1st November 2016
Some more work has been done on the Fanuc System P Model G driver and now it mostly works. Unfortunately the previously mentioned buggy MAME
FPU emulation causes some issues and the more complex example shown in pic5 gets stuck when creating the machining paths and won't continue
past a certain point. I created a simpler example and falsely adjusted some of the tool data and basically just forced it to work. I have 30
years experience with FAPT and know how to make it do what I want even if it is physically impossible ;-)
The software is clearly having trouble calculating things correctly, but now it creates G-Code which is shown in the last pic :-)
Here are a few screens of the Color PG in action (shown without the clickable artwork for clarity).
Notice (in the last pic) the roughing (green lines) works but the finishing pass (yellow) goes off into space and is generating the same
coordinates over and over with E+07 at the end in an infinite loop hahaha!
Pretty amazing that it works though. I think back in 1982 the System P Model G was something like $20k! Most of you probably don't realize,
but that amount was easily made back in the first week of using it ;-P
27th October 2016
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working with a very talented guy (outside of the MAME Team) on the Fanuc System P Model G emulation.
He had previously, and with some success, emulated (privately) the Fanuc System 6A CNC controller (which is not in MAME). This was a
tremendous feat of reverse-engineering because the Fanuc CNC controllers use a lot of custom ICs and very locked-up specialized technology.
He kindly helped out with the PG emulation in MAME and it is now mostly working. Unfortunately there are issues caused by missing/incomplete
x87 FPU emulation which appears to be completely unused in MAME. The PG uses an 8087 and MAME has no examples of it's use since it's an
optional chip in all PCs and is not actually used in any driver. It may get fixed eventually, or this very talented new guy may figure it
out along with the remaining issues.
Here are a few screens of the emulation in action using artwork I created with pics taken of my real PG System....
There are many floppy disks and manuals that were originally made to go with this yellow box of tricks. I happen to have a few of them here
and they have been archived for use with the emulation.....
We need help to locate any of the remaining floppy softwares that may be out there in some dark engineering workshop or sitting on
a shelf in an office somewhere, unused for the last 25 years.
If you have worked in Engineering in a CNC-related job and have access to any of these Fanuc System P floppy disks or know someone who does,
please contact me so we can get them dumped and archived for future use.
I have also been working on a battery-damaged Amiga 3000 that a friend asked me to look at. This is possibly the worst battery damage I have
seen so far. After stripping, cleaning, re-assembling with new parts/new sockets and patching dozens of tracks (most are not visible because
they are under ICs and patched directly on the board using 0.15mm wire) it was mostly working but not stable. Investigation revealed one of
the legs on the Agnus chip has become very weak and was almost falling off. This was caused by the previous owner who had tried to do some
butcher repairs and broke the corner off the Agnus socket in the process (seen in the first picture), and also damaged the legs on the Agnus
chip on that same corner. Initially I bent them back into place but once chip legs are bent they weaken and eventually break off. When I
noticed the bad connection on one pin I removed the Agnus from the socket and casually touched that pin with a finger and it fell off! So I
had to grind away the plastic to get to the leg and solder a wire in place. That appeared to fix it for a while but it still has some
issues. Let this be a lesson to all of you Amiga fans out there.... if you own an Amiga and you have not touched it for years, go find it
now, open it up and remove the internal barrel battery before it's too late!
Here's a few pics of the repair....
25th October 2016
Recently I completed the dump of Crazy Dou Di Zhu II (Sealy 2006) and Luca has done some work on it in MAME.
It's now starting to do something....
10th October 2016
Regarding the Quiz Punch news below, it looks like my MCU dump was ok. Luca did his usual magic and it's partly working in MAME now.
24th September 2016
I'm currently in the middle of re-organising all the PCBs and stacking them on a metal shelf rack so things can be found quickly. Here's a
quick Work In Progress pic..... I'm almost finished :-)
The Items For Sale list has also been updated, including adding a few boards that were previously at
unknown locations or unlisted.
While going through the boxes I found a couple of boards that were not dumped so I dumped them. One was a Poker/Casino game by 'Status
Games' and the other was by 'Kramer Mfg' and was dumped but the existing dump is incomplete and missing the color PROM.
I also checked one PCB that was not labelled, and it identified as 'Quiz Punch'.
I dumped it years ago but checking in MAME I saw that there were missing ROMs. That's because the game has an epoxy block on it so I decided to open
it. It was actually really easy to open with just a flat bladed screwdriver. After cracking the sides off the plastic case, the inside was
revealed and the PCB inside it was just glued on. I put the screwdriver between one of the chips and the top of the plastic epoxy block
cover, twisted the screwdriver and the whole thing just popped off in one piece :-D
The pics show the parts inside. A Z80B at 4MHz, 4 logic chips, a 68705P5 microcontroller and an unknown DIP8 chip.
Notice the writing from the Z80 has stuck to the glue inside the epoxy block cover haha!
I removed the 68705 and read it and something came out so maybe the dump is OK. Not sure, as subsequent reads gave nothing.
Now onto the DIP8 chip.... I pulled it off and on the bottom side of the chip it has the part number and pin-1 notch! So this chip was
upside-down. In this configuration the chip is non-standard and can't be read as-is. I bent the legs out straight and soldered it into a
larger socket (also fixing the broken leg at the same time) then just read it as a 93C46 EEPROM. The dump was good!
4th September 2016
A few months ago I was given a Merit Megatouch Force 2006.5 unit by a local friend. It was told it wasn't working so it sat outside in my
garage for several months. I decided to have a look at it yesterday. The unit would not boot up. The first issue was a dead motherboard
battery. After changing it for a new one and resetting the BIOS defaults and tweaking them, it booted up but gave some error about the
motherboard model not being correct. I went back into the BIOS and set the factory defaults and then it got past that error and booted into
the game. The touchscreen didn't work. I went to the calibration setting screen and tried to recalibrate it but the screen did not register
presses. Inside there was a rats nest of hacky wiring and several wires were chopped off and tied up. Other wires were dangling everywhere.
A small AMP board was just sitting on the frame and had some insulation tape wrapped around it to stop it arcing to the metal. Looks like
some rough operator really went to town on this unit and made a real mess of it. I wouldn't trust that guy to pull out weeds correctly!
