If you follow this blog you definitely know, that i'm a big fan of the QUIZARD arcade machines from TAB AUSTRIA and i already did invest many hours of my time and quite some money to save the history of these systems.
Thanks to Ryan, all four versions of Quizard are now fully
playable in MAME and some years ago i designed a pcb, which let's you experience all
Quizard games on any Philips
CDI Player. So at least there are ways to play these games even today and with my board you can basically also repair every real machine! Don't expect any support for these machines from TAB these days...even 10 years ago, they did not have any spare parts or even documentations for these systems left.
Just in case you don't know the Quizard and how the hardware is working.
It uses a standard Philips CD-I Player inside the cabinet. The complete program is on CD and TAB Austria did release quite a couple of revisions of each Version. The interesting fact is, that each revision also contains different language-packages on the CD.
Next to the CD's you will also need a, like i call it, "Protection PCB", which is JAMMA-based and contains an MCU as protection device. At the startup of the machine, the program on the CD communicates with the MCU. The MCU controls the supported Quizard-Version (each Version needs a different MCU!) and it also controls the language to which the Quizard boots. So if you have all 4 CD-Versions of the Quizard and want to play all four versions, you will always have to switch the MCU on the board for each Version...which isn't always fun to do.
I checked all of the available/known Quizard-CD's and here we have a overview of the included languages on each CD:
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Quizard 1.0 | 09/94 | X | X | | | | | | | | |
Quizard 1.2 | 01/95 | X | X | X | | | | | | | |
Quizard 1.7 | 10/96 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
Quizard 1.8 | 01/98 | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X | X |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quizard 2.2 | 03/95 | X | X | X | | | | | | | |
Quizard 2.3 | XX/XX | | X | X | | X | | | | | |
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Quizard 3.2 | 01/96 | | X | X | | | X | | | | |
Quizard 3.4 | 01/98 | | X | X | | X | X | | | | |
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Quizard 4.0 | 07/97 | | X | X | | | X | | | | |
Quizard 4.1 | 06/98 | | X | | | X | | | | | |
Quizard 4.2 | 09/98 | | X | | | X | | | | | |
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Quizard French Edition V1 | 01/96 | | | | | | | X | | | |
This is quite interesting, as they not only added languages to each higher CD-revision...they also excluded sometimes languages. (for example Italian and Greek on 4.0, which got removed on 4.1 and 4.2)
f205v and i found an before unknown CD-Version a couple of weeks ago! The Quizard French Edition V1, which is pretty interesting, as it only contains the French language and as it's dated 01/96 it's also the first time FRENCH was available on this system....at least in 10/96 it was also included in Revision 1.7 of the normal Quizard. (as we currenty don't have any revision between 1.2 and 1.7...it maybe got included in an revision earlier already...)
So far we had the chance to get german MCU's for the Version 1, 2, 3 and 4. (As this system mainly got released in Austria and Germany, the german MCU's are the most common ones...but also pretty rare available these days) We got an italian MCU for Version 1 and we got a czech MCU for Version 4. So we are missing many MCU's for the other Versions and other languages!
With the new FRENCH version we found i tried to handcraft some MCU's and at least got some success! I modified an existing german MCU-dump to be compatible with all 4 Versions. Which means it's an ALL-IN-ONE german MCU and you will never have to change the MCU again on the board. Just change the CD within the CD-I-Player, reboot the machine and have fun playing the games.
My next step was, to modify this "AIO"-MCU to the czech language. Which also worked perfectly! This also means that we get the Versions 1.7, 1.8, 2.3 and 3.4 in MAME working with czech quiz questions!
Both AIO-MCU's got tested in MAME and on the real hardware and work perfectly on both systems.
Please always check the list above, which language is included on which CD-Revision. Before i made the list above i tried the new czech-mcu a couple of times with Revision 2.2 and always wondered, why the system does not boot! It didn't boot, because this revision does not include the czech language package...
So far i had no success with the other languages and hope that maybe someone from MAME will jump in here and get also the other languages to boot in MAME. Specially the new FRENCH EDITION V1 would be really interesting to see.
If you have any Quizard-CD-Revisions and MCU's which are not secured so far, please contact me!
