MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: DU: Karate Champs

So here is the story on these. They are not bootlegs but early production Karate Champ player vs player boards for the US market.

The US version of Karate Champ seem to start at about serial number 20,000. Boards with serial numbers between 20,000-21,000 have similar factory mods on them just like mine does.

If you take a look at the board the rom stickers all match the factory stickers. All the board chips, stickers, numbers, ect match other official boards. Not saying some one could fake it, but for such an old game that is highly unlikely.

After dumping the roms I ran rom checks.

This version has a mix of the "Karate Champ (US VS version, set 1)" and a few roms unique to "Taisen Karate Dou (Japan VS version)" along with 1 completely unique rom not found on romident.

The "Deserves the Fair" tiles are actually in the Taisen Karate Dou (Japan VS version) version of the game but not used. So they are not bootleged or hacked.

If I had to guess, from looking at the Taisen Karate Dou tile sets they knew they were going to do a US release because all the translations are there. The only difference is instead of "My Hero" as found in the later US sets it says "My Here Deserves the fair".

So for the early runs of the English version they edited the machine code to point to the US speaking bubbles and swapped to the English Audio roms.

After some of these went out they noticed "My hero deserves the fair" makes no sense so they updated the rom to just say "My Hero" like the version every one knows about and made a few other fixes.