System-18

Galloping Ghost Arcade celebrates 600 games with SEGA’s Star Wars Arcade

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I really lucked out when I ended up buying a house 15 minutes away from the Galloping Ghost Arcade. Opened in 2010 in Brookfield, IL, Galloping Ghost Arcade has fast become the largest arcade in the world with 599 games available to play. Yesterday, that total hit 600 with a Mystery Monday reveal of SEGA AM3 and LucasArts’ Star Wars Arcade. This Model 1 game released in 1993 to Japanese arcades and remained an exclusive. Few machines are known to exist, with only three listed on Aurcade as being publicly playable in the US. The game is best known for its SEGA 32X port, which is a faithful home version of the game. However, having now played both I have to say that the arcade version feels much bigger and livelier, with a higher polygon count, more ships and more hazards. Interestingly, I did not notice the Y-Wing as being playable in the arcade version, with the one and two player co-op modes both piloting the X-Wing fighter.

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Prototype of unreleased SEGA shmup Hammer Away found

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So here’s a nice surprise: three people in Portugal have found a prototype of an unreleased shmup by SEGA for the System-18. Meant to be released in 1991, this game never found it’s way in arcades for unknown reasons. So it’s great that we can finally see what the game is like. While the arcade board the game was found on was damaged, the fanatics managed to get it working by putting the chips on a working System-18 prototype.

Not only that, we can soon play it for ourselves. The group has dumped the game’s code into a ROM and MAME is already capable of playing the game. While the ROM isn’t up yet, we likely won’t have to wait long until it can be downloaded. Another video showing the attract mode can be found after the jump.

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