Scared Stiff Upgrade of the ROM

I was playing Scared Stiff last week and I managed to score 46 million, obtaining Grand Champion. How did I do this, you ask?

I cheated.

Well, not really through any fault of mine. What happened was that a mode called Leaper Mania got caught in an infinite loop, constantly adding points to my score. This is a common glitch with the 1.3 ROM. Up until now, it hasn't been a problem, but it certainly has become an issue that has to be dealt with.

Thus it was off to eBay to buy another game ROM. I decided to buy both Scared Stiff and Popeye ROMs at the same time to save on shipping, since I'll probably have problems with Popeye down the road, might as well fix it now. The ROMs arrived this weekend and I immediately went to work on replacing the Scared Stiff ROM. The procedure is basically the same as it was for White Water. The difference this time was that when the machine reset after the ROM was changed, it booted up in French.

Great, another import! I wasn't looking forward to another soldering job. Fortunately, Scared Stiff uses DIP switches to change the language.




So here's the DIP switch settings before. Notice the #7 and #8 switches are set to off. This sets the machine to French.









According to the manual, for English those two switches need to be set to on...










Here's the switches set to the proper position. The game now boots to English. Way better than having to solder. All the high scores have been reset, so I guess I'll have to get back to Grand Champion the hard way!