I pulled it apart completely and then I could see what was supposed to be connected to what and while I had it apart I documented the
hardware. The touchscreen issue was caused by some dangling wires that had caught on something and pulled out a connector on the touchscreen
controller breaking a solder connection on it. After re-soldering it, cleaning it out, tidying up the wires and re-joining the chopped ones
(basically putting everything back to normal as it should be) I went back into the calibration setting screen, did the screen calibration
and then it kind of worked but only on some parts of the screen and it only registered presses occasionally. That problem was solved by re-doing
the calibration again, but this time when pressing the opposite corners as instructed, I held my finger there for 2 seconds. That is
actually documented in the manual ;-)
After that it all worked properly :-D
Having this all working now, I decided to do some research about these units as this was the first time I had seen a Megatouch. The info out
there says this has a security module on the I/O board. The I/O board is there but there's no security module!! I have a couple of pics
below showing a comparison of the I/O boards. Looking closer, it turns out this box is *nothing* like a genuine Megatouch Force
unit. The whole thing appears to be a copy. I have some suspicions about 'who' did this, but I won't mention the company here. Let's just say they
are located on the East side of Australia in Melbourne and they were fined about $500K a few years ago for pirating some other stuff (by
ICE, if I recall correctly), so no doubt it's the same guy up to his old tricks again.
Anyway, the security has been hacked out so it works as-is without the special security dongle. That's a bonus for us because that means it
should make it easier to add to MAME because essentially it's just a PC running Linux. The extra PLCC chip on the I/O
board may be a problem but maybe not. I suppose we will find out when it's added to MAME.
Here's some pics of the unit....
I will probably sell this eventually, I have very little interest in Megatouch games. If you are interested to buy the whole unit complete and working, contact me.
21st August 2016
Luca has been working on some of the latest arrivals shown below. Here's the first one.....
It's a rare Namco game called "Star Audition"
15th July 2016
THE mother-load arrived.
Note these are all original PCBs and none are currently dumped.
All items will eventually be listed on my Items For Sale page.
p.s. Hi Micko
p.s. Bye Micko
19th June 2016
Today I received a redump of a rare game called 'Number Crash'. The new dump now works in MAME :-)
Thanks to Kuro-san
3rd June 2016
This Konami System 573 3 player Hyper Bishi Bashi Champ repair job arrived the other day. It turned out to be an undumped Korean KAA version so I dumped it and it was added to MAME today.
14th May 2016 (6)
I decided to clean out the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Unlimited box today so here's a few pics of the inside of Namco System 369 and a few pics of the
game screens. Basically System 369 is the same as System 357 but is using a slim PS3 mainboard and 2.5" HDD. The cooling method has been re-designed but
unfortunately they are still unreliable because it's still just a PS3. The game should have been called 'Limited', not 'Unlimited'. The system is
hobbled and plays only 1000 games if not connected to the Namco network then requires payment to Namco to keep it working. Worse, that service is no
longer available so when you get to your credit limit you'll have to get one of the cracked HDD's with that limit removed if you want to keep using it.
Fortunately I have one of those too ;-)
12th May 2016 (5)
Today I received a couple more dead/suicided CPS III carts to do the Darksoft mod on. One of them looks very dodgy. I dumped the ROM and it's unknown so it may be a
bootleg conversion of some kind.
The first thing I noticed was the label is not the same color as an original and appears to have been printed on a color laser printer. The original is on the right,
copy on the left....
Here's a zoom of the copied label.... you can see horizontal lines through the image. Hmmmmmm.....
The second thing I noticed was the screws holding the cart together were covered in hot-melt glue, which of course is not on genuine carts. Note the
photo below was taken after the conversion was done and I've removed the glue but you can still see traces of it, including some on top of the sticker.
The third thing I noticed is there's one of those 'Warranty Void If Removed' stickers on the side which is not present on genuine CPS III carts and it's identical to the sticker covering
the screws holes on Capcom CPS II A/B boards.
So the hackers put a genuine Capcom CPS II security sticker on the CPS III cart to make it look genuine hahaha!!!
Note the label on the back of the cart is also a copy. All these imperfections point to a bootleg conversion. Either way this cart was not dumped so
now we have another alternative ROM for one of the CPS III games :-)
29th April 2016 (4)
I noticed a few days ago that a couple of ROMs from the Silent Scope 2 network PCB were recently flagged as bad and therefore need to be redumped.
Guess what I just got hold of ;-)
26th April 2016
A lot of people have inquired recently about whether I do repairs. The answer is yes.
As an example, I've just finished a huge repair job.... lots and lots of Sega Model 2 Daytona USA sound PCBs. These took around 2 months to fix, working on them now and then as
time permitted, but now every one of them is working perfectly. One of them was covered in some kind of sandy or saw-dust crap and looked like it had been under water.
Another was covered in half-dry sticky Coke for about 10 years and was deemed scrap back then. Many were rusted beyond the grasp of mere mortal repair people.
After some Guru-magic they all look perfect and are now all working and rock-solid and should last many years :-D
I also have several of these Daytona USA sound PCBs for sale.
If you have any PCBs you need repaired, contact me.
21st April 2016 (3)
Another repair job arrived today. This time we have a couple of Capcom CPS III carts that are in need of a nice Darksoft BIOS modification because
they suicided.
Here's a few pics of the repair job. If you have any Capcom CPS III carts that have suicided, or you just want to be able to play any of the CPS III
games and you would like to have the cart(s) converted, contact me for more info.
Note, I have a number of CPS3 carts for sale, both cased and uncased. All of them are modified with the Darksoft CPS3 multi-game BIOS and all work
fine without the battery so should last almost forever :-)
While converting these, I dumped the ROM in each cart and one of them was not in MAME, so I found an undumped version :-)
If you have any CPS3 carts you need repaired/ressurected, contact me.
10th April 2016
I've been playing with the CPC6128 emulation in MAME again and by pure luck I figured out how to run ROMs that are plugged in via the ROM
Expansion so I'll let everyone know here, since there doesn't seem to be any info that I could find about it or anyone who knows.... at
least nothing I could find in my limited searches.
Here's how it went down....
After much research about the CPC6128 over a couple of days and finding nothing, I decided to re-check what I already knew as a start.
On the CPCWiki it says how to load the ROMs but nothing about running them. Ok, so let's get it loaded.....
mame cpc6128 -exp rom -rom1 roms\cpc\protext.rom
This starts the CPC6128 emulation and configures the CPC with the expansion 'ROM' slot device. The ROM slot device has 8 slots for ROMs. It then
loads ROM1 into that slot. In my case the ROM I want to load is called 'PROTEXT.ROM'. Using the command line above this is the result....
So far so good, but no obvious way to 'run' it????
At least not for a Commodore boy like me. I'm sure all you Amstrad guys are saying 'WTF it's EASY!!' ;-)
So during my research I came across a manual for a DIY ROM Expansion board by Maplin.
I got the manual and it gives some info about testing the board and says to type |HELP to get the menu. The Maplin board seems to be
using some kind of test ROM, but of course with my ROM that didn't work either. My ROM is called 'PROTEXT.ROM' so just off the top of my
head I decided to type |PROTEXT and this was the result....
Oh Oh! success! The command can even be shortened to just |p and it still works. So I decided to replace the ROM with a game rom
(TAPPER.ROM). I loaded the ROM into the expansion like this....
mame cpc6128 -exp rom -rom1 roms\cpc\tapper.rom
Then I reset the computer. The usual start screen appeared with no message. I typed |TAPPER and guess what...
