Teamwork is the most needed part to secure history

here are a couple of things, which happened the last two months.

Leapfrog Leapster:

15 new dumps!
thx to the financial help of Tauwasser and Buddybenj, i could buy these 15 previously undumped US games for the Leapster!


500-01168 - Spongebob Squarepants - Saves the Day (US)
500-10093 - Learning with Leap (US)
500-10999 - Kindergarten (US)
500-11204-A - Thomas and Friends - Calling all Engines! (US)
500-11929-A - Scholastic I Spy - Challenger (US)
500-11993-A - Number Raiders (US)
500-12160-A - Scooby Doo! - Spooky Snacks! (US)
500-12293-A - Scholastic - Animal Genius (US)
500-12350-A - Letterpillar (US)
500-12677-A - Creature Create (US)
500-13272-A - Wall-E (US)
500-13445-A - Ratatouille (US)
500-13472-A - Star Wars - Jedi Reading (US)
500-13563-A - Up (US)
500-14005-A - Scooby Doo! (US)
500-14320-A - Cars 2 (US)


as with all other Leapster dumps! these roms contain alot of SWF files, which can get extracted with different tools...

     

V.Smile 

6 new french dumps!


Winnie Rourson - La Chasse Du Miel De Winnie (FR) (new REV)
Les Grandes Decouvertes D'Elmo (FR)
Thomas Et Ses Amis (FR)
Oui-Oui - Detective D'Un Jour (FR)
ABC Land Aventure (FR)
Le Roi Lion - Simba Decouvre La Jungle (FR)

all six games boot in MAME!

Radica Space Invaders 5-in-1 TV Game

Last year I sent a couple of things to Sean, as it was too difficult to dump the stuff myself and he has the better equipment for this.

This included the internal pcb of this TV Plug & Play console from RADICA.
 Sean dumped it and Haze did an amazing job in emulating it!






Read more about it here, at Haze's blog: https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2018/01/15/the-alternative-to-emulation/

A video of the current emulation status:

Sega Pico

two new dumps could get bought and dumped for the Pico.

+ HPC-6148 - Shichida Makoto Kanshuu Unou Image Training Sansuu Eigo de Mojars ni Chousen‏‎ [Best Selection](Japan)
+ HPC-6149 - Shichida Makoto Kanshuu Unou Image Training Hiragana Katakana Casino de Moja Vegas Dream! [Best Selection](Japan)
+ T-133250 - Soreike! Anpanman no Minna de Kyousou Anpanman! (Japan)

HPC6148 and HPC6149 are Best-Selection re-releases, where we already have the original dumps...HPC-6148 is exactly the same as T-075010! HPC-6149 is a 2mb dump....filled the second half with FF's, like on some other Best-Selection releases...the minimum romsize for such Best-Selection releases was 2mb.

T-133250 - Soreike! Anpanman no Minna de Kyousou Anpanman! (Japan) is a real new/previously undumped game:

Olivetti Quaderno

rfka01 sent me a couple of internal boards from various PC's, where i mostly dumped the keyboard-controllers from. Included was also a Olivetti Quaderno, where i the 2 internal roms got dumped from!

VTech Intelligence Advance E/R Lerncomputer

rfka01 sent me also a Vtech Learning Laptop, which i sent to Sean also. Sean dumped the internal 8mb rom from it!

 

 

Konami Picno

SSJ and Dustin sent me a undumped cartridge for the Konami Picno.

RX111 - Kiiroi Kyouryuu-kun Parasa no Obake Taiji

89 in 1 - NES Handheld

I bought this 89in1 handheld in China, for 5USD...and dumped the internal rom!
It's VT* based and as David Shah does currently some great work for the VT*-Emulation in MAME...it's working there.


   

Target Ball '96 (ARCADE)

Brian found an undumped version of Target Ball at ebay and offered to pay most the costs if someone in Europe wants to buy it for dumping. I bought it and covered the remaining amount.

Basically just a title hack of Target Ball (Nude) with an updated copyright year.

Conclusion

It's most times not possible to secure the games/software alone. A team with great people and alot of money is needed to get this all done the right way.

Quizard 3 - Decap the D8751H

Exacly 11 months ago i decapped the D8751H MCU's from Quizard 1 and 4. Sadly nobody hooked them up in MAME so far, but at least the data was secured and you can easily burn replacements since then for this two versions!

A couple of days ago i got a D8751H for the Quizard 3!

Today i decapped it.

Picture of the D8751H before starting the process...

Heating it to 330°, and you can easily remove the top of it.

Using UV opaque material to cover the eprom area...

Close-Up of the DIE, works pretty good if you use the nail polish of your wife ;-)

To verify the data afterwards, i burned a new 89C51 with it. Guess what, i works perfectly!

The procedure is pretty simple: Remove the Top of the D8751H, cover the ROM-Area with nail polish, bring the DIE under your UV-lamp, so that the lock-bit get erased and read the chip on your favourite eprommer...

I really hope we get a D8751H for the Quizard 2 soon too.

Pico or Picno or is it a new console?

Most of you will know the Sega Pico console, a kids-learning-console from 1993 which failed in Europe and the US, but got more than 250 game-releases in Japan and new games were even released until 2005.

Looks like Konami was really impressed by the Sega Pico, so they quickly released there own kids-learning-drawing console, the Konami Picno in 1993.
Not a big success, as it was only released in Japan and as it looks like not more than 25 cartridges got released for it...in 1994/1995 everthing was over and afterwards no new stuff got released. The console itself got two revisions: The Picno, and the Picno 2.

