The late 70's/early 80's videogame market saw the emergence of a cottage industry, where small-time game makers would deliberately copy the circuit design of a popular videogame and either release a nearly-identical clone (or "bootleg") with minor changes to the name and graphics, or would develop a new game that could run on the existing hardware and sell ROM-and-daughterboard sets to the arcade operators.  It was a good deal for both bootlegger and operator (though not such a good deal for the original manufacturer); the bootleggers could ride on the back of a popular hit with little R&D cost, and it obviously cost a lot less for an operator to just buy and install a new set of ROM chips (and sometimes a new marquee) into an existing cabinet than to purchase a whole new game.  UNIWAR-S was one of these – while IREM did manufacture "dedicated" cabinets, the game was designed around a modified GALAXIANS board and could also be obtained as an "upgrade kit".  Ironically, this "bootleg" game became popular enough that it was bootlegged by others in turn, and sold under a variety of names.  Mine appears to be one of these, since the attract-mode screen does not actually show the name of the game.  (The original game would show a swarm of "WARP" sprites that would eventually settle into fixed positions and dissolve into the letters UniWar S.  Mine still shows the swarm, but the sprites dissolve into blank space instead.)

Some of those cabinet graphics sure look familiar, don't they!  Obviously, this console used to be something else at one time – your guess is as good as mine as to what, though.  It's basically a "Frankenstein" machine, probably pieced together from and/or repaired with whatever spare cabinet parts some operator had lying around – STAR FIGHTER marquee (which, according to KLOV, is a knock-off of EAGLE, which itself is a knock-off of MOON CRESTA... oy!  Can't keep track of the players without a scorecard! ), a monitor bezel with "STAR WARS" X-wing fighters on it (a half-broken one, at that – and it did not come from an actual STAR WARS game, either!), and who knows where the monitor and that generic-looking control panel came from...

I first encountered UNIWAR-S (under its real name) at a grocery store in Albuquerque, NM... I think.  It's been a while.   This one was added to my collection in June of 1999, making it number seven in my collection.   This particular UNIWAR-S, alias STAR FIGHTER, was purchased from a local collector, via a for-sale ad on the usenet newsgroup rec.games.video.arcade.collecting, for $125.  (Fortunately, he put up some pictures of it on his webpage, and I recognized the screen display for what it was; otherwise, I might have passed it up!)

UNIWAR-S follows the familiar vertically-oriented, space shoot-em-up motif popularized by SPACE INVADERS and GALAXIANS – in fact, the first stage is almost exactly like GALAXIANS, down to the little flags in the corner indicating the current round number and the background siren that increases in pitch and tempo as you whittle away the alien armada.  You move your ship left and right with the joystick, and shoot with the fire button.  Only one shot can be in the air at a time.  UNIWAR-S displays the high score, but does not save it when the game is turned off, and does not allow you to enter your initials.  There is no buy-in capability to continue a game after you lose your last ship.  You begin with 3 or 5 ships, and earn an additional ship every 4000, 5000, or 7000 points, depending on the operator's DIP-switch settings.

Stage 1 plays out basically the same as GALAXIANS – except that there's only one type of enemy, the "Super Mosquito", and they nearly always dive-bomb in groups of three or four.  One interesting bit of attention to detail on the programmers' part is that the Super Mosquitos actually rotate 180 degrees in place, so that their needle-shaped fronts face towards you, before attacking, which gives you a slight forewarning of which group is about to peel off from the main squadron and attack.

Destroying all of the Super Mosquitos WARPs you to the surface of a planet, to engage in ground combat against the next waves of invaders...

...or at least that's what the instructions say, although it's not much of a planet; it's just a dashed line underneath your ship... and why are the stars still whizzing by as though you were still in deep space?   (Answer: because the starfield background is directly generated by a dedicated subsection of the video circuitry, not by the game software, and the programmer forgot to turn it off.)  Hovering Attackers (I did not make up these names, by the way – this is what they're called in the manual!) "warp" in above you, hover for a few seconds, then do a spiral-loop-and-dive bombing run; if they escape off the edge of the screen, they warp back in a couple of seconds later.  When they first materialize, they don't shoot on their first bombing run, but they do every time thereafter.  These are probably the easiest enemy to deal with, since the warp effects tell you where they're going to materialize next, and while they're hovering for those first few seconds after warp-in they're sitting ducks; they don't drop bombs until they start their runs.

Here's where things start getting nasty.  When Demon Flies are shot, or if they get too close to the "ground" (the dotted line under your ship), they drop "Spy Aliens" that quickly fall to the bottom of the screen, trying to get underneath the dotted line.  If they make it to the bottom, they start patrolling back and forth, trying to "spear" your ship from behind through one of the openings in the dotted line.  Fortunately, they don't move very fast, so as long as you only have one or two to deal with, they can usually be avoided.  The only way to get rid of them is to shoot the "Killer King" (that blue-and-yellow alien at the top) which makes a random appearance.  Killer Kings are worth a large, and random, number of points, but they only appear on the screen for a few seconds, and are extremely difficult to hit due to their quick and randomly-erratic movements.

Rolling Fires are the most difficult stage, by far – not only do these also drop Spy Aliens when shot, but you can only shoot them through a tiny opening in their rotating outer shield, making them much more difficult to dispose of.  Other than that, this level plays out pretty much the same as the Demon Flies.  Once you've disposed of the last Rolling Fire, you WARP back into space to begin another round with the Super Mosquitoes.

UNIWAR-S runs on a Z-80 CPU.  The manual does not provide schematics, so I can't tell you much more about it – except that the board inside mine looks suspiciously like a modified MOON CRESTA board – which, if memory serves, could also be run on a modified GALAXIANS board, so who the hell knows what this board really is or was!

Note the two "daughtercards" sticking up off of the main board; those plug into the four ROM sockets on the original board.  This was typical of these types of "conversion" games; since GALAXIANS only used four 2716-type ROMs, two for graphics and two for data (that's a whopping 4K of program space – I'll bet you most programmers these days wouldn't have a clue how to fit a game in that small a space!), daughterboards were used, along with a few judicious hacks cut-and-jumper modifications to the main board, to expand the available code and graphics space.  (In this case, to 16K and 8K, respectively.)

As usual, the interior of the cabinet is a whole lot of empty space.  Since this one has so much free space inside, and such a (comparatively) simple wiring harness going up to the board, this cabinet is destined to be a "project" – eventually, I plan for it to house a couple of other boardsets I have sitting around (including a MOON CRESTA and a STRATOVOX), along with some kind of switching system to allow me to select between them, to make it a Multigame.