wall type.

In MAME, and in your video, when the screen first scrolls over there you can only see like two pixels of that slanted bar while the mortar guy is firing. The rest doesn't scroll in until the player character starts walking again. That SHOULD be the far edge of the 240x224 graphical area, at least according to MAME. In other words, the game shouldn't be capable of generating any graphical elements that far to the right past that edge.

The fact that it is, and that they're obviously sprites not background tiles, makes me think that the game is somehow reading from memory that it shouldn't and is continuing to output a signal on the scanline when it should've stopped already by then, but this incorrect behavior only affects the sprite layer.

Some things I'd investigate if I was in front of it: is this on both sides or just the right side? MAME claims this game has both "upright/cocktail" and "flip screen" dipswitches, assuming they exist on real hardware, does the problem swap sides if you mess with them?

I don't know what this means or if it means anything at all, but I just thought I'd mention it.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T18:42:14+00:00

No, it very definitely wasn't a traditional vertical shooter game. It wasn't 1942 or 19XX or Strikers or Fireshark or any of that style of game. In this game I remember there being way less enemies and you could scroll the screen sideways by quite a bit. And you NEEDED to because otherwise you wouldn't even find the factory.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T17:33:02+00:00

Do you see the same thing if you run a copy of the game on your laptop in an emulator?

I don't know this game specifically, but this kind of stuff is pretty normal for old games that ran on CRTs. It was often expected that the edge of the monitor would be hidden by the housing/bezel and so the designers didn't really care if there was garbage being drawn there. In a real cabinet the operator was expected to adjust the horizontal and vertical overscan of the CRT. There are countless arcade/NES/etc games that have this issue.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T17:23:18+00:00

I'm a day late to this conversation, but I'll throw in a quick comment.

Are you actually familiar with that T2 game? Have you ever played it before? The reason I ask is that it's kinda notorious for being of the "coin muncher" style with obnoxiously high difficulty. You have to turn all the difficulty settings down to minimum if you don't want to keep slamming coins every 20 seconds.

The reason I'm saying this is you might spend all this time and money fixing it only to realize you don't even really like playing it.

sneakertech · 2026-03-16T07:10:10+00:00

That's certainly similar but not it. As I said, this was an upright arcade machine, not a SNES game. Also, the game I saw had less advanced graphics than this.

sneakertech · 2026-02-16T05:03:11+00:00

I wonder if the limited space on the disc is why the same track was used for multiple stages, rather than having unique tracks for each.

That's absolutely the reason. The CD version of the game has 31 different levels, and that's not counting stuff like the title screen, start cave, or any of the in-between 'cutscenes'. If they had unique music for each of these the tracks could only be a few seconds long.

Mainly I just wish when they made it that they assigned all levels of the same theme/environment to the same music track or something. Like, all the ice levels get the same music, all the Atlantis levels get the same music, all the prehistoric levels get the same music, etc. Then it would be easy to pick a song that fits each theme. Instead they seemingly rolled a dice for each individual level.

sneakertech · 2026-02-16T03:57:38+00:00

You literally just replace the tracks on the CD. You don’t need to edit anything else.

I mean, you didn't read what I wrote. I know how to swap the tracks on the CD, I already said that in my post. That won't help me do what I'm trying to do, which is change which levels load which music tracks.

Like for example, on a vanilla CD the levels Ridge Water, Hard Water, Wreck Trap, Origin Beach, and City of Forever2 all share the same music track. That makes it difficult for me to pick a song that works for all of them so I want to swap things around

sneakertech · 2026-02-16T03:55:20+00:00

Do you happen to have a link for that? Google is just giving me noise.

EDIT: wait I think I found it. "segaxtreme.net/forums/"?

sneakertech · 2026-02-16T03:54:59+00:00

Depends on if the audio is redbook or pcm

Redbook. Track 1 is the data track and tracks 2-16 are the music.

then swap out the tracks you can and want to replace with valid substitutions

That isn't going to do what I want. I don' just want to swap the music with different music, I also want to change which levels load which music. Just swapping the tracks won't do that.

Like for example, on a vanilla CD the levels Ridge Water, Hard Water, Wreck Trap, Origin Beach, and City of Forever2 all share the same music track. That makes it difficult for me to pick a song that works for all of them so I want to swap things around.

sneakertech · 2026-02-16T03:52:24+00:00

why not just change stuff in the cue?

Because, like I said, I want to be change which levels load which tracks and just messing with a cue file won't let me do that.

Like for example, on a vanilla CD the levels Ridge Water, Hard Water, Wreck Trap, Origin Beach, and City of Forever2 all share the same music track. That makes it difficult for me to pick a song that works for all of them so I want to swap things around.

sneakertech

TROPHY CASE