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
There was a forum post on the J+ forums today asking why his Progear fails the ROM checks in the test menu.
This reminded me that I had made a little fix for this a while ago so thought Id write it up.
NOTE: No modified ROM’s will be available for download on my site but instructions to help DIY are here
The ROM tests fail on this version of the game because it looks like this version was once the Phoenix edition but has been hacked a little to remove the Phoenix screen at boot up. Since Razoola already fixed the checksum value in his releases, the modification changed the end result slightly which make the test fail.
So, basically I started off looking at disassembly of the code.
The code that checks the ROM’s is at location $395c
The checksum loads the first HEX value into a register then sequentially adds the rest of the HEX values into it. The final result will be the ROM checksum.
It looks like Razoola also modified the code to incorporate a more thorough test routine. The original started its checksum after the point where the expected checksum value is stored where as Raz’s code checks the whole thing.
This left me with a couple of ways to modify the code. I could either revert back to starting the checks after the stored value or I could add some filler values in an unused section of ROM in order to modify the final value.
I chose the first method for no particular reason.
The start address of the checksum is defined at address $3962 and original reads LEA ($1, A0), A0
This loads address $1 into register A0 as the starting address.
I changed this to read LEA $FFF, A0
Now the game will pass its tests on ROM 0. The same process was used to fix the ROM 1 issue too.
Having recently obtained my +2a and suffering the poor quality that RF gives, coupled with the pleas of my good friend Mr Stiggy to somehow get a composite output I set about making this simple yet extremely effective circuit.
The TEA2000 chip actually gives a composite output on pin 6 which is nice. I also think that this signal goes right into the RF modulator but I couldn’t get any picture to appear from that so this circuit is no more than a small amplifier of that composite signal.
My veroboard design is sloppy and rough with no coordination of wire colours what so ever but it works very well and im happy with it for now.
The audio present on the same signal line causes quite a bit of distortion in the picture. To remove that just remove capacitor C24.
I then went on to cut the board down and also removed the RF modulator altogether to end up with this
Im going to order a PCB mounted socket and fix the board in place somehow and this will be fully usable. Audio output is now provided by the audio jack to the right next to where the old RF output was.