First Arcade Shooter - Cave's Ibara

This week I will receive Ibara, a Shmup, to put in my Sega New Astro City. Its a vertical shooter so Ill have to rotate the Astro's monitor 90 degrees counter clockwise. Ill post pics of that when I do it. Here is a pic of the Ibara kit:





Ibara is a Bullet Hell game made by Cave. Ive heard its super hard and frustrating. Luckily, someone has just found a "special version" of the game hidden in the program code that allows level select, pause, slow motion and more! All of this info and pics were found on the Shmups forum here:

Link -> Ibara Special Version

To access the "special version" you need to have DIP switch #2 flipped like this:



Power on the game
Hold down the A+B buttons & release once the loading screen displays
You will enter a special version of the setup which looks like this:



Now press the A button to return to the main title screen. The title screen will be the same except "Special Ver" will be displayed on the right.



- At the title screen, move the stick left or right to select a stage (great for practice)

- While playing press the start buton to pause or hold the start button to slo-mo

- Rank counter is at the top of the screen during gameplay

- Ability to take over control of either ship and play during the demo cycle

- Hold A+B+C for 2 seconds and the game will reboot. You can also hold A+B immediately after this to boot right back into Special Mode.

- You can hold C with up/down to bring up the debug screens (anywhere except during play)

- While viewing debug info, you can press start to resume playing while keeping the debug screen overlayed

*The rank indicator appears to consists of two parts, a rank level, and a rank counter. The counter continually decrements from a high hex number. The rank level starts at 10 and slowly goes up by 1 or 2 each stage.



Here is a video of Ibara's stage 1 (normal version) on someone's Taito Egret II:



Ill post more once I have it, tate my monitor, and get the game in the cabinet.