The CV-1000 returns, but at what cost?

One thing that always amazes me about the arcade industry is the ingenuity of the, shall we say, post-market. Certainly there are simple things like the 60-in-1 or the King of Fighters ‘97 pirate board that are little more than interfaces between MAME and a JAMMA edge, but more interesting things include the Teddy Boy Blues complete recreation of Sega’s System 1 hardware. But what about the CAVE CV1000? Could that be recreated?

Challenges

At the time the Teddy Boy Blues board was likely created, making a clone of the System 1 board was the only financially viable way to make something that could play System 1 games. They probably would’ve used MAME, if that was an option. So of course, for someone to actually recreate the CAVE CV1000 hardware we’d be firmly in enthusiast territory.

That being said, the CAVE CV1000 has one thing I noted in my blog post that makes it particularly desirable to recreate, beyond the high price of the games: slowdown.

CAVE’s stock and trade were bullet-hell shooters, a genre noted for having huge amounts of moving objects on-screen, as well as genre noted for popularity with high score runners. The slowdown behavior of the hardware is not only an inevitable