SSJ brought my attention to this console a couple of month's ago and as i was looking for missing Sega Pico games at Yahoo Japan, i quickly bought a Picno 2 console too. We also got a couple of cartridges for the system and when everything arrived here, i soon started to take a look at it!

Step 1

Look inside the console and the cartridge and see what's dumpable

Inside the console is a HD6435328F, a HN62334BP (a pin compatible 27c040 maskrom), a custom Konami chip, a HM538121JP and M514256B.

- the HD6435328F has a internal 32kb prom.
- the HN62334BP is used when no cartridge is insert and contains basic drawing stuff.

Let's take a look at the cartridges:
These are really thin (nearly as thin as the Turbografx-16 Hucards). As we basically knew nothing about the carts, i opened them. I was really surprised to see maskroms inside the carts. They used the thinnest pcb's i every saw and made the cartridge-shell extremely thin, were the rom sits.
What's also interesting, Konami used (at least inside the 8 cartridges we have) two different flashrom-types, which have no standard pinout!
It took me a couple of hours to get the correct pinout of the cartridges and i also could document the custom pinout for the two maskroms!

Step 2

Dump it

 

The internal 512kb maskrom of the console was dumped pretty easy, just desoldered it and directly dumped it as 27c040.

I desoldered a cartridge-slot from the console (the slot is pretty unique, and i'm pretty sure there is no compatible slot anywhere to get) and built my own cartridge-dumper for the console, using an Arduino Mega 2560.

This way the 8 cartridges, i have, were dumped easily.

 

 

The HD6435328F is the last undumped chip. For emulation, we really need the internal 32kb of data dumped. I already ordered a QFP80 socket, which should arrive in the next couple of days...hopefully a working adapter will be possible with it.

Summary

MAME will get 8 new cartridge-dumps for a previously undocumented system, the 512kb internal maskrom-dump and the complete documentation i did for the console (cartridge-pinout, maskrom-pinout's,...) in the next couple of hours.

Hopefully the HD6435328F's internal 32kb can be dumped soon too and we get a working emulation of the console...

At least one other cartridge will get dumped soon!

Currently about 300Euro's got spent to get this far, if you can donate some money, please do so.
Paypal: crazy2001@cooltoad.com
 

100 years dumped and preserved!

In the last couple of month's, some games were dumped and preserved.
this article only covers the three most interesting ones.

SSJ sent me a package with some undumped cartridges last week and a couple of days later we had it preserved:

CHALLENGE GOLF (1984) [Bandai RX-78]

 that's the first dumped (and released) game-cartridge for the RX-78.

Exciting Jockey (1984) [PV 2000]

 the last undumped game-cartridge for the PV-2000!

Real Number Basic (1983) [PV 2000]

the last undumped cartridge for the PV-2000! So with these two PV-2000 cartridges all known games are now preserved!

Special THX to SSJ who found and bought those carts for preservation!!

This is the type of software which needs to get preserved and why i like what i'm doing. It's every time again amazing to see >30 year old software running on an actual PC!

 

Preservation, Emulation and Flashcarts

Most of you will know the TOMY PYUUTA or TUTOR console. Released in 1982, it had a 16bit CPU and was way above the standards at it's time.


2015 and 2016 we were at a hunt to get the remaining undumped cartridges for this system. Most japanese cart's were undumped at that time and after a hugh amount of invested money, we could aquire all missing games for dumping.

the big problem was, that the cartridges and the console itself are very RARE and you have to pay high prices for some games. Cartridges get sold for 50EUR to 150EUR each. You mostly don't have the time to think about it twice and directly have to buy the rare cartridges if you see some of it popping up in various auctions-plattforms...

At the end, we got all officially released cartridges dumped! Currently only 2 DEMO cartridges (US and JP) are undumped.

Emulation in MAME was nearly completed and only had to get some small modifications, so that the 32kb games could be played!





The Tutor/Pyuuta got about 30 unique game-releases. There are three 3D games (with 32kb), 5 games with 16kb and all others only using 8kb.

After we had a complete dumped collection of all the games, i was thinking about a Flashcart...
I contacted Brizzo, and about 2 weeks later he had designed a Flashcart.

left: Rev1    right: Rev1+Modifcation

Revision 1 of the cartridge has 512kb space and you can play all available 8kb games with it. You can select the games by dipswitch.

I made a One-Wire-Modification to the flashcart and now you can play all available 8kb and 16kb games with it.

the cartridge/game is recognized

The nice thing is, that this flashcart costs maybe half the price of the cheapest Tutor/Pyuuta cartridge and you can play nearly 90% of all available games with it. All you need is the cartridge and the DIP-Switch-List (see below) and you can enjoy 28 games on your console!

Game running

Gamelist + DIP-Switch Settings

To get the remaining three 3D games working will be more tricky, as the Tutor/Pyuuta console needs a special GAME ADAPTOR to play these. The consoles don't have enough addresslines for 32kb cartridges, so my next goal is a special flashcart which has this GAME ADAPTOR (which is rare as hell too) included and fits directly into the I/O Port of the console.

this just show's what's the main three goals about dumping the games!

Preservation: available cartridges are becoming less and less. So a digital copy of the content is a must have!
Emulation: people all around the world can enjoy or view the games/programs, even without having the original device!
Flashcarts: What would you do with an hardware-device, when you don't get games for it anymore, or when the available games are damn expensive. So flashcarts keep the original hardware useful!