Viper Phase 1 Update / Region Fix
I picked up an original Viper Phase 1 Taiwan region PCB and wanted to update it to the “New Version” also known as “USA”. The new version is regarded as the better version since there were some game play changes to make the game more enjoyable.
Unfortunately, the Seibu SPI main and game boards are region locked. If you attempt to play non-matching regions you will get a check sum error when booting. I pulled the roms from the game board and erased. I was unable to locate roms for the Taiwan “New Version”. I attempted to burn the World roms, but received check sum error 1776.
The main Seibu SPI board holds its region on the first byte of the flash chip at U1053. It is possible to reprogram this chip to change the region, but there there is a tool called SPI REVIVE which enables reprogramming the main Seibu SPI board to a region of your choice. The source code requires Raiden Fighters 1 or 2 Japan region unless you put in some work to create your own patches for other game boards. I do not have these boards in Japan region so I started looking for other methods.
Some others discovered that game rom 1 contains the region on the last byte in the last line of the rom file. If you check the MAME Seibu SPI driver document you can find the region codes.
Seibu SPI Region Codes
01 Japan
10 US
20 Taiwan
22 Asia / Hong Kong
24 Korea
28 China
80 Europe / Germany
82 Austria
8c Great Britain
8e Greece
90 Holland
92 Italy
96 Portugal
9c Switzerland
9e Australia
be World
You can simply edit rom 1 using a free HEX editor, such as https://hexed.it, and burn the rom. In my case, I took the New Version World romset and modified the last byte of seibu1.211 changing ‘BE’ to ’20’ to switch it from World to Taiwan. I burned all roms 1-6 and installed on the game board.
Normally when changing games on the Seibu SPI you need to move the jumper on JP1 (also labeled JP072) to the opposite position, boot the game, wait for the countdown to complete, switch jumper back, and reboot. When I switched the jumper I didn’t see a countdown and the game booted directly into the New Version (Taiwan).
I suspect this region fix will work on other games and regions, but I can only confirm the Taiwan version for now.
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- Before Update
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- After Update
