Updated Starhawk Manual

March 27, 2024

The Cinematronics Starhawk manual hosted here and on a number of other sites has been missing pages 24 and 26. These pages describe the Starhawk audio board circuits. I recently bought an original manual and have scanned these two pages and updated the PDF to include them. You can find it here.

Reproduction Cinematronics Control Panel Distribution PCB
Now Available!

May 15, 2022

The Cinematronics Control Panel Distribution PCB connects the CPU board to the game's buttons, joysticks and coin switches. It is normally installed on the underside of the game's control panel and has a ribbon cable soldered to it.

This reproduction includes a number of improvements over the original PCB including replacing the attached cable with a standard 26-pin ribbon cable socket. I currently have a small quality available from the initial run of boards. Click here for more information.

Cinematronics Reset Indicator PCB Back in Stock

April 5, 2022

The Cinematronics Reset Indicator PCB is back in stock. This small board adds the reset LED functionality to older Cinematronics and Vectorbeam CPUs.

Click here for more information.

Exidy Spectar Test ROM

February 7, 2022

I have modified the Exidy Targ Test ROM code to build a version that will work with Spectar as well. It includes tests of the game's RAMs, ROMs (Version 3 and 1), sound board, video adapter board, control panel and DIP switches.

For more information and to download it click here.

Outerworld Arcade Website Updates

January 30, 2022

I am in the process of working on some updates to the Outerworld Arcade website. I've moved to a new web host and the site now has a website security certificate and is accessed with HTTPS.

On my previous web host the site was stored in an arcade sub-directory on the server. This sub-directory has been removed to shorten URLs a bit. I have added redirection on the error page, so old links and bookmarks should be redirected to the correct page in its new location.

I'm also updating pages to be valid HTML5. Some pages were originally created sixteen years ago on Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver, which produced some messy HTML which is not compliant with HTML5. I'm back to using a text editor and cleaning out lots of old code.

As part of this update I'm also working to clean up the site's CSS coding. The page formatting should eventually be more consistent throughout the site. If you browse to a page that the formatting looks completely wrong you can try forcing the page to reload the CSS. For example with Firefox, hold the shift key while reloading the page.

I also plan to replace Flash Videos with MP4 videos. Some videos were originally shot in HD so as part of this process I will be able to upgrade them to higher resolution versions.

New Space Invaders Test ROM Modification

January 19, 2022

Phil Murray has modified the original Space Invaders Test ROM code to ease in troubleshooting the game's audio PCB. Individual sounds can be selected with the left and right buttons. The selected sound can then be played by pressing the fire button.

He has given me permission to distribute this modification and it can be downloaded from the Space Invaders Test ROM page.

War of the Worlds: Modification to Use Star Castle Audio PCB

December 1, 2019

Cinematronics War of the Worlds uses a modified Star Castle audio board to generate sounds. I recently learned that the hardware changes to convert a Star Castle audio board to War of the Worlds were all I/O and polarity. There were no changes to the sound circuits themselves. With a bit of work, I was able to remap the sounds in the game code to work with an unmodified board.

The video below shows modified War of the Worlds code running in an Armor Attack cabinet with an original Star Castle audio board attached:

Outerworld Arcade Is Moving

November 30, 2019

I am currently in the process of moving and most of the arcade has been placed into temporary storage. During this transition I may not have access to my games or tools for testing code, building PCBs or burning EPROMs. Please contact me before placing orders.

Programming Cinevectron FPGA Menus

November 29, 2019

I haven't added many updates to the Outerworld Arcade website recently, but have nevertheless continued to work on a number of arcade related projects.

One of these projects is coding the menu system for Cinevectron, a FPGA replacement for the Cinematronics CPU. This menu system includes the ability to toggle options like free play and high score saves and to view technical info. It also uses scrolling menus to allow enabling/disabling of games and adjust virtual DIP switch options. It is currently undergoing beta testing by a small group of users and is nearing completion.

Click here for additional information on Cinevectron FPGA.

Modified Space Invaders Test ROM Updated to v1.3

March 28, 2019

Marc Deslauriers has submitted an update which fixes incorrect RAM failures that were occurring with V1.2 of the Space Invaders Test ROM.

Click here for additional information and links to download the source and binary.

Outerworld Arcade News Archives

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