Received a Street Smart board today.
The PAL I originally had for download (location 1N, missing in MAME too) was useless. Luckily 2 of the 3 PALs on this board were unprotected and have now been added.
They are PALs at location 1N and 20M.
The PAL at 1N is a PAL20L10 and needs to be programmed to a GAL22V10.
I also have the original PAL dumps should anyone want them.
Received a New Astro City cab yesterday. Its in pretty decent condition, the monitor looks really nice and the price was right.
After checking and adjusting the voltages at the edge connector I fired up Puzzle Bobble 2 on the Taito F3 platform and had a few games.
There are a few problems to start with. Both the start buttons didn’t work. This ended up being some dodgy micro switches but was quickly sorted with a dose of WD40.
After a few games I decided to check out the inner workings of this thing. What a shock I had.
Looks like the good people of Hong Kong arent too fussy about safe wiring practices.
After making the loom safe for use I decided to check out the rest of the wiring.
First of all, this cab was originally designed for 110v supply but a step down transformer is fitted to convert 220v to 110v. I checked the voltage coming out the noise filter, 143v! Turns out the step down transformer was for a 200v input to get 100v output.
I removed this and fitted a proper 240v one. The output is now 108v, much better.
I also replaced the power supply wiring as this was 22AWG for something more substantial.
I decided to check the incoming wiring on the back panel, more dodgyness.
These are actually the supply wires.
I also found a set of redundant RGB-S wires in the loom, these have been removed too.
Found a BGSB2D PAL in my SFZ2. Also spied another PAL on the daughter board labelled BGSG2B.
Both can now be downloaded
I decided to see if I could replace a PLS153 for a GAL22V10. Due to the high number of outputs the PLS153 has, it cannot be swapped out for a GAL16V8 and GAL18V10’s are a bit pricey. A GAL22V10 on the other hand has enough outputs but it has 4 more pins than a PLS153.
I made a simple (and rough) adapter up on veroboard, reversed the PLS back into equations using a tool made by Charles MacDonald, rejigged the output pins and recompiled for a 22V10.
The outcome was a fully working adapter to swap out an expensive PLS153 for a cheap 22V10 and can be made in around 15 minutes.
If anyone is interested in making one of these up that works for my GAL files here is the pinout
NOTE: If you do make one up, remember that you will be turning the adapter around to insert it therefore pin 1 on the PLS side will go to the left. I didn’t think it through on my first attempt and got them the wrong way round.
GAL Pin PLS Pin
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4
5 5
6 6
7 7
8 8
9 N/C
10 N/C
11 N/C
12 10
13 N/C
14 9
15 11
16 12
17 13
18 14
19 15
20 16
21 17
22 18
23 19
24 20
Today has been a good day for new PALs.
This morning channelmaniac uploaded his Air Buster GAL dump, then Dieter, who has tested out my Block Block PALs confirmed that at least one of them works on his Super Pang board AND he also sent me his working dumps for Klax.
On top of all that I found that my Midnight Resistance PALs were unprotected so they have all been converted to GAL format and added. Thanks to VectorGlow for originally testing the Midnight Resistance ones I had and found they didn’t work.
Big thanks to everyone who has helped so far.