JAMMArcade.net – Page 169

Arduino game cartridge dumping

Arduino Comments Off

Nov 232014

Continuing on from the Gameking post I made yesterday. I have been working with Team Europe recently to help dump some cartridges for inclusion into MESS from the Leapster range of devices.
I adapted my Gameking dumper program a little to be more suited to the Leapster but in doing so I believe it made it more generic and therefore easier to be adapted to other devices too.

First off this program relies heavily on two additional IC’s being used in the circuit. These are 74HC4040‘s.
These chips are binary counters and they are great in the fact that they only require 2 inputs each from the Arduino and they cover 12 address bits out each too. So a simple bit of maths tells us that by using 4 output pins from the Arduino we cover 24 address pins. For those of you that thought my Gameking dumper wasn’t possible due to the low number of pins used on the Arduino then this is the reason why.
They are also good to use as they are both 5v and 3.3v tolerant and as a lot of these cartridges only use 3.3v its ideal.

If you are even just slightly familiar with how to hook up a ROM for reading then you will have no issues in wiring this circuit up.
Here is the circuit drawing made by Team Europe

And here is the circuit

Of course all of this is useless without the Arduino program itself which you can DOWNLOAD HERE
If you use this program for anything useful then please let me know and also please give credit where credit is due.

Thanks to Team Europe too for their testing, feedback and providing the pictures used in this post.
You can visit Team Europe’s blog here https://team-europe.blogspot.co.uk/

Gameking ROMs released

General Comments Off

Nov 222014

The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that I recently released the ROM dumps I made of the Gameking cartridges I own.
Haze has made a start on the driver for this system too but looks like we may need to dump the internal Rom of the Gameking in order to get this to work.

If anyone can supply this we would be very interested in getting hold of it in the hope that emulation will be possible.

Grand Striker 2 human HUM-0003-(A) PLD dumps added

PAL Updates Comments Off

Nov 212014

Luizwt (BRASIL) has sent in 3 PLD dumps from Grand Striker 2.
They are straight dumps from PEEL18CV8 devices so unless you convert them you will need to located these devices in order to use them.
Thanks to Luizwt (BRASIL) for these.

Crime City repair log

PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs Comments Off

Nov 172014

Another board donated from my arcade operators friends.It’s time for Crime City.

For the uninitiated, Crime City is a beat ’em up developed by TAITO that can be played by one or two players simultaneous.Here are the technical specs of the hardware:

Hardware – Taito System B Hardware
Board Number – K1100470A
Main CPU – 68000 (@ 12 Mhz), Z80 (@ 4 Mhz)
Sound – YM2610 (@ 8 Mhz)
Screen Orientation – Horizontal
Resolution – 320 x 224
Refresh Rate – 60 Hz
Palette Colors- 4096
Players – 2
Buttons – 2
Joystick – 8 way

The board booted fine but I immediately noticed that there was no sound at all except for some scratching noises.Besides, some colours were wrong and some characters tended to pink compared to the correct ones from MAME (see wheels of car in the picture below, MAME screenshot is on the right) :

As usual I started my troubleshooting with a visual inspection of the PCB and found a broken track on the solderside which I promptly patched with some AWG30 wire:

This fix restored correct colours (the broken track was actually connected to the TAITO ASIC TC0260DAR which is a custom pallette generator and this explained the reason of the fault)

As I said board was silent, no sound at all except for some noise sign that the main MB3735 amplifier was working fine.Digital audio section is made by a Z80 CPU which commands a sound synthesis YM2610 chip.With my logic probe I could verify that all was working fine there so fault was elsewhere.So I started to suspect the YM3016F sound DAC:

Connecting its analog output to an external amplifier produced no sound (while digital input was present).This convinced me to replace it and so sound was fully restored .

Splatterhouse repair log #2

PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs 2 Responses »

Nov 152014

First of all I want to thank JROK for providing me all the technical info and allowing its public release, without his help I would not have ever made.Let’s start with the story.

Some time ago a friend of mine sent me his Splatterhouse PCB bought as working saying it got stuck upon boot on ‘ROM TEST START!! PLEASE WAIT..’ message displayed upside down on a screen filled with red zero.So I started to investigate on the net and found that usually this kind of issues are caused by a faulty custom chip marked ’64A1′ @M4 on ROM board.This was confirmed by swapping this IC in another CPU board of Galaga88 with this missing component , in this case I got an ‘EEPROM ERROR’ message which is a further proof of the fault.

Thanks always to JROK we know that this ’64A1′ custom IC is nothing else than a HD63701 MCU with the exception of two custom opcodes not present in original part.You can go deeper into technical reading here:

https://www.jrok.com/hardware/cus60/cus60_an_owners_guide.html

So, programming a blank HD63701 MCU with the available dump from MAME won’t work due the presence of these two custom opcodes.So, patching a ROM is needed.

In the specific you have to change three bytes in the ROM “VOICE0” at a specific offset.For example : in Splatterhouse the offset is $FA8B and the new HEX values are “20 01 56”.

The string to search for in HEX is “B7 C0 00 6E 00” and the first 3 bytes must be changed to “20 01 56”

The patch seems to be needed at offset $FA8B for most games, but not all. Here’s a reference table :

Tank Force – $FA29
Blazer – $FA8B
Dragon Spirit – $FA8B
Galaga 88 – $FA8B
Marchen Maze – $FA8B
Splatterhouse -$ FA8B
Rompers – $FA8B
Blast Off – $FA8B
World Court – $FA8B
World Stadium (and WS ’89, WS ’90) – $FA8B
Bakutotsu Kijuutei (Baraduke 2) – $FA8B
Beraboh Man – $FA4E
Dangerous Seed – $FA8B
Face Off – $FA29
Pisto Daimyo no Bouken – $FA8B
Puzzle Club – no voice ROM !
Quester – $FA1B
Souko Ban Deluxe / Boxy Boy – $FA8B
Yokai Douchuuki (Shadowland) – $FA8B

So, it was only matter to find some real blank HD63701.My first attempt failed since I bought as new some ICs that they turned out to be already programmed and, since they were the plastic HD637B01VOP one-time-progfammable version, they were unusable for my purpose.But then I was luck and found some HD63701VOC UV erasable ones:

So, it was only matter to program one of these MCU with MAME dump using my Hi-Lo Systems ALL-11C EPROM programmer and, at the same time, replace the ROM ‘VOICE0’ with the properly patched one.Once done, I had confirmation of what the good JROK said about. Operation ‘NAMCO custom 64A1 replacement’ accomplished.

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