One week again, i bought a Taito Type X+ Motherboard with Half Life 2 Survivor 2.0
The plan, was to have a look inside the motheboard to fill my curiosity and ofcourse, dump the game aswell.
Well, looking at the board outside, it looks like a Type X2 motherboard with a sound card addon and a Type X1 hdd plate instead of a type X2 hdd plate.
So taking this in mind, i thought that i was buying a Type X2 board at all …
Auction was for a board without dongle, so i also thought that they did the same Taito previously did with Aquarium Age Alternative Taito Type X2 Satellite game : taitos loader is present on the hdd, there is a crypted partition aswell, but there is no dongle at all, i also got a Street Fighter 4 HDD that came this way and its not a bootleg at all.
Looking at the stickers, we can see
1GB memory (both regular typex2 and typex1 boards came with 512mb)
P4 2.8GHZ
Well, at this point i didnt noticed about the 9800 PRO gfx card on the sticker, that never was released as PCIe card.
So once board arrived, i noticed that it was a Type X1 board into a Type X2 case, good thing is that the case is smaller, hardware is sigly better than type X1 and PSU is 120v-220v auto switching (regular typex1 board came with a 120v-220v psu aswell, but there is a switch to choose the mode, rumor says that some Irish operator fried some type x1 psus pugging the board to 220v directly without change the switch 
)
Well, first thing i did was to try a taito type x1 game, as board seemed 100% the same to my eyes.
I plugged Kof 98 UM and game booted, but sound wasnt working at all (yes, i removed the sound blaster live card that came with the board), i didnt tried the game with the sound blaster live card plugged at all, cause its impossible that KOF 98 UM has drivers for this card.
Maybe there is some jumper to enable or dissable the on board sound card (this is my guess), but was tired about this thingle, so i decided to sell it without waste more time with it once i noticed its a Type X1 and not Type X2 board at all.
Pc hardware is allways boring …
On a side note, they just added a sound blaster live audio card to the board, cause Half Life 2 Survivor uses surround, and onboard sound card, seems not capable to handle it.
Another interesting thing is that the board wont run with regular io boards (atleast with the 3 sega io boards i got at home), but it plays pretty fine with taitos own io board. This is where the JVS standart serves for …
About the dongle, this game is really really interesting, it has a crypted partition aswell, but its only 50mbs, there is a loader there that downloads the game from taitos webserver and launches it once downloaded (you dont have to download the entire game every time you plug the board, update files get downloaded once and stored at the 2nd partition of the hdd (it fits there unencrypted)) what i really wonder is if the game cames from factory with any data on this partition at all …
Not much more to say, game looks pretty nice (yes, its nothing new but Half Life 2) and it can be launched on regular computes (even input works with keyboard and mouse)
Long life to cheap arcade ports from pc
Some pictures of the game running on the real hardware