Aaaahhhhh!!!
So *that's* how you run the ROMs plugged in via the ROM Expansion board on a CPC6128. Amazing ;-)
The ROM Expansion board is actually a pretty nice thing because it lets you have 8 ROMs plugged in and always accessible via a simple command.
That's all fairly old technology though. I would think by now there's a flashROM based board that lets you play the disks/tapes/ROMs directly from a SD card or USB stick, like most of the other old computers and consoles have now.
Anyway, now you know.
Looks like it's time to re-visit the CPCWiki linked below and try some of the other ROMs that are available :-)
Of course all the above is only academic. If you want usable/playable CPC6128 emulation use another dedicated emulator because MAME's
emulation is too slow unless you have an i7.
BTW, I don't have any use for this CPC6128 which is a donation I can keep (other than stripping out the sixteen 64kx1 DRAMs for future Commodore 64 repairs hehe!) so if you are interested to buy it and help generate some funds to go towards other things,
contact me.
Now for something funny....
News about my post below was posted on mameworld forums by Enrique (yeah, the guy who spent considerable time, effort and money to send this
CPC6128 to be dumped). He told me some fucking bastard (his words) on MW (probably Shitdogg) deleted the post and he's not happy about that!
Oh yeah that's how to treat a donator, delete his news post about this new dump for MAME and ban the poor guy.
WOW! You're supposed to be supporting MAME, not turning people away, you shortsighted asshole. You are supposed to be enthusiastic about
people who provide things to dump so that your image improves and then more things will come your way. You're not supposed to whinge and
whine about doing dumping work for MAME, make up lots of excuses to get out of doing the work and say you hate it and then say you don't offer any
guarantees it will work afterwards (classic example here). Geez what a loser.
Deleting posts and banning those people only causes grief and makes the whole of the DU look bad (well, worse than it is now, since Shitdogg
is their so-called 'leader' and also a forum admin so anything stupid that he does has a domino effect).
On second thoughts, keep going! Eventually no one will bother with the DU and I'll still be going strong! Hahahahah!
This act of
contempt and disrespect for donators only strenghthens what I've always said.... that Shitdogg is out of control, is only bringing a bad
image to the DU and needs to be replaced immediately with someone who knows how to handle responsibility and lead a team the right way. Need
more proof? Check my old post here for a refresher.
Anyway, this is hilarious! To any future donator, don't bother with anyone else when you have something that needs to be dumped, just come
directly to me for proper service and care. I'll look after you.... the thousands of news posts on this site prove that :-)
Based on the rate of things arriving, people can see exactly where the knowledge and experience is.... it's right here. You can already see
things here are improving even more than usual now that I have loads of free time to deal with new dumping tasks and *lots* of items have arrived over the
last few months. More updates on that soon, I'm just waiting on the latest few items to be finalized :-D
The bottom line is if you want something dumped properly and working afterwards, send it to me.
7th April 2016 (2)
Another unusual item rolled up today..... an Amstrad CPC6128. The Spanish version. Thanks to Enrique for sending it out.
Here's some pics....
There is a fairly large archive of CPC ROMs (etc) at http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/ROM_List
However a lot of the OS ROMs are non-standard as per real life ROMs found on the CPC6128 hardware and don't work in MAME's CPC6128
emulation, including the Spanish version..... which is why the CPC6128 was sent to me for a re-dump :-)
The existing dump does not work in MAME and is considered a bad dump by MAME's criteria. They may or may not work in other emulators but
that is not my problem or my concern. My job here is to dump it correctly so it works in MAME.
The BASIC and BIOS are combined into one 32k 'OS' ROM and the Floppy OS is in a 16k ROM.
You can see those two ROMs in the pic above, located just below the Z80 CPU.
The Floppy OS ROM is marked 'AMSTRAD 40015' at IC204 and the OS ROM is marked 'AMSTRAD 40038' at IC103.
The Floppy OS ROM is common to all versions of the CPC6128 and under the ROM, printed on the PCB is '40015'.
Under the OS ROM printed on the PCB it says '40025' so I'm guessing the regular common English version would be marked with that number too.
The existing dump of the Spanish OS ROM is 16k, therefore incomplete and thus bad. Again, this is as far as MAME is concerned.
The actual ROM is a 23256 mask ROM, but this particular OS ROM used in the CPC6128 is not 100% compatible with a 27256 and can't be read using that type.
Because the ROMs are slightly non-standard it requires a little trick to get a good dump out of it.
I'm told the most important key on a Spanish keyboard is the enye (ñ), which is located next to the L key.
As you can see from the screen shot below (running in MAME), it is there and emulation is working just fine using my re-dumped ROMs :-)
The only other difference I see is the top title has a (s3) at the end, whereas the existing English version says (v3).
As usual, with many early ROM dumps they were very poorly documented, or not at all and the file names are a big mess.
This re-dump fixes that problem too :-)
If you want to try the CPC6128 emulation (or in fact any old computer emulation) you'll need to know a few simple commands.
Unfortunately MAME's UI is quite poorly designed and has no built in or external simple 'how to use' help file system via
simple text files (like it *should* have), so I'll list a few simple CPC6128 commands here for loading the various media types.
Note you should be at a command prompt and in your MAME directory (i.e. C:\MAME or where-ever your MAME.EXE is located). If not CD to the correct directory.
You also need the CPC6128 ROMs and they should be in your MAME/ROMS dir.
Loading from a cassette tape:
Get hold of a CPC6128 .cdt cassette file from the net (use google to search)
For this example the file I have is called 'xevious.cdt' and is located in C:\MAME\ROMS\CPC\
At the command prompt type mame cpc6128 -cass roms/cpc/xevious.cdt
The emulation will start and the Ready prompt will show on screen
Type |TAPE (| is shifted @ on the CPC6128 or shifted [ on a PC keyboard)
then type RUN "XEVIOUS" then press the ENTER key. Or you can just type RUN" and press ENTER
A prompt will ask you to press PLAY on the tape drive then to press any key.
Press scroll lock to get PC keyboard partial control and press F2 then any key. At the top left corner a tape counter will show and then you must
wait for the tape to load. You can press the PC's INSERT key to speed it up.
When it finishes loading, the game will automatically start.
Note I found using load i.e. LOAD "XEVIOUS" didn't work... it loaded but the game didn't start and there was no way to make it go. YMMV.
If you want to know what files are on the tape, type CAT and press the ENTER key. Then press PLAY and wait for the files to be listed.
