I wasn’t originally going to write this up but seeing as though I won’t have much time free in a few weeks I thought I might as well.
So, this game would hang at the Q Sound check at startup. After a quick check I found why.
I straightened the pin and the game now works.
Whilst sorting out some CPS2 stuff the other day I found a BGSB3E PAL in a Street Fighter Alpha. I didn’t have this in my list so dumped it. It was actually unprotected so its a proper dump and has been converted for use on a GAL16V8 device and tested.
Also, whilst looking into a potential bad dump (turned out to be fine!), I found 2 other PAL’s in a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo board They are found on the daughter board and are labelled:
BGSG1 and BGSG2.
BGSG1 is linked to the sound, without it it plays some SFX choppy and the music is a mess
BGSG2 is graphics related and gives jailbars and messed up sprite priority when removed.
Both are dumped and have been tested.
Ive been developing BINman a little more and some others have let me know they are using it too which is nice.
Here is an updated version (v1.6)
The layout has changed a bit to remove any clutter that would be caused by adding new features. Its now all operated by the menu bar.
It can now:
>split a file in to 2, 4 or 8 smaller files. These files are named “file#” where # is the sequential number of files generated.
>swap the upper and lower half of a file
>combine 2 files together
Saw this the other day on eBay and it was going for a sensible price with sensible delivery costs so I took a shot and won it.
On power up we got this
Never seen this fault before and as everything was soldered in I didn’t want to go down the route of swapping everything out.
I could not use the cartridge port or type anything in but I did have what looked like a flashing cursor. I also found, when I pressed the CONTROL key the screen flashed up with a nice multicoloured garbage screen which I have seen before with a dodgy PLA.
Whipped this out and burned a new PLS100 chip.
Now everything is back to normal (or is it?)
Whilst running some diagnostics I saw there was a fault on one of the CIA chips that displayed “INTERRUPT”yet everything seemed to be working.
Running a different set of diagnostics I found that the RESTORE key did not function. As the restore key generates an NMI this was probably what I was seeing.
I don’t have any spare CIA chips so this will have to stay as it is for now.
UPDATE: Thanks to a comment left by Rocky I revisited this today armed with schematics. Found a completely knackered 556 timer chip that just so happens to control the NMI from the RESTORE key. Replacing this fixed all my problems.
Lesson learnt. Don’t assume you always know what your talking about!
Thanks to Rocky for making me look at this again
Some long term readers may recall some time ago I made a program called Byteman.
It was a simple program written in VB.NET and it allowed the user to quickly and easily interleave, deinterleave and byte swap binary files.
I use this program a lot and was starting to get a little frustrated with its bugs so I finally recovered the source code from my laptop and gave it some much needed attention.
Anyway, its done and its more useable than before. Ive also removed the silly online update checking routine as it could get slow.
Ive done my best to remove any major bugs but I don’t doubt there will be some left in there.
You will need .NET Framework V4.0 to run it