StephensDev
Reviving an Area 51 Arcade Board
Contents
- Reviving an Area 51 Arcade Board
- How do you play Area 51 today?
- My Code
- Second Board: Area 51 + Maximum Force
- 🔧 Python ROM Patch Script
- Example usage
- Binary Files
Last year, I purchased a broken Area 51 arcade motherboard. It had no hard drive or peripherals, but with some cleaning and minor repairs (replacing a couple of cracked ceramic capacitors), I got it working. Since it came as just the motherboard, I had to recreate the hard drive from a backup image — and it actually booted successfully.
How do you play Area 51 today?
The big challenge is that light guns don't work on modern LCD displays. So my plan is to adapt the game to work with an LCD monitor, using an IR-based gun system and some custom electronics.
My Code
You can check out the project here:
🔗 Area-51-Arcade-IR-Gun code on GitHub
Second Board: Area 51 + Maximum Force
This year, I picked up another broken board — this one with both Area 51 and Maximum Force ROMs installed. Unfortunately, it was missing the security PIC chip, which is normally required for the game to boot.
To bypass that, I'm using a small Python script that patches the ROM files so the game runs without the security chip.
🔧 Python ROM Patch Script
def patch_rom_files(rom_paths, patch_offset=0x418, patch_value=0x4E754E75, output_suffix="_patched"):
if len(rom_paths) != 4:
raise ValueError("Exactly 4 ROM files are required.")
# Break patch into 4 bytes (big endian)
patch_bytes = patch_value.to_bytes(4, byteorder='big')
# The offset within each file is one 32-bit word = offset // 4
file_offset = patch_offset // 4
output_paths = []
for i, path in enumerate(rom_paths):
with open(path, 'rb') as f:
data = bytearray(f.read())
if file_offset >= len(data):
raise ValueError(f"Offset {file_offset:#X} is out of bounds for {path}")
# Apply patch byte to this ROM file
data[file_offset] = patch_bytes[i]
# Save as new file
output_path = path.replace('.', f'{output_suffix}.', 1)
with open(output_path, 'wb') as f:
f.write(data)
output_paths.append(output_path)
print(f"Patched {path} → {output_path} at offset {file_offset:#X} with byte {patch_bytes[i]:02X}")
return output_paths
# Example usage
rom_files = [
"area51mx.3h", # Byte 0
"area51mx.3p", # Byte 1
"area51mx.3m", # Byte 2
"area51mx.3k", # Byte 3
]
patch_rom_files(rom_files)