Remember to rewind the tape using the UI menu (scroll lock / TAB / tape control) before issuing commands if you have previously played the tape
Loading from a disk:
Get hold of a CPC6128 .dsk file from the net (use google to search)
For this example the file I have is called 'operwolf.dsk' and is located in C:\MAME\ROMS\CPC\
At the command prompt type mame cpc6128 -flop1 roms/cpc/operwolf.dsk
The emulation will start and the Ready prompt will show on screen
Type LOAD "OPWOLF" then press the ENTER key
The file will load and then display the Ready prompt. Type RUN and press the ENTER key to start the game
Alternatively you can type RUN "OPWOLF" and the game will load and automatically run
Note I found using load would sometimes work and sometimes not, depending on the game. For example LOAD "OPWOLF" works but not for a file
I have called 'outruneu.dsk'.
In this case I had to type RUN "OUTRUNEU" to get it to load. Other times it would start to load then say 'Out Of Memory'. Using RUN instead of LOAD fixed most
of the loading issues I had with a number of different programs I tried. But note using RUN by itself like the tape example above (i.e. RUN") doesn't work for disks.
If you want to know what files are on the loaded disk, type CAT and press the ENTER key (or |DIR). Then the files will be listed.
The manual said most commercial disks could be loaded and run by typing RUN "DISC" (aka like LOAD"*",8,1 on the C64) but it didn't work for me.
There's also ROMs (.bin) available for the CPC6128 for some games and other programs that can be loaded by adding an expansion ROM BOX via MAME's
command line or UI menus, but I couldn't get the actual ROMs to 'run' either. They would load and display a small text message on screen at boot-up,
but I didn't see any way to 'run' it, and there's no mention of running ROM carts in the manual. As usual information is randomly spread out wide
and far and MAME is no help at all so some more net research is needed :-/
Anyway, that's the basics of loading and running tape and disk software on the CPC6128 via MAME.
You might be thinking all of the command line typing is bullshit and so 80's, but actually it's the fastest and easiest way to get things
going in MAME with computer emulation. Not because it's faster to type when you know what you want, but because the MAME UI sucks. Even the
latest incarnation of it. Sure most of it could be done via the built-in UI now as-is providing you had time to go through the menus and set
it up. The bottom line is it still has a LONG way to go before it is as professional and slick as some of the other UI's in system-specific
emulators like for example, the Enterprise EP128EMU. But even typing things has it's issues because of the extreme lack of info in MAME
regarding what to type.
I'm talking about MAME running computers (etc) of course. We all know MAME does arcade emulation pretty well
(although you need an i7 to make proper use of it) and the UI is not all that important. But for running computers it is. MAME was king with
arcade games but now that it's merged with MESS it's taken a big step backwards.
In the UI, things like the hardware add-on menus are cumbersome and unorganised. Compare that with the EP128EMU Emulator
to see what a slick emulation menu system should look like. BTW, this emulator also has perfect emulation of the CPC6128 and ZX Spectrum.
Another example that should have been done years ago is internal ROM auditing. For years that code has been hidden from the release because
MAMEDEV didn't want you to know what was available and wanted to shield you from becoming a pokerom. You could just use CLRMAME anyway so it
was pointless. Haha!
The current UI makes it worse because there's a filter to show what is available but no way to do an audit, so the
'Available' filter shows more items than are actually available. Personally I'm not sure how an 'Available' filter can even work without
doing an internal audit first. I have only a handful of ROMs on this PC, but it shows dozens of systems I don't have (for example the
Famicom, and I don't even have the BIOS/boot ROMs on this PC!), and when I click on it the list changes to a long list of carts and I have
none of those either. Clicking on any one of those items brings up a message stating the file can't be found. Erm.... duhhhhh! I know that I
don't have any of them and they should not even be listed with the 'Available' filter activated.
Here's a pic showing what comes up when there are NO ROMs at all....
Clearly the filters need some work so that the emulation looks for the BIOS/bootROM *first* and if there's no BIOS then don't show the
software lists of carts etc.
The whole idea of an 'Available' filter is to only show what's **actually available** :-/
Yet another example of sloppiness, when using the menu to select a file to load in (such as a tape or disk image) the UI shows [DIR] for zip files.
So it looks like this....
LOL! Last time I checked a zip file was not a dir.
Another example, in the UI there's a 'How To' section on the right side when the < or > is clicked, but that 'How To' information is no
where to be found. Obviously the How-To for arcade games is the cab instructions which is an image and available as the 'Extra Files' from
various sites on the net. But for computers, this needs to be linked to an external help file to show the user how to get started. It's
exactly the kind of thing that should have been designed with an extra 10 minutes of thinking and checked properly. They don't build cars
with accessories that have missing pieces, everything is present and just works. I've only used this new UI version of MAME for an hour and
already I found several problems. And MAME has been going for how long? ~18 years, and still not user-friendly and with a slick interface.
Hopefully one day the myopic powers at the top will wise up, move into the 21st century and make MAME more user friendly. Hopefully they
will take a good long hard look at the other emulators like EP128EMU and take some ideas from it.
Hopefully one day they will actually use the full power of PCs to make MAME run at full speed instead of crawl along like a snail.
Hopefully one day they will add some kind of external linking to simple system-specific help text files to get people started and include
those with MAME. Just the simple stuff like how to load the media and get it booted. Then maybe some external group will make a simple text
help file for all of the computer systems supported in MAME, instantly improving MAME's image ten-fold. Maybe a group already exists who
have created all of that but I didn't find it with a quick search. If it does exist now it should be included with MAME by default. At the
very least the help files should be available for download together with MAME on the same site. The whole thing should be organised on a
wiki and a program used to capture the relevant files and auto-make text files of the latest wiki info. It's not rocket science people.
There could even be a button in the UI to download the latest set of help files straight off the hosting server without having to search
100's or 1000's of sites for 'MAME Extra' files. Now that MAME includes computers too, the whole process to make it more user-friendly
requires some serious thinking and planning. Thinking and planning that has been lacking so far. For a so-called 'documentation
project' this big and this old it is seriously lacking any kind of real-world user documentation that would make it more usable and
friendly.
Unfortunately certain people think I'm only a ROM Dumper who knows nothing about design or programming, even though in reality I worked as a
CNC/PLC Programmer at the top of my field for 30 years and designed and manufactured many thousands of things over the years including
secret prototypes for billion-dollar corporations. But sadly due to me being 'just a ROM Dumper', the apathy and stubbornness of certain
devs, and where MAME is now, stuck in a rut where most of the work being done is mostly pointless re-factoring (just check the github
commit history online for what's going on... not a lot of useful stuff there), most of what I've suggested here will be written off and
never be done.... thus MAME will stay in the dark ages forever and never really achieve mainstream exposure or the highest status for
emulated computers and consoles. Maybe now that MAME is really open-source they will grab some code from some of the other better open-source
GPL'd emulators and improve things. Or maybe certain devs' pessimistic attitudes will just push the project back further and into
self-destruction. I suspect the latter. Only time will tell.
The moral of this story is simple..... when running computer emulation in MAME, skip the UI and just type in the bullshit at the command prompt ;-)
Anyway, regarding the above simple explanation of how to use the CPC6128, I hope it was useful to someone who might want to try the
emulation. Until things improve in MAME, if you want to know more the full CPC6128 user manual is available at the
CPC Wiki.
