I dumped the two PALs from a original Raimais PCB , an obscure maze chase game released by Taito in 1988.Dumps have been successfully tested onto GAL16V8 devices.Board has been kindky provided by ‘robotype’, thanks to him.
I successfully converted from PAL to GAL and tested the Hot Shots Tennis dump we had from an unknown source.My test took place on a bootleg board which has identical layout of original.Equation of bootleg PLD match the ones of original so we mark this dump as working in both boards.
Also bootlegs deserve to be preserved so today we have some PLD dumps I got from not original boards (except one)
-Street Fighter II (bootleg)
-Bad Lands (bootleg)
-Power Balls (original by Playmark)
Dumps have been successfully tested in GAL devices.A picture of each board with PLD location has been uploaded as well.
Got this original Blood Bros. among a lot of untested PCBs:
For the uninitiated Blood Bros. was released by Tad Corporation in the 1990 and can be considered the sequel of Cabal since it shares the same gameplay.
When I powered up my board, I didn’t noticed anything abnormal but once started a game the background GFX were flashing until they completely disappeared leaving black this part of screen :
Board uses some customs ASIC to generate GFX.Studying a bit the hardware I figured out that the one marked ‘SEI0200 TC110G21AF’ 8QFP100) addresses the background/foreground 42 pin MASK ROM through some 74LS273 and processes directly its data :
Piggybacking a programmed 27C800 (equivalent to the 42 pin MASK ROM) had no effect.Since there were no other involved component I was pretty sure the ASIC was bad.Having a Raiden II as donor board I decided to replace this custom:
After some work the donor part was in place:
Powered up the board again and all the background GFX were back.Board 100% fixed.
In the past day I managed to repair a P.O.W. and Blood Bros. PCBs, this gave me the chance to test the PAL dumps we had in the archive.I could successfully convert the P.O.W. dumps from native PAL format into GAL one except for the one marked ‘P-A8’ which doesn’t work on PCB probably due timing issue.I tested the dumps from Blood Bros. (for some of them there was the need to convert from PAL to GAL format) confirming they are good and dumped a further device so now we have six dumps from this game (there are other two PLDs on PCB but sadly they are secured/registered PEEL18CV8 devices).Lastly, I added correct labels and PCB location.