Long Lost Sega System-18 Arcade Prototype Found: Hammer Away

[parallaxscroll]

Prototype of unreleased SEGA shmup Hammer Away found

So here’s a nice surprise: three people in Portugal have found a prototype of an unreleased shmup by SEGA for the System-18. Meant to be released in 1991, this game never found it’s way in arcades for unknown reasons. So it’s great that we can finally see what the game is like. While the arcade board the game was found on was damaged, the fanatics managed to get it working by putting the chips on a working System-18 prototype.

Not only that, we can soon play it for ourselves. The group has dumped the game’s code into a ROM and MAME is already capable of playing the game. While the ROM isn’t up yet, we likely won’t have to wait long until it can be downloaded. Another video showing the attract mode can be found after the jump.

http://segabits.com/blog/2014/11/03/...er-away-found/

If you’ve been impressed as of late by the emergence of long lost video games for various consoles, what would you say to the discovery of an unreleased coin-op? Sega were due to début a vertical scrolling shooter known as Hammer Away into the arcades in 1991, only it never arrived. Fast forward to today and a development board containing the game’s code has since been found, preserved, and emulated in MAME.

This fantastic discovery was recently made in Portugal where three die-hard shmup fanatics uncovered a rather dusty and damaged lot of arcade PCBs including a System-18 prototype arcade board. After negotiating a deal with the warehouse owner, the group carefully removed the chips from this decaying PCB and placed them into another working System-18 prototype - and voilà, Hammer Away was up and running.

After getting the prototype home, the group generously dumped the game’s code into a ROM file and submitted it to the MAME development group to get it emulated. Within less than a day, MAME had been updated to boot the Hammer Away ROM further showcasing how dedicated the emulation scene is towards preserving our gaming past.

Expect to see Hammer Away available to download in the usual places in the coming days, but until then the new owners of the prototype have shared footage of both the game in action and its attract mode.

http://www.retrocollect.com/News/lon...d-to-mame.html

[CRTGAMER]

Nice post! Great news of discovering a prototype Arcade Board and even better, dumping the Rom for others to see.

[Greg2600]

VERY cool! Can I modify any version of MAME to run this game, or it has to be the newest version? I have MAME on OUYA, Ipad, etc., not looking to reinstall all of MAME.

[Tanooki]

That's stunning, looks a little 194X too with the POW item and aircraft/ships. Equally stunning was the generosity of all those involved taking the high road in preservation getting the ROMs public so they're spread and not dead nor hoarded and they got the MAME crew on it so it can be finally experienced two and a half decades after the fact.

[Gentlegamer]

This is fantastic!

The game play looks like it may be a bit too easy for a coin-op shooter, maybe the difficulty hadn't been tuned yet.

[parallaxscroll]

I tried out Hammer Away in MAME, the difficultly is somewhat above average for a coin-op shmup of that era.

Similar games would be Kyukyoku Tiger (Twin Cobra) by Toaplan (1987) and Twin Eagle by Seta (1988).

It's truly a great thing this proto was released and one can only hope other lost games from that era get preserved in the same manner.