Decapping is pure fun, fear and adrenaline

I decapped my last 8751H over 6 month's ago. So i was pretty excited when f250v contacted me for decapping a protected 8751H from his Street Figher (bootleg).
Read more about here.

He shipped the mcu last monday, i received it today and as i had a short period of free time i immediately started to work on it.

To be true, decapping a chip is pure adrenaline, a little bit of fear and in the end alot of fun. While it proved another time that my decapping method is working pretty good, it's always risky to decap a chip. (don't use too much heat / did i use enough polish / hopefully i did not accidentally cut a wire /...)

In the end it took about 15 minutes to open the chip, 5 minutes to erase the lock bit and after another 5 minutes we had the dump.

The next interesting fact was, that this dump matched the other existing Street Fighter mcu dump, which was just added 8 days ago to MAME (here). The previous dump was only possible, because an unsecured 8751H was found. 

Anyway, this confirmed the existing dump!

Thx to f205v for sending the 8751H to me, it was nice variety to my currently other work.

Preserving a rare V.Smile Motion Demonstration Station / Kiosk

While i always keep my eyes open for rare / obscure systems, a rare Demonstration Station / Kiosk of the V.Smile Motion system showed up on the net.
You will not find any information or picture of such system anywhere and i had never seen one before somewhere for sale.
So i had to buy it!

Like all other Kiosk-Systems it's a complete AllinOne-Package. You have a TV, a complete V.Smile Motion system and 5 games included in one demonstration-case. The controller is wired, so that nobody could take it away. (V.Smile Motion has a wiresless controller)

This german Kiosk-System has five german games included. Selectable by pressing each button. (Micky Maus Wunderhaus, Dora, Winnie Puuh, Meister Manny, Tinkerbell)

Inside the console is a cartridge, which has a unique cover that i never have seen before. The cartridge is mounted inside the console and could not get removed.

The button of the currently running games is lighting!

As this was completely new, i was not sure what i will find inside. It could have been 5 demo-versions of the games or just the final\retail versions of each games. So the first part was to remove the cover of the game-selection.

 What was behind the cover was pretty interesting. They basically moved the main-pcb of the V.Smile Motion outside the console and mounted it on the back-side of the Kiosk-Case. They soldered in a 90 degree cartridge-slot and inside this slot they insert a huge custom cartridge. Which looked like a 5in1 Multicart (5 globs, each for one game)

left: big custom cartridge        right: main-pcb of the V.Smile Motion console

Main-PCB of the V.Smile Motion (looks like a standard main-pcb)

Custom Cartridge, inside my dumper

The next part was to get the games dumped. Luckily this Multi-Cartridge worked like "normal" carts, while just selecting each bank with the buttons.
That way i could dump all games pretty fast with my V.Smile dumper.

Now to the (maybe) sad part. All games matched the already existing dumps of the retail cartridges. Only "Meister Manny" was new/undumped, as the retail cartridge of the V.Smile Motion version is not dumped so far. But mostly for sure, it's also the same as the retail version.

Nevertheless this was a fun challenge to document this pretty rare hardware and we now know for sure the games inside are just like the same as the retail games.



 Another interesting V.Smile Kiosk-System popped up recently for sale:

Too expensive for me, but if someone wants to help with money just contact me.