The Quest to Find Dinorex
-
04-07-2023 10:56pm#1
Some of you might remember the affinity we had around these parts with Dinorex, the bizarre Taito dinosaur fighting game, about ten years ago.
I was planning to host an A&R beers and thought it would be fun if I bought a Dinorex PCB in advance and had it ready to play on a cabinet for the night.
Alberto1225 on Arcade Otaku happened to be selling a board, I bought it from him along with a PGM Cartridge of The Gladiator, on the 16th of August, 2013. So just shy of a month away from ten years ago today.
The board arrived, I tested it out in my SNK cabinet, it worked beautifully. I excitedly wrapped it up and stored it away for the big A&R beers night.
The beers night arrived, I went to stick the PCB into the cabinet and it was nowhere to be found.
I've kept an eye out for it over the years, but it just never turned up. Nowhere among any of my PCBs. Since buying it, I've actually moved house four times, with a lot of stuff being thrown out along the way.
Did it end up in the bin? Did someone else throw it out? did I actually buy it in the first place? I did only play it once - was that just a dream? No it cant have been, I've the PMs from Alberto1225 saying it was shipped!
I eventually gave up, deciding that I'd just never know what happened to it. A mystery for the ages.
Today I was reading arcade-projects.com and saw someone mention a Dinorex PCB. A user from Ireland. It brought memories of my missing board flooding back. Did this guy find my board in a landfill? Is it actually still in my house somewhere, among the pile of PCB boxes? Convinced it had to be somewhere, I decided to take up the search again.
First port of call was seeing what the thing actually looked like. Maybe my one had some identifying markers. I hadn't a clue.
Back then I used to upload all my photos to a photobucket account, but after their whole ransom thing they did, I deleted my account. So unfortunately if I did take photos of the board, they were long gone.
Decided to search Arcade Otaku for 'o1s1n Dinorex' and as it turns out, I'd posted an image of it when it arrived in the 'post here when you get something new thread'
The hyperlink was dead, but a blurry thumbnail was still there with a nice big ugly Photobucket watermark:
Well that's a start!
Okay, I knew what I was looking for and had to get up into the attic anyway to get some other bits, so decided to look through the PCB boxes again.
After searching under suitcases, Christmas decorations and piles and piles of cables, I found a box with two big Taito PCBs. One looked very like the above thumbnail.
The Taito sticker with the game name was on it (white sticker next to the Taito logo) so I got excited for a moment when I saw this as the Irish guy's board on Jamma-projects.com had DINOREX written clearly here - unfortunately on mine the text had vanished over time.
In addition to this, I was convinced it was a Rastan board as I'd seen one of them in the attic a few years back. With a glimmer of home I took it down for testing but tried not to get too excited.
Plugged it into the SNK cabinet, switched it on and... nothing. Completely DOA. Not a peep. No garbled sprites, no sound, nada. Whatever Taito board it was, it looked like it's secrets died with it. I noticed that one of the eeprom windows was exposed, perhaps that was it.
As a last ditch attempt and with no hope left, I plugged it into the Pony - nice new PSU in it so should be giving a board clean power.
Powered it on and...
OH.MY.GOD.ITS.DINOREX.AND.IT.WORKS
Apologies for the absolute dog **** photos but I was so gobsmacked in the moment I lacked the ability to take anything clearer.
I must have tested this board in the SNK cabinet over the years and just kind of cast it aside in my search as it 'didn't work'. Little did I know it just didn't seem to like the PSU in that cabinet.
So there we go, ten years later, the board I thought was lost forever that I only played once had been there in the attic all along. Waiting for the right PSU.
The beautiful sound of victory!
14
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
Join Date:Posts: 50005
It's an awful game but there's a strange amount of love poured into it. The storyline is utterly mental and... Goes places.
Congrats for unearthing some arcade and retro lore. I'm not sure what it is but we always managed to extract the weirdest **** at the arcade and retro beers from full mame ROM sets.
I'm amazed we never found trio the punch.
1 -
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
Join Date:Posts: 50005
I played a few data east games on switch re entry. They're really ropey games and the yanks have no nostalgia for them but they are pretty beloved in Europe because the rights were cheap but he conversions were handles by pretty competent porting teams.
Bad dudes vs dragon ninja and sly spy are pretty forgettable arcade games but they had excellent C64 and Amiga conversions.
0 -
-
-
-
-
Thanks dude!
Managed to save another PCB this evening.
I've had an original Atari Tetris for an age that always booted with some sprite issues. Sound worked fine and it played fine. But visually it was a mess. Always just assumed a bad component somewhere.
Fairly old PCB, dated 1989. Used to actually have a second one too but it's MIA.
Took a comparison photo this evening, so the bad PCB on the left and miSTer on the right displaying the same game correctly. (Funnily enough my PCB is a hori one and misters one is vertical, the opposite of my actual screen orientations!)
Sideways images aside you can see the problems. The image is there but the colours are all wrong.
I thought I'd just try reseating every single socketed chip on the board on the off chance it might work.
And it did! Haha. Easiest fix of all time.
4 -
Quite a bit of fun testing more PCBs out this evening.
The six slot switcher really is great for testing purposes. Can have a board being powered in say, slot 1. Board doesn't work. Change the switcher to slot 4 which is empty.. Can now remove the board and work on it. Stick the board back in, change the switcher back to slot 1 and try again. Lots of testing without having to turn a cabinet on and off each time or digging out a supergun.
Metal Black was one of my favourite PCBs but for some reason it stopped working.
Plugged it in this evening to they new PSU - Bingo! Back to life. So it was a PSU problem afterall, nothing wrong with the game itself.
Had a similar thing happen with a Raystorm PCB, also actually working 100%.
Few other boards I was tinkering with that had mixed results.
Nebulas Ray. Interesting vertical shmup, boots and is about 90% there, still some graphical issues but I got rid of a lot of them with eeprom reseating.
Gnet is still working thankfully.
Shame I didn't take a photo of the Raystorm PCB. Really interesting to compare it to the Gnet board, they both run on Sony branded hardware (I think it's PS1 tech basically) with Taito boards mounted on top. Gnet gets even more interesting then with the compact flash card on top of that again.
3
