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fax: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Fax (c) 1983 Exidy.

Who? When? What? Where? Why? Fax is a trivia game that asks questions about : general knowledge, sports, history and entertainment.

- TECHNICAL -

Main CPU : M6502 (@ 705.562 Khz)

Sound CPU : M6502 (@ 894.886 Khz)

Sound Chips : Custom (@ 894.886 Khz)

Players : 2

Buttons : 4 (A, B, C, and D)

- TRIVIA -

Released in June 1983.

Fax came in what was essentially a jukebox cabinet (with a black and woodgrain finish). This was probably because Exidy had hoped to sell this machine to a different market than its normal arcade games. It has a 9in. monitor mounted in the center (with a 'Fax' logo on the monitor bezel), and a row of buttons on each side of the screen. Sales of this title were limited a bit by its $2495 price tag (USD), which was a good $500 over the average arcade game price at the time.

This game used an advanced (proprietary), compression algorithm to hold nearly 3700 questions in a tiny amount of EPROM space (roughly 128K, which was still a huge amount of storage in 1983, which was why this game was so expensive). Exidy also sold several EPROM replacement kits that provided new questions, but they sold very poorly, and are nearly impossible to find today.

- SERIES -

1. Fax (1983)

2. Fax II

- STAFF -

Written by : Vic Tolomei, Larry Hutcherson

Art by : Mike Craven

- PORTS -

* Computers :

Apple II

PC

Commodore C64

Atari 800

- SOURCES -

Game's rom.

Machine's picture.

MAME Info:

0.33b6 [Mike Balfour]

Artwork available (fax, fax2)

NOTE:

- The original ROM images for FAX (c) 1983 Exidy have been made available for free, non-commercial use. Authorization from H.R. Kaufmann, president of Xidy.

NOTE:

- The Fax board has two ROM sockets which were apparently never populated (fxd-7a.64, fxd-8a.64).

WIP:

- 0.145u2: W. Belk, Smitdogg and The Dumping Union added missing proms to FAX and clone FAX 2.

- 2nd March 2010: Smitdogg - Thanks to W. Belk we got a FAX board to dump the prom (74S287) and check for an alt set.

- 7th December 2009: Mr. Do - Kiltron cleaned up the buttons artwork for FAX/FAX2, courtesy of Ranger_Lennier. I also went ahead and made the artwork "clickable," so you can click on the actual buttons on-screen when playing the game (clickable artwork is my "new toy").

- 0.129: MooglyGuy added savestate support to FAX and clone.

- 27th December 2008: Mr. Do - Addy also took care of Fax and Fax 2 artwork, the latter which was scanned by Ranger_Lennier. Some time later, we'll add the lighted buttons to this.

- 0.116u2: Changed description to 'FAX 2'. Renamed (faxa) to (fax2).

- 0.113u4: Changed description to 'FAX' and clone to 'FAX (alt. questions)'.

- 0.84u6: Pierpaolo Prazzoli added clone Fax (alt. questions). Added new gfx1 rom ($0) to Fax.

- 0.37b5: Removed Samples sound.

- 8th March 1999: Eric Hustvedt added another Fax clone.

- 0.35b2: Fixed sound with new cpu2 rom ($6800).

- 0.34RC2: Known issues: Sound doesn't work because one ROM is missing.

- 0.34RC1: Added Samples and Custom sound.

- 0.33b6: Mike Balfour added Fax (Exidy 1983). Sound doesn't work because one ROM is missing.

- 9th June 1998: Dumped Fax. Game runs on hardware extremely similar to the other early Exidy games (i.e. Targ, Spectar, Venture, Mouse Trap, Pepper II). It uses the same color plane expansion board as Pepper II to acheive 2-bit color. It also uses a memory expansion board to handle the large ROM requirements for all the trivia questions.

LEVELS: 33

Romset: 217 kb / 38 files / 193.1 zip

MAME XML Output:

<manufacturer>Exidy</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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