The stages in Dead Connection have min and max difficulty values. One of the items in the game is a cross that gives 500 points. It also resets the stage difficulty back to its minimum, unless you're playing as Gary, in which case the stage difficulty is maxed out. I've no idea what to make of this.

If you buy Midnight Landing on Arcade Archives this week, you'll receive a Biorhythm calculator at no extra cost! You can use it to measure your humors or whatever, I don't know. I'm not from the 70s.

(Original find by Phil Bennett - see article for details)

tcrf.net/Midnight_Lan...

Getting into the groove of making articles again. Here's one for Strategy X, which was released on Arcade Archives a few weeks back. Includes version differences with the older Stern set, an unused enemy, and evidence for a possible older Konami set buried in Stern's version.

tcrf.net/Strategy_X

(TCRF-Adjacent Content??)

Finally talking about something I've been working on for about 2-and-a-half years: Scans of 134 drafts from 100 episodes of The Simpsons, covering Seasons 1 to 16 (mostly the first 6). This was a big time sink. Hope you'll enjoy them.
#Simpsons

archive.org/details/@gol...

So the prototype we have is oddly put together. Everything in it comes from a later date than the prototype featured in these screens except for the sprite graphics ROMs, which date from _before_ this prototype. Note the different HUD in those screens compared to the dumped proto; same as final.

Just in case you were wondering if she has her own ending, unfortunately she does not. Completing the game with 2P solo just gives the standard 2P-only ending slides. They might have run out of room in the FG/BG graphics ROMs.

Seems like the most appropriate day to post this:
In Dragon Unit / Castle of Dragon (article to come) if you hold 2P Start and then insert 2 coins, the second player - usually a palette swap - will instead be a lady knight with unique sprites. This only works if the game's license is set to Athena.

This is a week late, but here's a TCRF article on Dead Connection that I made a few years back. Notable finds include a big debug menu, scrapped 4P support, a location test screen, hidden cameos from Zak and Mel of Pu-Li-Ru-La fame, and a mess of unused destructibles.
tcrf.net/Dead_Connect...

Don't worry, they're fine.

Thunder Fox has one of those Double Dragon-style twists wherein after the final boss is defeated in a 2P game, both players are compelled by forces beyond their control to fight each other. Behold:

I'm going to try to explain how Thunder Fox's game clear score bonuses work. It's a little confusing and more than a bit buggy. This only applies to a 1CC game; otherwise, the player gets no bonus.
1. The player gets 400,000 points for each life remaining. The "100000PTS" text is incorrect.

Thunder Fox is coming to the Arcade Archives! Here's the TCRF article on the game I made like 3 years ago, which has an alternate, radder title, details on debug functions, and many, many alternate and unused graphics.

tcrf.net/Thunder_Fox_...

Oh, okay. I was asking because Taito of American pulled a Ninja Kids and so setting it to US changes one of the location's names.

Final Blow is out on Arcade Archives. There's a hidden image that can be triggered in attract mode that's a sly reference to similar images found in Taito Kumagaya Lab's games - see link(s) for more on that and other content.

tcrf.net/Final_Blow_(...
x.com/ZackmannX/st...

#ファイナルブロー
#アーケードアーカイブス

A test post.