5th April 2016 (1)
Just finished another repair job, this time to a couple of Sega Afterburner II PCBs.
One had messed-up colors, that was just a bad color RAM. Here's some pics of the repair.
After changing the bad RAM it looked like the problem was all fixed. Or was it?
Look closely and you can see some tiny dots around the plane wings. I checked all of the crappy Fujitsu mask ROMs and they were actually all ok. Hmmm. I wonder...
I'll just check those 3 EPROMs that were changed by someone else.....
They ended up bad. All 3 of them! WOW!
Changing the 3 bad EPROMs fixed the graphics problem.
After talking with the owner I suggested he should get rid of all of the Fujitsu mask ROMs and replace them with EPROMs so it will last longer because
this board is running in a cab. He agreed, so I bought some equivalent EPROMs (27C1000 to replace 831000 28 pin masks) and programmed the
whole lot. Here's a pic of the finished job.
The other Afterburner worked fine so the fault is with the monitor in the cabinet. I checked the ROMs on this version and it is a moving cab
DX version which is currently not dumped. So that's another new dump found :-)
23rd March 2016
With the large amount of spare time I have now, in between sleeping a lot to catch up on 30 years of lost sleep, and going out with friends for lunch or a cappuccino,
I occasionally have time to look at repair jobs.
An interesting and unusual repair job came in last week.
It's a Neogeo AES console.
These seem to be pretty rare nowadays and expensive *if* you can find one for sale.
This one was initially dead. It had developed a bad connection between a RAM and the CPU due to some minor corrosion because it was stored poorly
for a few years outside in a shed. After quickly finding the problem I connected it temporarily with a couple of micro jumper clips and up it came, working
fine. The bad track went under both RAMs and only on the top side of the PCB so I patched the track as neatly as possible. Now it's working just fine :-)
Here's some pics of the repair....
The owner also wanted a Uni BIOS fitted so I did that too.
If you need something repaired and can't find anyone to look at it, or as in this case, no one has any clue what it is or how to fix it, maybe I can
help you. I will look at anything including consoles, old computers (such as Amiga, Commodore 64, Atari, Mac etc etc) and arcade PCBs,
plus anything else electronic that happens to be out there.
To give you an example, a while ago I fitted a region mod chip to a Blueray player for a friend.
However please note I don't do repairs for free, otherwise I'd be inundated with repair requests and I'd have no time for lunch and the cappuccinos!
But don't worry, my repair fees are quite reasonable and if it can't be repaired there's no charge..... you just pay return postage if you want it back
or nothing if you don't want it back. Drop me an email if you have something that needs to be repaired :-)
20th March 2016
Due to getting a faster internet connection this site has moved slightly.
The new URL is http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1_nbn/gurudumps/
Please update your bookmarks.
In other (brief) news, lots of stuff has arrived over the last few weeks. I'll post an update on that soon.
12th October 2015
If you have ever played Led Storm Rally 2011 in MAME you will have seen some of the sprites were wrong, either with missing pieces or incorrect data,
and the ROMs were flagged as bad dumps.
They were not actually bad, they were just from the normal Led Storm ROM set and were being substituted while we waited patiently for the
correct ROMs to be dumped.
Having almost infinite time on my hands now means I can finally get around to doing crazy stuff like that dumping job for Led Storm Rally 2011....
There were three ROMs that needed to be dumped. The first one was dumped by me on 24th May 2009. Unfortunately I didn't have time to get back to this job for several years. Now the time has come! The second and third were completely different so a lot of
research was needed. The first of those took about 3 hours (including research and Guru-Meditation). The second one took about an hour to wire up and
about 5 seconds to read.
When they were plugged into MAME they still didn't look right. This was due to the data being in a different format so someone figured it out and now
it works perfectly :-)
Pity about the actual game though, it's super hard and likely not many people will play it for more than a few minutes. Maybe someone with more
enthusiasm for the game than me will do a complete run from start to end and put it on youtube. Maybe not ;-)
Now here's a tip for those out there who think it's a good idea to have a pissing contest with old Guru by buying things I have and trying to dump them,
then failing miserably when you realise just how difficult it really is....
DON'T
A better idea is you buy something I don't have and concentrate on that. Or dump the things you've been sitting on for years. Then twice as many jobs
can be done in the same amount of time and you'll save some money too.
Cooperation is better than competition.
In other news, RB emulated Attack Pla-Rail. You can see some emulation screenshots over on RB's site
7th October 2015
I just dumped a very rare Namco System 12 board that arrived here some years ago.
This should be coming to a MAME near you very soon!
In other news, I picked up a very rare Namco System 246 game called 'Cobra The Arcade'.
This is now dumped and in MAME along with several other System 246 games that I dumped recently.
The Namco System 246 / 256 status page is looking very good now, only a few games are missing!
If you have been watching and waiting for certain arrivals to be dumped then put up for sale it's your lucky day.
Most of the stuff I have is now on my For Sale Page.
Some of the rare items have gone already but there's still LOTS there..... nearly 700 items.
Check it out if you have been looking for some rare PCBs..... but don't mess around, they are selling F-A-S-T
19th August 2015
More arrivals!
Street Fighter Alpha 3 (980616 USA SAMPLE Version). Now dumped and added to MAME. Thanks to ocean d for loaning the PCB
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Unlimited on Namco System 369. Thanks to Darksoft
If you are paying attention you may notice something trying to get some attention and free publicity by sneaking into the picture frame on the top
right of the 2nd pic.....
Yes of course it's a Macintosh IIci
But it's a very sick and dying Mac IIci....
This was given to me by a friend recently. The internal battery has puked *big-time* after sitting dormant for 10 years and made a real mess. The
brown crap is rusted metal combined with battery acid. The entire battery holder is almost entirely eaten away. The only good thing about this is the
box was sitting on it's side with the battery at the bottom and the damage is almost totally isolated to the side of the plastic cover. Of course it
has the usual start-up issues associated with these old Macs, plus a dead rusted 50MHz oscillator and green crap on the RTC and many of the chips
in the reset section, but I'm sure I can get it working with a bit of Guru-Love ;-)
I've already cleaned it up and ordered some new chips to re-build the reset section. I might post an update on the repair job later.
Let this be a lesson to all of you who have something old containing a battery.... if you are going to leave it there, make sure you sit it on it's
side so the battery leaks onto the side of the case!!!
Hehehe. No no no!! To be *worthy* of owning something like this remove the battery NOW before it's too late!!!
In other news some more arcade items were purchased recently with donations and will arrive sometime in the near future.
If you want to see more items arrive and be dumped for MAME you can help by donating funds. Thanks!
16th August 2015
A few nice items arrived....
