Game: Elevator Action Returns
Manufacturer: Taito Corporation
Year: 1994
Genre: Platform Shoot-em-up
Players: 2 players simultaneous
My Version is: The F3 Cartridge (Japanese Release)
Screen Position: Horizontal

Background
Back in the mid eighties my parents enrolled me on Monday night swimming classes. At the time I couldn't care less if I was there or not, but one thing that made it all worthwhile was seeing the `Elevator Action` arcade machine in the entrance hall of the sports centre. I was never actually allowed to have a go on the machine, but used to enjoy watching the bigger boys play, and see how far they could get.

Years went by and by the late 90's I'd got myself a PC and was really into emulation. Apart from Mame, my other emulator of choice was Raine, which seemed to emulate titles that Mame wasn't at the time. One of these titles was `Elevator Action Returns`, a re-vamp of the 80's classic. Even though there was no sound emulation for this title I loved it, managed to track it down, and it's been in my collection ever since.

Elevator Action Returns - Title Screen

Insert Cartridge As with the Neo Geo MVS system (by SNK), the Taito F3 system is also cartridge based, but the Taito cartridges are much bigger than the SNK ones and are not as easy to swap over. Currently Elevator Action Returns is the only F3 cartridge in my collection, so I have yet to attempt a cartridge swap. Most of the F3 cartridges that come up on Ebay usually come with the main board anyway, so this may not be an issue if/when I come to add more F3 titles to my line-up. According to System16.com there are 30 known titles that run on F3 hardware.

Hardware Specifications (courtesy of System16.com)
Main CPU : MC68EC020 @ 16MHz
Sound CPU : MC68000 @ 16MHz
Sound chip : ES5505 @ 16MHz
Sound DSP Chip : ES5510
Video resoution : 320x224
Known games on this hardware : 30
Board composition : Board and Cartridge
Hardware Features : 4 scrolling layers (512x512 or 1024x512) of 4/5/6 bpp tiles, 1 scrolling text layer (512x512, characters generated in vram) 4bpp chars, 1 scrolling pixel layer (512x256 pixels generated in pivot ram) 4bpp pixels, 2 sprite banks (for double buffering of sprites), Sprites can be 4, 5 or 6 bpp, Sprite scaling, Rowscroll on all playfields, Line by line zoom on all playfields, Column scroll on all playfields, Line by line sprite and playfield priority mixing, Alpha blending on playfields and VRAM layer.