Info
I bought my first Zookeeper from the 1999 CA Extreme show. I didn't know enough at
the time to know that it was actually a Qix cabinet with Zookeeper parts in it. That
was fine with me, since I was just having fun playing, but then I saw a dedicated
cabinet on eBay and had to have it. Nobody bid on it because the price was too high.
The little gears in my head started turning and I figured I could pay a little extra
for it and then turn around and sell my Qix-turned-Zookeeper cabinet to help pay
for it. That's exactly what I did. I got the new cabinet and it was joyful.
I then sold my old cabinet to my friend, Stephen Beall. It was joyful for him, too,
but only for a little while. He reported some problems that turned out to be coin
processor related, so I gave him the coin processor board from my new Zookeeper.
It didn't help. I told him to bring me the cabinet back and I would get it working.
It was stubborn. Both cabinets developed problems and actually stopped working all
together because of the stupid coin processor board. I got real pissed off. I decided
to look at the MAME source code and figure out what the coin processor did and how
it worked. It turns out that its only purpose in life is to prevent people from converting
Qix boards to run Zookeeper by swapping ROMs. Well, that would not do at all. Stupid
thing.
I brushed up on my 6809 assembly language skills and proceeded to crack the stupid
protection and made it work without the coin processor board at all. I managed
to do it in about three nights of crunching my eyebrows up real close to think
better
and the Zookeepers have both worked flawlessly ever since. (Of course, I had
to put in a new PC-AT power supply and replace horrid board-eating battery with
a NVRAM
board designed by Mark Spaeth). You can download the patched code from my "technical
info" page if you want to get rid of your coin processor too.