Mahjong Raijinhai
Mahjong The Mysterious Orient Part 2
The former won't be working in MAME due to protection but I'm sure the latter will be emulated in record time so keep an eye out on Luca's site ;-)
Thanks to Dyq for sending out these PCBs.
and a couple of 8-Liner games....
Dino Dino by Astro Corp.
Fruit Paradise by IGS
Unfortunately it's unlikely either of them will be working in MAME due to protection.
Thanks to klove
Also arrived, some more bootleg Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter II PCBs thanks to Marco!
In other news, I dumped a strange and uncommon sticker machine board a while ago and Luca got it working in MAME.
Check Luca's site for pics and info.
Thanks to several donations recently I've picked up a few more wanted items and they are currently in transit to my dumping lair.
If you want to see more items arrive and be dumped for MAME you can help by donating funds. Thanks!
9th August 2015
Some time ago RB and I bought a rare Namco System 12 PCB called Techno Drive.
I dumped it recently and after a herculean effort by RB, today it's *mostly* working in MAME :-D
You can check out more pics of the emulation on RB's site.
The game is entirely in Japanese so I think to give this game true justice, some introduction and explanation is needed.
Here's the back story....
In 2305 the traffic war is overheated by a dramatic increase in traffic volume, the main road was completely paralyzed, logistics system
collapsed, victims of traffic accidents also reached the milestone of 1 million injured a day. The government had been subjected to a policy that
greatly strengthened the penalties for traffic violations, such as 10 years imprisonment for a parking violation and life imprisonment for worse
traffic offences. However, future driving technology had gotten significantly lower. The governments harse policy caused a big drop in the
number of people driving..... 2310, the government reaches a desperate conclusion and it goes ahead with an implementation of a new
policy called "Ability Gene Enhancement Plan". To ensure the driving skills of the future of mankind, they impliment a bold
plan that will enhance the driving skills of the human race at the genetic level. A device is developed. Playing repeatedly
will encourage the strengthening of the driving skills gene, the breakthrough device also results in the revolution of driving
awareness at the same time. The device was named 'Techno Drive', and put their last hope in solving the problem of the past.
Experience the Techno Drive, regardless of strengthening the gene! To use it is to save the offspring!
Game Summary....
Based on the results of the mini-games the machine will measure the driving skills of the player.
Measurement is carried out in the three items "steering technique","footwork technique" and "practical".
Steering = Use only the wheel.
Footwork = Use only the accelerator and brake.
Practical = Use all of the input devices.
Each stage has five tests prepared. The player receives a measurement by selecting any one game from among them.
After completion of the measurement of all three tests (the mini-games), the game-play is analyzed and the result is printed out to paper as
"The players' driving skills revolution guidance document".
Details of each stage....
Steering | Footwork |
Practical
Note the 'Details' pages are unedited and only roughly auto-translated to English using Google Translate.
It's enough to get the main ideas ;-)
If you want to see the original page, which is entirely in Japanese, it's here.
6th August 2015
Since about the middle of last year it seems there are a few 'elite' people out there with decrypted ROMs for Sega System 32 games and they think
they need to protect us from ourselves by keeping it all secret. WOW guys, just freaking WOW! We (as in MAMEDEV) spent the last 15 years
emulating this stuff and gave you 10000+ arcade games for free and now you have the outrageous insolence to keep this info from the rest of the
arcade community who just want to repair their original Sega suicided boards. You should be ashamed of yourself. Very ashamed. People like Porchy
have gone to great lengths to collect and host an almost complete list of decrypted ROMs for most of the Sega FD1089/FD1094 encrypted games
purely as a gift to the community. Other guys like Darksoft are actually doing hardware-related things to revive dead boards that were previously
only good for scrap. In doing so this has actually reduced the high cost of bootleg conversions because you can actually do it yourself for free
with a bit of effort. Now because of the hoarding, unscrupulous people are taking advantage of the lack of System 32 decrypted ROMs and are
making a killing selling converted boards for thousands of dollars. Do you really want to see this happen.... ripping off MAME and selling at
huge profits? It's happening now. The excuses I'm reading are very weak.... to protect rare releases of the games from people suiciding them on
purpose to convert them to other more valuable games. Errr, wake up guys. For starters there are no rare releases of System 32 games, it's half a
dozen obscure games that almost no one wants to play anyway, except the die-hard collectors who own the originals. Protecting us from ourselves
didn't work for System 16 or CPS2, it's not going to affect System 32 either.... in any case most, if not all of them are already dead anyway. In
fact several boards have popped up for sale on eBay and Yahoo auctions and have sold for prices 10X what the game is worth. Essentially forcing a
dedicated arcade fan to buy it at rip-off prices just so he can continue to play the original game he owns. The excuses are particularly thin
especially when all of the games are dumped and emulated and are basically worthless now anyway, just like every other game perfectly emulated in
MAME. We have basically screwed ourselves by dumping and emulating all of these games for free and in doing so have made most arcade PCBs
worthless. I'm personally sitting on many hundreds of PCBs that I bought and can't even sell to buy more stuff for MAME. Why? For the good of the
community and for the preservation of arcade games.
Here's an idea: We have already given you 10000+ games for free and the info to decrypt the ROMs to fix your PCB(s) via MAME source code, plus
info to fix many other PCBs like Sega System 16 and others, since MAME has a wealth of technical info which could, and in fact is used to help repair
arcade PCBs. You have enjoyed MAME for many, many years, all for free. How about you release the full set of decrypted System 32 ROMs and
associated info to the emulation community as a payback for all of the hard work we (MAMEDEV) have done over the nearly 20 years we have been
doing this. Sounds like a fair deal to me.
That request also goes out to all those people who have enjoyed MAME for many years and are holding onto undumped PCBs (particularly rare titles
from the 80's distributed only in Japan.... which are known to be dumped and emulated for several years). I'm not just talking about traditional
old-school arcade PCBs either. That also includes NAOMI/Triforce/Chihiro conversions by people who take our dumps, hack them and sell them on CF
cards and Lindbergh multi-game conversion of dumps taken from MAME. Don't force us to spend years scraping up funds and have to shell out
thousands of dollars to buy and dump what is already available now in private collections. Since you are a collector you value the hardware and
you're not going to sell them anyway so the value remains the same. Keeping it locked away only artifically inflates sale prices at places like
eBay and Yahoo Auctions and just helps the vultures make huge profits. Don't look away and pretend you don't know who these people are. You have
been blogging and/or posting on forums for years about your collection. You have exhibited photos of boards that have been repaired with MAME
ROMs (i.e. System 16, CPS2 etc). There are many of you and you are known. You have enjoyed MAME for years, now it's time to give something back
to us. You will get the warm fuzzy feeling like I still have after doing this for 15 years.
That is priceless :-)
Just remember we WILL get there eventually anyway regardless, and we will take the credit for all of it. Or you can go from zero to hero and help
us. Or not, and remain at zero.
