Dumping Gameking cartridges

 Arduino  Comments Off on Dumping Gameking cartridges
May 182014
 

Got my hands on a Gameking with 13 games recently.
The Gameking is a bad handheld device from the East and all the games are a ripoff of something already released.

This little project represents the first attempt at I made at dumping a ROM using the Arduino.
It’s also the first time I used the 74HC4040 to generate the addresses. I used these binary counters because they offer 12 outputs and it only uses 2 outputs from the Arduino. They are also tolerant of both 3.3v and 5v so interfacing with different voltage chips is a lot easier.

On with the dumping.
There is a guy called Brian Provinciano that once had a website that contained a lot of nice information about the Gameking. Fortunately it can still be found here

So armed with the pinout this should be easy right? Nope. The physical cartridge pinout is a 2×30 pin affair and I could not find one. Nothing left to do but desolder the original cartridge connector from the Gameking unit itself.

So now I have everything I need. Time to hook this thing up and test it out.

I had each byte spit out to the serial port and then used my makerom.exe program to create a binary file the log file.
The end result looks pretty decent. I can see the header of the file.

I can also see all the game graphics using Brian’s editing tool available from the link above.
Unfortunately that’s as far as I can go with it for now as there are no emulators available. There is one for the NDS but its worthless in terms on usage.

This was a great project that was pretty easy to build.

Wonderboy in Monsterland (317-0043, 317-0043 & 317-0043)

 Decrypted Updates  Comments Off on Wonderboy in Monsterland (317-0043, 317-0043 & 317-0043)
May 132014
 

Runik and Mpatou have added 3 decrypted and tested working sets for Wonderboy in Monsterland.
Not familiar with the hardware myself but one of these sets is for the English VC version.

Thanks go to both Runik and Mpatou.

 Posted by at 8:24 pm
May 102014
 

Quite often I need to be able to manually toggle the input pins on a PAL chip so I can observe its behavior. Ive needed to use this method to reverse several registered devices and also the Amstrad 6128 HAL chip that used latches.
Up till now Ive either used a program written on the Boardmaster 4000 or an old circuit board I made up with switches and LED’s.

I recently got my hands on an Arduino MEGA 2560 which is a really nice bit of kit so as my first project I thought I would implement my pin toggler on this device.
After several days of learning Ive finally arrived at something im happy with using.

Right now its all on a proto board but I have just finished making a “shield” for this.

Its controlled via the terminal window (I use Putty) and also gives its output via the same terminal. It also detects the configuration of all the programmable I/O’s and sets up accordingly.

The code also fully supports switching between 20 and 24 pin devices so it just needs a link to determine which device you are using.
Its a simple concept but took a surprising amount of coding to implement.
Loving the Arduino and will be looking at doing a lot more with it in the future.

 Posted by at 8:39 pm

Skulls & Crossbones (rev 5) PAL dumps added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Skulls & Crossbones (rev 5) PAL dumps added
May 072014
 

I dumped the three PALs from an original Atari Skulls & Crossbones (rev 5) PCB, an obscure arcade game, never heard of it until now.The three devices were all unlocked so I dumped them with a standard programmer and then converted two of them (a PAL16R8 and a PAL16L8) to GAL16V8 format using PALTOGAL utility.The third was already a GAL16V8 device so no conversion was needed. I can confirm that the two dumps mirrored here with the permission of Aaron Giles match the mine (same equations but different labels) so we can merge them.All dumps are tested working in GAL16V8  devices.

 Posted by at 11:31 pm

Nastar (World) PAL dumps added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Nastar (World) PAL dumps added
May 062014
 

I just dumped the two PALs from an original Taito Nastar (World) PCB.Both devices (AMPAL16L8B)  were unlocked so I read them with a standard EPROM programmer, disassembled into their equations using JEDUTIL MAME utility and then recompiled into GAL16V8 format under WinCUPL.Besides, I can confirm that my dumps match the ones present in MAME.Anyway I have no way to test them since the PCB is faulty so we would appreciate if someone with a good board could test them and report feedback, thanks.

 Posted by at 9:54 pm