MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Deco Cassette update: I guess what it all comes down to is that the..angle of my dangle is inversely proportional to the heat of my meat.

> Al was in contact with Charles and was supposed to send
> him the Deco stuff but hasn't. I'm not sure there is
> anything there we still need though, never heard anything
> about Flying Ball

We won a cassette that was labeled "Flying Ball"; that title doesn't correspond to any known DECO Cassette titles, but we speculated that it might have been a mistranslation or bad transliteration of some other known title. During about the final three or four months I was on the MAME Team, that cassette and I think two others were sent to Al, who had said he would dump them. He didn't dump them and never returned them.

> I'm never spoken to Frank.

"Space Raiders" is an exceedingly rare Universal title from 1982. We got into a bidding war for the PCB with that company in Japan that rents out rare old arcade boards. We basically asked them to stop bidding against us so that we could have the board long enough to dump it, and promised that we would then sell them the board for what we paid for it. Wonder of wonders, they complied, and the board was won, sent to Frank, and dumped, but Frank insisted that the game couldn't be emulated until the board was better understood. I told him that he needed to hurry with his analysis and that if we didn't get the board to the rental company, I was pretty sure we would never get a chance at any of the other unemulated games they owned boards for. But the PCB remained on his workbench, I left the Team, Frank became inactive, and unless I'm very much mistaken the MAME Team has ever since been on the rental company's shit list. It's probably never going to be possible to patch things up with them, but the PCB itself at least needs to be recovered (and maybe sent to Charles or someone?) so that the game can eventually be emulated properly.

Now that I'm strolling down memory lane about analysis of 80s PCBs, has anyone ever made any progress on figuring out those massive custom chips at the heart of Stern's "Great Guns" and "Mazer Blazer"?

> Maybe you can get the ball rolling on those.

I have not communicated with either Al or Frank in years and I doubt whether my email addresses for either of them are any good. I would appreciate it if someone in more recent contact with them could follow up.