Over the past few months I got the final boards I needed to complete my PCB collection. Firstly, I finally managed to find Guwange, and a Batrider Version B. In addition, I also picked up a JROK Robotron board to replace my broken real Robotron board.

Finding the Batrider board was a one in a million shot. I have been searching for this since last year, but nothing has come up. Finally, it has turned up as one of my contacts in Japan had messaged me about it.

Guwange was a bit easier to find, and I got it for pretty cheap by standards – about 1000 bucks.

The first thing I did when I got these boards was change out the version roms. For Guwange, I changed out the program roms for the Special Version (Blue) edition. What is interesting about this version is that it’s more intense, and has modified rules and mechanics from the original Guwange to make it more interesting. I believe it was originally ripped from the Xbox 360 version of the game. Though, if you play the PCB, which I have been lately on my Twitch channel, you’ll notice the real board has tons of slowdown not present in the 360 version which makes it playable. So, big difference in the versions there. I am not sure if anyone found this out, but if you hold down any button while pressing start, some parts of the game turn to English.

Likewise, for Batrider, I changed out the PRG0 ROM for the US one. There’s a couple of reasons why I elected not to keep the Version B Japanese ROM on there. First of all, I think the US version is a lot more fair in terms of the boss patterns and formation attacks, and it has nothing to do with the rank. Secondly, I don’t have to deal with annoying dropped extends. Note that if you are playing the US version, the last 3 dips on sw3 must be turned to off otherwise it deactivates all the special features. The US ROM has them all unlocked by default. Note that if you don’t have the Japanese version B on your board, you’ll have to burn PRG0 and PRG1 to complete the conversion.