To the rest of the MAME/emulation/arcade community reading this, why not help out by buying one or more of the PCBs I'm holding here that has
been dumped for MAME. Even if you have no intention of playing it or don't even own an arcade machine, you can help just taking these off my
hands. Or just donate because you enjoy MAME so much and can't live without it. If you own/made a MAME cab you are in even more debt to us than
the rest of the community and you should definitely donate ;-)
If everyone who used MAME donated we would have enough to buy up all of the remaining undumped PCBs out there..... that would effectively be a 6
figure number. You will also get that warm fuzzy feeling and you will have pleasure in knowing that money will go towards more undumped PCBs that
will eventually be available in MAME :-)
4th August 2015
Some discoveries and a MAME fix..... the hard way ;-)
A couple of days ago I was looking through some old PCB's that arrived many years
ago. I found 3 Psikyo PCBs (Mahjong G-Taste x2 acquired as junk for free, one was dumped the other was untouched, and Gunbarich), all the PS5V2
type board. Looking at the MAME source reminded me that there are left-over ROMs on these boards from a nice game called Dragon Blaze (which I
actually dumped for MAME years ago then sold). Each board has only half of the chips needed but having both boards means I have a full set of
graphics ROMs to make up Dragon Blaze so I thought it might be fun to try to convert one of these boards from junk to a nicer game. If you know
anything about conversions you will know it's generally not so simple to bypass the protection. But as I progressed it seemed simple.... or was
it?
First check the photo.....
With reference to the photo let me first explain the programmable parts (*ROMs) and what they are used for.
Pink chips are main program, 2x 27C4096 DIP40 EPROMs in sockets.
White chip is an Oki MSM27C1652CZ 16M-bit surface mounted mask ROM containing the sound data. The package is TSOP48 Type II and requires a custom
adapter to dump them, which I made many years ago :-)
Red chips are Oki MSM27C1602CZ 16M-bit DIP42 mask ROMs equivalent to 27C160 EPROMs.
Blue chips are the same type of package as the white chip, but they are Oki MSM27C1602CZ.... essentially the same type as the red chips just in a
different package.
Yellow is the EEPROM, a surface mounted SOIC8 93LC56.
The orange chips are the same as the chips nearby but don't need to be changed.
There is much work to be done here to convert this. So I did the easiest thing first.... I grabbed the untouched Mahjong G-Taste, removed the 27C4096
EPROMs and replace them with new 27C4096 EPROMs programmed with the main program for Dragon Blaze. To my surprise it booted and gave a EEPROM NG
error. I powered off/on and then the EEPROM passed! The game booted up and played but of course with totally corrupt graphics because the ROMs
were from Mahjong G-Taste.
OK, so some chip swapping is needed. Since Mahjong G-Taste has a full set of Dragon Blaze DIP42 ROMs (the RED ones) all I needed to do was swap
the blue ROMs and maybe that would fix the graphics issue.
With all of those ROMs swapped I powered on and was greeted with readable text on the start-up screen, ROM/RAM/EEPROM passed and then the first
screen with green circles appeared. But not quite, the entire screen was filled with Japanese Kanji characters. It progressed to the PSIKYO logo
screen and it was about 50% ok but with some wrong data, and the title screen was almost 90% good, but again with small graphic corruption.
Hmmmm. Now what to do?
I knew the ROMs were ok because I dumped them years ago and the board had sat in a box for years doing nothing. I needed to do the ROM test but
in MAME it's not clear how to activate it on real hardware. MAME says there's a dip switch. Nope, I don't think so buddy. A little more research
is required.
I mentioned the issue to Luca and he suggested it was close to test/service and could be the tilt signal. Sure
enough with tilt activated (by grounding JAMMA pin 15 solder side) and booting while holding player 1 start, the ROM test came up. There was no
ROM testing text though, just a mish-mash of junk graphics and blocks but the final 'OK block' was in RED, essentially telling me all of the ROMs
were NG (i.e. bad). Since I knew they can't all be bad and some of the graphics were actually good on screen I decided to drop this board and
move all of the ROMs to the Gunbarich board.
First thing was to swap the socketed EPROMs and see if it boots. It did but had a single red rectangular block in the middle of the screen.
Checking this in MAME told me that the block was actually the security test that had failed and it was actually saying SECURITY NG. OK so back to
the MAME source to do some reading.....
According to how the driver is coded in MAME, there's a debug bit that has to be LOW to make it work. When discussing this previously with Luca
we discovered that bit is really the tilt pin on the JAMMA edge connector. On my board it's hard-wired to HIGH by default through a logic chip
and resistor network and there is no dip switch or jumper pad to change it. Since this is forced low in MAME to get the games to work, this
smells of a MAME hack ;-)
I jumpered tilt low with a piece of wire (safe to do because of the in-series resistor network) and the game boots, just like MAME. Of course
with bad graphics, but this is progress so I'll take it ;-)
The bigger question now is why did Dragon Blaze work on the Mahjong G-Taste board and not on Gunbarich? The key is the 93LC56 EEPROM. Obviously
there's some secret info that is kept in there and even when it's cleared only part of the whole address space is re-written. Programming the
default EEPROM from the MAME ROM set didn't help at all. The security check still fails.... meaning the EEPROM in MAME is bad. I guess this
EEPROM was made using the MAME emulation which creates the EEPROM data with default settings. But as stated above it doesn't write the entire
address space and the secret security data is missing. I also guess all of the EEPROMs that were created in
the same MAME driver are similarly bad.
To fix this I needed a working Dragon Blaze EEPROM! But wait.... I have one! I simply exchanged the working EEPROM from the previously converted
Mahjong G-Taste board onto the Gunbarich board, and as expected the game works without having to hold tilt low. Obviously when Psikyo modified
the original Dragon Blaze board to Mahjong G-Taste they never bothered to change the security, they left it as-is. So as it turned out, jerking
around with the Mahjong G-Taste board first actually helped. Without that first failure I would never have known what was really going on. Never
under-estimate the value of jerking around with some other piece of shit first when experimenting with the unknown. Anyway, that's problem 1 solved! :-D
So now to swap all of the graphics ROMs over again. Gunbarich originally had the blue ROMs but I've removed them and put them on the Mahjong G-Taste
board so only 4 of the Dragon Blaze ROMs remained (shown in orange). The red ROMs needed to be changed anyway. After swapping all of the red ROMs
and replacing all of the blue ROMs the game now works perfectly!
Problem 2 solved :-D
I decided to have a quick play of the game to test it. Sure enough it works great. But my ears are hurting. Ouch! What is that screeching sound
coming from the speakers??? Errr, oh yeah, the sound ROM isn't the correct ROM. Hmm, that's going to be a problem because it's a strange surface
mounted type without any flash equivalents. I guess I'll have to do it the hard way and manually wire in an EPROM.
First I need to check the datasheet for the real ROM and get the pinout....
