Castle of Dracula PAL dumps added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Castle of Dracula PAL dumps added
Mar 222015
 

In the past days I dumped an unemulated game from Korean Yun Sung (licensed by Escape) called Castle of Dracula:

https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Number=337848

https://www.lucaelia.com/mame.php/2015/Castle-Of-Dracula

It has already been emulated thanks to the work of MAME devs and will be inserted in next MAME 0.160 release.

Today I dumped the two PALs (PAL16L8ACN devices) and reversed them in GAL16V8 replacements.Dumps have been tested as working.

 Posted by at 11:35 am

Star Jacker PAL added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Star Jacker PAL added
Mar 212015
 

Star Jacker has two PAL16R4 chips on it. Looking at the schematics for Star Jacker and Choplifter I saw the PALs on both of these boards are very similar. The 315-5138 from my Choplifter board works fine in place of the 315-5024 PAL on the Star Jacker board.
The other one has a couple of differences. Pins 13 and 19 are swapped and pin 17 has a different designation altogether but it looks the same apart from that. I will try and recreate this chip soon.

 Posted by at 9:14 pm

Champion Wrestler & Exciting Hour PALs added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Champion Wrestler & Exciting Hour PALs added
Mar 182015
 

Muddymusic has dumped some PALs from his Champion Wrestler and Exciting Hour PCB’s.
They are untested but look good.
There were two more from Exciting Hour but I think they were registered and the dumps were not usable.

Thanks to Muddymusic

 Posted by at 2:50 pm

Irem PAL dumps update

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Irem PAL dumps update
Mar 142015
 

Today Irem PAL update. We have a dump from PAL labeled ‘NIN-C-3F’ on a Ninja Spirit PCB, courtesy of ‘Robotype’.He also confirmed that this PAL is the same as the ‘MH-C-3F’ found on Mr.Heli as well as the ‘IF-C-3F’ on Image Fight is the same as the ‘TOM-C-3F’ on Legend of Hero Tonma

Last but not the least the PAL dumps from IREM M92 hardware present on our database are from a Gunforce PCB so they could not work for all M92 games.This has been confirmed by someone who tried them on a Ninja Baseball Batman PCB.So, testing of these PALs on different M92 games would be welcome and well accepted.

 Posted by at 10:51 pm

Taito F3 PALs confusion

 General, Technical Info  Comments Off on Taito F3 PALs confusion
Mar 142015
 

Back in January there was a discussion going on over on the Jamma+ forums regarding the D77-14 and D77-15 PAL dumps.
After a lot of help from various people and testing by myself here is the conclusion I have come to regarding this issue.

D77-14 is used when the main CPU ROM’s are 27c2001 (0x40000).
D77-15 is used when the main CPU ROM’s are 27c4001 (0x80000).

On a 27c2001 EPROM, pin 31 is the programming pin. It is active low so once the chip is programmed we want to keep this held high when in use. That’s exactly what the D77-14 PAL is doing. Pin 19 of this PAL is fixed HIGH and is connected to pin 31 of the 27c2001 EPROM.

On a 27c4001 EPROM, pin 31 not the programming pin but it is the upper most address bit and that’s why with a D77-15 pin 19 is able to toggle which allows for double sized EPROM’s to be used.

This is where the confusion comes in.
On many converted boards out there in the wild (and there is a lot of them) we have found there to be D77-14 stamped PAL chips with the same code as what we have found in D77-15 PAL chips and vice versa. Assuming the PAL chips themselves are the original ones from Taito (and I have no reason to see why they wouldn’t be) then my theory is, as they are all PALCE16V8 chips, which are reprogrammable, they have simply been reprogrammed by the bootlegger/converter to use whatever version they needed. This would keep it looking that little bit more authentic and also cuts down on the cost of buying a GAL16V8.

If you check in the MAME source too, every game that has program ROM’s of size 0x40000 uses the D77-14 PAL and every game that has program ROM’s of size 0x80000 uses a D77-15 PAL.

Hopefully that will clear up a bit of the confusion surrounding this.