The truth is, that the Quizard is already completely dead! No Support from TAB Austria anymore since years, and i didn't find any parts for it anywhere to buy at least the last 3-5years.
I'm happy that i found a couple of CD's and MCU's for it in 2010, so at least some of the stuff is secured since years.
But we are missing at least 10 CD-Revision, which we could not find so far.
So, since you can't find any parts for this machine, most real cabinets got destroyed already and your only way to play these games today, is to emulate it in MAME.
While preserving games with emulators is a very good thing, it's also important to rescue the original hardware of these niche machines.
Quizard is a Philips CDI based arcade system. Inside the cabinet you will find a CDI-Player (mostly Philips CDI 220) and a board with an MCU on it. This board is also the interface to the push-buttons on the cabinet.
The game is completely on the CD, using the external MCU just for copy protection.
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| Original board from TAB AUSTRIA |
While i could decap at least the MCU's for Quizard 1, 3 and 4 so far, there was still one thing missing, which was needed to get the Quizard playable on each Philips CDI. The interface board!
So i reworked the complete original board and made it even better (i think).
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| new interface board (made by TeamEurope) |
This board is basically a 1:1 clone of the original board, but has some improvements:
- only 1/4 of the original size
- no external power needed (get's VCC over the serial cable, from the CDI-Player)
- all push-buttons included on the board
- fits inside an Arduino MEGA case.
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| size comparison |
I sent a board to rosewood from retrostuff.org a couple of weeks ago (read his blogpost about it here) and he did an amazing job, testing this board with a couple of different CDI-Players!
With the included pins on the board, you can even use it inside an arcade-cabinet as a real replacement for the original board!
Here are some pictures of the working board:
Here are some infos about the switches on the board:
I finished three boards today, which can get bought.
The package consists of:
- Interface-board (ready to use)
- 1x Arduino MEGA case.
- 3x MCU's (for Version 1, 3 and 4 - GERMAN)
- 1x serial cable
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| complete package |
PRICE: 55 EUR
Very cool! Thank you so much for your contributions to the CD-i community! Do you have some reference pictures of the original boards?
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