To my surprise the TSOP48 Type II ROM pinout matches the DIP42 version exactly, just the top 3 pins on both sides are not connected. And we
already know the DIP42 version is equivalent to a 27C160 EPROM. Great! That makes it easy to wire up. I grabbed a spare blank 27C160 EPROM and
programmed it with the data for the sound (SND.U52). I need to make it easy to wire up so first I spread the legs apart then mounted it erm.....
onto the board using hot glue in the missionary position... erm... no, no, in a position directly opposite the solder pads where the original ROM
was. Now it's ready to be pounded into submission. Just remember if you are going to do this kind of extreme manipulation make sure you keep it
trimmed neat and tidy because nobody likes a messy job. We're going to end up with a pile of spaghetti anyway so try to minimize it as much as
possible :-)
Thankfully the data is 8-bit so only half of the data lines are used. I can see that on the PCB because the upper 8 data lines are not connected
to anything. A 27C160 is switchable between 8-bit/16-bit by tieing the BYTE pin (32) low or high, meaning I saved some time by not having to add
the extra wires for D8-D15. So after some hours of precision wire cutting and meticulous soldering this is what we have now....
Now working perfectly, graphics and sound :-)
If you are paying attention you will see that actually I'm only saving 7 wires because pin 33 is D15/A-1 which is used in the 8-bit mode.
With all that sorted I pulled the EEPROM from both the newly working Dragon Blaze and the other Mahjong G-Taste boards and dumped them for MAME
so the hacks can be removed. The original EEPROM from Gunbarich seems to be bad, it won't read and gives a bad connection fault on pin 6. It
appears to read something out so I'll let a higher authority take a look and decide if it's ok.
Over-all this was a successful conversion and
a couple of issues in MAME got fixed as well :-)
P.S. I've split the older news out to separate pages (like in previous years) because the screws holding the top header were starting to come loose
due to having too much bullshit hanging there. So the front page is now a bit lighter on the load ;-)
28th July 2015
With the extra time I have available to me now, I've been looking around for nice undumped PCBs. A few days ago I came across a very rare game
never before seen for sale anywhere so I bought it with the help of some additional funds from a couple of paypal donations. I can't say any
more yet but rest assured it's a unique and wanted game. Note this is the only kind of PCB I will be buying in future, should the
same situation arise again..... we already have a clone king for everything else.
So with that item snapped up you might be asking 'what's next'? Well, I can easily continue to look and buy undumped items providing finances are
there.
I have many thousands of dollars worth of dumping equipment, many years experience dealing with complex electronics
and a proven track record of several thousand dumps under my belt. It makes sense
to keep doing what I have been doing since 1999 and use my equipment and knowledge for the good of the emulation community, especially with the free
time I now have. Things can be as they were a few years back with lots of PCBs arriving every few weeks if a surplus of funds exist.
With that in mind, I know there are many people reading this who have enjoyed MAME for many years, support what I am doing and what I am planning for
the future. If you want to see more exciting and interesting undumped PCBs arrive and be dumped for MAME, my paypal account is always
open to receive your donation. You don't need to ask or inquire, there is always something out there. To ensure these can actually be secured just
click the big 'DONATE' logo in the main header above. Note if you want to make regular donations, the donation page now has a check box to set your
donation as recurring monthly because several people enquired about wanting to do that.
Remember, without your support my good work can't continue. With your support and donations more undumped PCBs can be purchased and dumped....
In other news a Lindbergh RED Satellite version arrived. This is basically identical to the normal Lindbergh RED with an
additional smart card reader plugged in via USB and mounted inside the box. The game that came with this system is Answer X Answer V1.0
The photo doesn't show it but the top is silver.
Also another Lindbergh game, Initial D Arcade Stage 4 DVD & dongle.
Thanks to Darksoft
24th July 2015
A mahjong game arrived a few years back called Mahjong Gorgeous Night but somehow slipped through the Guru-Cracks.... oops!
Luckily this has a regular Z80-based TMPZ84C015 as the main CPU, not the usual nasty Toshiba TMP91P640 MCU.
I dumped it a few days ago and as usual, Luca got onto it immediately and emulated it in record time :-)
Thanks to Dyq for the reminder :-D
8th July 2015
Luca got onto the Mahjong dumps and here's two emulated.
All 5 Mahjong boards have now been dumped. Out of the remaining PCBs not shown above only the IGS game was not already dumped although it
won't work because it has an IGS027A CPU with undumpable internal ROM. Mahjong Electromagnetic Base and Mahjong Ougun no Pai are in MAME already
so these PCBs were actually not needed. The latter has a TMP91P640N with internal ROM and is undumpable.
5th July 2015
I have plenty of free time now. You can read why here.
These arrived around April/May....
Mahjong Ougon no Pai (Dynax, 1991)
Mahjong Electromagnetic Base (Dynax, 1989)
Mahjong Super Dai Chuuka Ken (Dynax, 1995)
Mahjong Shuang Long Qiang Zhu 3 (IGS, 1999)
Mahjong Magic Lamp (BMC, 2000)
Thanks to Dyq
Another Mortal Kombat bootleg and Street Fighter 2 CE bootleg
Thanks to Marco
15th April 2015
Recently I got hold of a bunch of random PCBs. Some of them could be undumped versions. At the very least they will be used to make Guru-Readme's and added to MAME source.
The games are.....
Leland Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road
Namco Winning Run (in metal box)
Sega Scud Race Drive Board
TAD Toki
Data East Mutant Fighter
Sega Scud Race MPEG Digital Audio Board
Sega Shinobi on System 16B
Sega Monster Lair III on System 16A (still working with the original battery in the FD1094!!)
Technos WWF Superstars
Atlus Power Instinct (bootleg)
Sunsoft Shanghai II
Strata Hot Shots Tennis
Technos Shadow Force
Sega Title Fight on System 32 Multi
Sega Stadium Cross on System 32 Multi (x2)
Unknown (28-way mahjong pinout, with black epoxy all over it. Looks like someone plugged it into JAMMA and blew it up)
Thanks also to Marco for sending out an alternative Street Fighter 2 CE bootleg PCB and a Tecmo Cool Boarders PCB.
4th March 2015
I dumped the remaining available Koei PasoGo carts and our 'PC' man, Carl, did some work and got something working on screen. Nice :-)
This is the PasoGo game list taken from the back of the instruction booklet that came with the last cart (KS-1010), showing all 10 games.
18th February 2015
A couple of items arrived recently....
2 bootleg Mortal Kombat PCBs. Thanks to Marco!
Another one of the rarer Namco System 246 games.... which has been anal-probed ;-D
Actually it was covered in 1/2" of dirty black dust (which is potentially fatal if left there for years with dampness) so I just pulled it apart and cleaned it
up then documented it for MAME.
The Namco System 246 / 256 status page has also been updated.
B-I-G thanks again to Darksoft!
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