MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - them BTANB issues

I didn’t play Capcom GNG myself, but my first time really encountering an actual Bugs That Are Not Bugs issue was with Asteroids back in 2001. I had never noticed the specific myself when I would play Asteroids a lot back in 1980s at arcade businesses. When I had come across MAME in 2000, I was just happy to be able to play Frogs and Sega Carnival since I had not seen either since 1981.

In 2001, I was browsing bug reports on MAME Testers and noticed TriggerFin’s Asteroids bug report explaining that the Asteroids 10th place third high score letter would be truncated to two letters at some point after a player or two would not reach the top 10 high scores. I then tried to look for that bug with an Asteroids cab and noticed it did take place and confirmed it was not an emulation bug. Another poster here, Sune, did have an Asteroids cab that had the 10th place high score letter fixed, but he couldn’t find someone that could dump the roms from the Asteroids pcb. Andrew Welburn came along and eventually added a newer release Asteroids bug fix rom that Atari made available to cab owners way back in 1980s. The Asteroids rom sets were then corrected to ascending order so the most recent Asteroids rom set was the parent rom set.

The 10th place truncated letter score was already known by Atari back in the 1980s and the company advertised about the rom fix to Asteroids cab owners in Atari’s Coinop newsletter paper publications. It was always known to those technicians in the 1980s era that repaired games then, but not many of those from that era would be on emulation forums in the early era when MAME was getting started.

The other BTANB I came across was Midway Gun Fight. When gameplay begins, the timed 60 seconds might skip a second or two and display 57 or 58 seconds remaining. stepph and I were never sure which bug it was until I had watched a YouTube clip with an actual upright Midway Gun Fight cab displaying the same bug description issue. Gun Fight was then added to BTANB section with its own issue. I don’t know if Midway ever bothered to fix that issue back in 1970s. Had it been a more serious bug, Midway probably would have mailed an updated service bulletin repair paperwork to Gun Fight cab owners and maybe advertised an upgrade replacement rom fix chip for a price.