Venture
First Draft: January 19, 2025

Manufacturer: Exidy
Released: August 1981
Date Acquired: December 4th 2024

I don't know why but I've always been quite the fan of arcade games by Exidy. The first I ever played (and the first I ever owned!) was Crossbow, a shooting gallery where you took out objects and monsters that were trying to kill your band of fantasy adventurers while they walked one-by-one across the screen. Spectar and Targ feel like games that I've not only played a ton of but also seen tons of clones of. They of course famously made a few controversial games, Death Race and Chiller, both of which I got to try out at Funspot in New Hampshire some years ago.

While looking into what all games the company made years ago, I found out about Venture. It's got quite the simple premise: You're a smiley face with a bow who's on a mission to recover all the treasure in a dungeon. You run around a little "overworld" of the rooms in the dungeon as a small red dot while avoiding enemies. Enter the room, take out the enemies, pick up the treasure, and leave before one of the space invader-looking things busts in and takes you out. Clear all the rooms on the floor and go to the next. I like it!

I started searching for a Venture boardset in the early 2020s. eBay really wasn't that useful to me, I could find manuals all day long but PCBs? Sometimes one would show up missing every major IC for a bit under $50, other times complete untested units were going for over $300. I didn't want the former as the boardset requires a smattering of pricey ICs (Two 6502s, a 6532 RIOT, a pair of 6821 PIAs, a 6840 PIT, a bunch of PROMs... buying the list of ICs would be a hundred bucks before debugging, no way a $50 + shipping gutted board would end up cheap). I didn't want the latter because it felt ridiculous.

Funnily enough, I eventually found a complete boardset at a price I was willing to pay from suruga-ya. It was $80 before proxy fees and shipping ($128.50 after, fine enough by me). Why was it in Japan? No idea, I wasn't going to question it, I was just happy it came up and I could get it.

As things stand, I'm still working on building wiring harnesses to test the boardset out. It's a bit dirty, everything is caked in a good layer of dust, so at some point I'll need to clean it proper. Do I expect it to work perfectly on the first try? Nope. I'm sure something will blow up, every board I get seems to have at least one issue. That said, I do think I can get it going. Hopefully that day comes soon! I'll update this page with more info as things move along.