Cosmic Monsters was a copy of Space Invaders with a few twists and was released in 1979 by Universal. This cabinet is an Electrocoin Licensed version and I just loved its bright colourful 70's artwork. I bought this machine to see if I could repair and restore it to it's original state. It was in pretty bad condition and is an ongoing project but it is now working even if not in it's original format. The advert for the machine stated "No signs of life". After delivery I did the usual checks and pushed pack anything that looked like it had jiggled loose and switched it on. Surprisingly the marquee light came on and so did the monitor, also some signs of life from the audio board. The audio board in these machines was separate from the main game PCB and was just making a faint alternating tone, a bit like an alarm. On closer inspection of the audio board I found it had a sticker on from the 80's that said "Audio Faulty".
The monitor in a space invaders machine and therefore also in this bootleg version was monochrome. Some had a colour "effect" created by overlaying the screen with plastic bands. This is how the bases looked green and the UFO looked red. As you can see these are still present in this machine and will clean up well.The control deck was quite damaged with lots of cigarette burns in the perspex, I got most of these out using toothpaste and a lot of scrubbing! The artwork on the control deck came up very nicely indeed.
The PCB was outputting something to the screen but it's mostly garbage so I figure the board it working but the roms are corrupt. You can see in the picture below that there are seven removable EPROM chips. I checked on MAME and there are seven rom files also, it figures that these are direct dumps so with an EPROM programmer I should be able to get the game board running again.I decided this was going to be a long term project if I was to get it working in it's original manner. I also didn't want a broken cabinet taking up space so as a temporary measure I decided to fit a modern colour CRT monitor and install a PC based MAME board to run the original game. It boots from a custom version of DOS and runs a custom MAME build. The control panel is linked via a I-PAC interface to stop any keyboard buffering issues. I've kept the original buttons as they look and feel great but replaced the micro switches.
On this machine you can play:
1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 19XX, Starforce, Space Invaders, Bombjack, Aero Fighters 2, Daioh, Air Gallet, Dyger, Exed Exes, Fighting Hawk, Final Star Force, Gunsmoke, Gyrus, Mad Shark, Meta Fox, Raiden, Xevious, Thunder Dragon, Lunar Rescue, Time Pilot, and of course Cosmic Monsters.
Game Screenshots
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