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Using the HxC Floppy Emulator with a Fluke 9100

Guides Comments Off

Jul 192015

Recently the floppy drive on my Fluke 9100 became unusable and I feared the worst. I’ve tried once before to get the HxC floppy drive emulator to work with this but I never managed and to be honest I’ve never delved into floppy drives at all so I was a bit clueless.

I found THIS site while looking for information and at first I skimmed over the details and didn’t really take any of it in. That was a big mistake as it provided all the information I needed to get this up and running.

The only thing I needed to do on the hardware side of things was to cut pin 14 of the floppy cable and connect the Fluke 9100 side to GND.
Everything else is all software.
In the HxC Floppy Emulator software you need to apply these settings

Save the config file to the SD card.

Then “Load” the .TD0 files that are available from HERE or HERE.

The HxC software can deal with these files without any issue so once you have loaded one go ahead and “Export” it to your SD card using the indexing naming scheme
Disk 1 = DSKA0000.HFE
Disk 2 = DSKA0001.HFE
etc

I have the first dip set to ON on the HxC device.
Once that’s all done you can fire up the Fluke and use your SD card to load.
My Fluke doesn’t have an SCSI controller hence it has no hard drive fitted so it is vital I have a working floppy drive.

Once you have the OS loaded up from the floppy drive you may need to change the way the system loads the user disks.
If your system is configured to be a 9100 then user disks are defaulted to load from the hard disk.
If your system is configured to be a 9105 the user disks are attempted to be loaded from the second floppy disk drive.

The HxC floppy replacement can apparently be configured to emulate two drives but I cannot for the life of me get it to work so this is necessary for me.

When loaded you will be met with this message
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Press the ‘SETUP’ button
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Move RIGHT to highlight ‘POD’
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Press F2 (‘USERDISK’) then select ‘DR1’. This is the first floppy drive.
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Go back to the initial ‘SETUP’ menu and select ‘POD’ again
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Then press the ‘SOFT KEYS’ button and some more options will appear
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Select ‘PODNAME’ and you will get this (Z80 pod is used here)
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Make sure you have the correct disk image selected on the HxC then press the ‘ENTER/YES’ key.
If all goes well the floppy will read and you will be presented with a new message (its different depending on POD type fitted)
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Now the POD is available to use.
NOTE: If you press the ‘RESET’ button on the keypad at anytime then it will revert back to DR2.

Time Pilot Test & Diagnostic ROM

General 3 Responses »

Jul 182015

18/07/2015

Added support for Atari licensed version
SFX counter broke after exiting character menu and re-entering SFX menu
Wrong ram associations with pcb locations now fixed.
Holding down player 2 start during power-up enters diagnostic mode

Important: Porchy discovered that 0x1 needs to be written to 0xc308 or nothing shows up on the screen at all on a PCB. This was undocumented but now we believe the value 0x1 must be written during initialization of the screen. The latest release addresses this issue. Thanks to Porchy!

To fix: Some sounds still play after exiting SFX test to main menu.

Note: Diagnostic mode relies on good RAM and ROM for configuration data to facilitate the support of multiple Time Pilot versions in the one ROM. Do not rely on results from the diagnostic mode without sorting out issues associated with RAM and ROM first.

21/6/2015

The EPROM ( a 27c64 ) once burned with this software installs on the CPU board @ 5H and can stay in there permanently if so desired.

Performs tests of the RAM & game EPROMs on the CPU board. This supports Konami and Centuri versions of the software, bootlegs are not supported yet.

Also has a built in diagnostic mode for testing inputs, sound output and displays character & sprite tables. The diagnostic mode is accessible via DSW2. All dips must be on except for dip 3 to access the diagnostic mode of the program.

Would like to thank cmonkey for providing me with technical info which assisted me in being able to display the sprite & character tables properly. Also like to thank the MAME team for their hard work on the emulator which I used as a tool for debugging/testing purposes throughout the development of this program.

See downloads in ROM Files for the binary.

0001 0006 0005

‘Massive’ Konami PAL dumps update

PAL Updates Comments Off

Jul 172015

Today we have a huge PAL dumps update and all of them came from Konami boards (original and bootleg, too).Let’s start with order.

Porchy dumped the PLDs (actually one is a redump and replaces an existing one) from an original Time Pilot PCB.Devices were two 82S153 so he converted the dumps to a more usable GAL16V8 format and succesfully tested them on hardware.

Dragos sent us the PAL20L10 chip from his Mystic Warriors PCB, I dumped it and Porchy took care of reversing it in a GAL22V10.Dragos successfully tested it.

Andreas sent us dump of the PLS173 from an original Devil World PCB ( board ID GX687, chip marked ‘007789’ @10H also present on Gradius II).We mark this dump as untested until we found a way of reversing the chip in a GAL or test the dump in an original device.

Thank you all for your precious contributions.

As for me I dumped the three PALs (two PAL16L8 and one PALCE16V8) from a Run and Gun PCB and the two ones (PAL16L8) from a Block Hole.Lastly I dumped the two 82S153 devices from a Gyruss bootleg PCB (located on the Konami-1 replacement piggyback board) and reversed them into GAL format.All my dumps come in GAL16V8 format (except for one from Gyruss that needs a GAL18V10) and have been tested as working on PCB.

Time Pilot diagnostic ROM update

General, Technical Info 5 Responses »

Jul 172015

Im currently working on a Time Pilot PCB and tested out Shoestrings diagnostic ROM.
This board is the Atari version which wasnt supported at the time but has now been updated.
I also ran into a problem where nothing appeared on the screen. Working together we eventually found the issue.
The original game code makes a write of 01 to address $c308. Using the Fluke 9010 I found that this write actually initialises the screen output.
MAME doesnt have any support for this so when testing the ROM in MAME it works fine. The test ROM has been updated with this now too and should work fine.

This highlights the need to test things on REAL hardware.
Thanks to Shoestring for making the diagnostic ROM and for putting up with all my questions.

Block Hole repair log

PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs Comments Off

Jul 142015

Got this Konami Block Hole (export version of Quarth) from my friend ‘mastercello’ :

Board was marked with “sprite issue” and indeed it’s what I got once fired it up:

Some sprites (like main ship, see the above picture) were garbled and totally wrong.There are eight 27256 EPROMs containing all the sprites so I went to probe them with a logic probe and I found that the common address line A10 (PIN21) of four of them was not prperly toggling compared to the healthy lines A9 and A8 for example.This was confirmed also by my logic analyzer:

I was able to trace this faulty address line back to the sprites generator ASIC marked ‘051960’:

So my suspects was that this ASIC would address the four sprite ROMS wrongly due its weakened address line.To confirm this I lifted the involved pin:

and its behaviour was the same as before when connected to sprite ROMs (on the left the an healthy address line, on the right the faulty A10) :

At this point, I was pretty sure the ASIC ‘051960’ was faulty in this address line so I played the card of replacing it:

And I was right, this restored graphics completely.Board 100% fixed.

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