I have some arcade boards made by the bankrupt Bally/Midway company. There are a number of custom chips that say MIDWAY on them. I am wondering if these were completely made from the ground up specificly for these games or if they are somewhat generic chips with the Midway printed on them. I would think it would be easier to just buy someone elses chips but maybe someone could shed some light on the process that goes into building these boards. I know some of it is because of security but that is what the PAL chips are for? Do they make their own chips so people won't be able to copy the whole boards? because they don't have those MIDWAY chips? I don't think to many people copy the whole boards, do they? I am hoping they are somewhat generic so I can track down some place that has the same chip under a different name. Thanks for the thoughts
Custom Midway chips
Nov 30, 2005
5 Replies
Midway did use alot of CUSTOM chips. For example GALAGA, it uses about 8 CUSTOMS which are marked with 4 digit #s eg... 05xx, 60xx... These are not crossed over. They are true customs. There is a guy that has bee reverse engineering the custom chips and has a few for sale on his web site. Somewhere around $25 each. There are the smaller BiPolar PROMS. These are just standard programmed BiProms. The only problem is that those PROM types are no longer manufactured. Some guys do have some old stock though.
try contacting Rick Schieve who does a lot of video game repair at: snipped-for-privacy@mchsi.com
Try the Arcade game newsgroup.. There is all sorts of people who know how to fix arcade boards there.
rec.games.video.arcade.collecting
They're custom designed chips, you can get replacements here
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I don't know offhand if these are used pulls, or new replicas using FPGA's but both are available.
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