Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Air Duel (World, M72 Hardware) - MCU decapped

 Finally after so many years, we got another needed MCU for MAME. This is another example of great team-effort, where people around the world worked together to get this finally done.

Brian A Troha found an ebay-auction where the complete chip-set for Air Duel (World) got sold. At the same time i got contacted by Silvio from Swiss, that he has an MCU for Air Duel, but as it's missing it's labels, nobody know's if it's for the World or Japan version of the game, and that he can ship it to me for decapping.

So we had a little dilemma. When Silvio's MCU is for the World-Version we don't need to spend a lot of money for the ebay auction. If it's not, we need money to get the chip-set from ebay...

Another example why the mail-list of the Dumping Union is really important! DU-member's teamed up to assure money for the ebay-auction.

The strategy was to wait until Silvio's MCU arrived here and could get decapped. => If it's from the Japan-Version, we have to buy the World-chips from ebay.

Silvio's MCU arrived at my home on tuesday the 14-06-2022 and shortly after i got home from work i directly decapped it. Sadly it was the MCU for the Japan-Version and matched the existing decap, which i already did some years ago.

So with the amazing financial help from the other DU-members we could buy the chips and the package arrived today at my frontdoor.

 The decapping-process worked flawlessly and just after a couple of minutes, the chip was desecured and i had the 4KB of data dumped.

Finally another MCU preserved!



Many thanks to all people who were involved in this task and helped to get another game on the M72-hardware finally fully preserved.

The rom will most likely be supported in the next MAME version (0.246) which will most likely get released at end of July 2022.

Credits: Brian A. Troha, BillD, rtw, f205v, darksoft, Gor, Smitdogg, Sean Sutton, Team Europe

And a Special Thanks to Silvio, for shipping the other MCU to me. Sadly not what we needed but as always very good practice for decapping chips.


If you want to read about another great team-effort, to get the two games on the Konami Polygonet arcade platform finally emulated in MAME, head over to Mog's Blog for an amazing summary of the complete emulation-history of this platform. How the journey started nearly 20 years ago, when the roms of Polygonet Commanders were added to MAME, what happened the next 19 years and how everything come together in the last couple of three weeks! => Amazing work guys and congrats to all who helped to get this done!

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