Let's do two more this month

Caius contacted me about two 8751H mcu's which  Jorge Silva would borrow us for decapping.
The package arrived today and i took a quick lookat them.

DRAGON BREED (M72)

This game is inside MAME since December 1997 and while the game-emulation works, we had no chance to preserve the MCU the last 22 years.
The MCU got decapped today and completes this romset!

AIR DUEL (M72)

Dumped in March 2000, this is another game which works in MAME since years. And finally today we got the MCU decapped for it!
Another game fully preserved!

Interesting fact:

The dump of "Air Duel" has this at the very first lines:

Whatever "Last of Ninja" is...

EDIT 21-10-2019: Maybe it's from "Ninja Spirit", a game which was released two years earlier (1988) from IREM and they had some MCU's of it left, which they recycled for "Air Duel".  As "Ninja Spirit" is missing it's MCU dump too, we will try if this dump also works for it. 

EDIT 22-10-2019: "Last of Ninja" is really the name of "Ninja Spirit". The MCU-dump is working perfectly for "Air Duel" and it really looks like IREM was just too lazy to remove the wrong game-title from it. This dump will not work with "Ninja Spirit".


Thanks to Caius and Jorge Silva for helping to preserve these games!

Final MCU's from Brian's package

and here we have the last three MCU's of Brian's last package.

Body Slam

Matches the existing decap of it! So this is another confirmation of the decap and practice for my decapping skills.

Fire Trap (US)

This is the MCU for the US-Version of Fire Trap. (The Japan-Version was decapped a couple of weeks ago).

It does not match the handcrafted dump! So this is a new real dump!

Last Mission

So this is really interesting!

As i already decapped this chip about 6 weeks ago already, we got good reads from it back than. Now i decapped this new chip and got a different dump.

While the rompart of the chip is the same on both and matches each other, there's a difference in the empty-part of the rom:

LEFT: old decap

RIGHT: new decap

both dumps will work on the real hardware with no difference, as this is only in the not used area of the rom.

Basically the second dump is cleaner and this way looks "more" correct to me.

As i have the "old" mcu here too, i redumped it a couple of times today and always get the same rom. So they are really different in that area.

why decapping MCU's is so important

Got the next two MCU's from the lot in my hands. Those two proved, why it's so important to decap and secure MCU's, as Emulation-Simulations of the MCU's won't help you to rescue your real board.

Image Fight

I test all MCU's about PIN-connections before i start to decap it. to be sure that the MCU is at least "working" before i put my hands on it.

So i put the MCU in my programmer and got this:

No matter what i did, nearly all pins on the left side had no connection. Only GND had a connection, so i cleaned all other pins, tried again and got the same result.

So i started to open the chip. As it was already dead, i had nothing to loose. I checked the die with my bare eyes and didn't see any faults. So i put on some nail-polish and afterwards made the first pictures of the die with my microscope.

Look what i found:

Can you see it? Two wires are cut.

Now to the interesting thing, this is GND!!!

As i  don't have the equipment to fix this small wires, and solder those back together, i made my own little fixing-tool for it:

When i connected the two wires, i got connections to all pins and could read the mcu.

Sadly the dump matches the existing Image Fight (Japan) dump. As we didn't know for which region this mcu was, we were hoping it is for the missing World revision.

At least it was a great challenge. I'm pretty sure someone mixed up VCC and GND on the board and that's why these two wires got blowed up.

Quartet

Brian already told me, before he shipped this package from the US, that one of the MCU's is missing many pins.

It was the MCU for Quartet and many of the pins got corroded and really broke away if you just looked at it.

After a short fixing job it at least looked like this:

The other side did look nearly the same, so basically about 20 of the 40 pins were at least partial missing.

The decap and Pin-fixing job worked out and it got constant reads after erasing the lock-bit.

Another mcu preserved!

MCU challenge

Another package from Brian arrived today!

Brian drove about 400 miles (or 650km) to a guy who borrowed us these 8751H chips for decapping. I had some time today and started with the first 3 MCU's from the lot.

GHOSTBUSTERS (US) (Data East)

Finally this MCU is now secured! I already tried it in MAME and it looks like it's working flawlessly. So the handcrafted dump can now get removed.

CHELNOV (US) (Data East)

And here's another MCU dump for Chelnov. This time it's for the US-Version. Interestingly, this dump does not match the handcrafted rom. Will be interesting, what's the difference.

Dynamite Dux (set 1) (8751 317-0095)

Now also this set is completely secured and preserved.

Enjoy another batch of 8751 MCU dumps for MAME. More will get decapped soon...

 

More Data East MCU's

We are currently on the hunt on getting most of the remaining 8751H mcu's for MAME decapped and dumped.
This is really costly and so far we paid all stuff from our own money. No donations came in for this so far. 

Decapping MCU's is risky! Even handled with extremely care, chances are high to break the chip. I decapped so far eightteen 8751H MCU's and 3 of those broke while decapping.
Getting better and better with every chip i decap it's basically a 25% chance something goes wrong and the chip is dead without a dump of it. Which also means we have to buy a second board to get the MCU dumped.

The today's update did cost us over 1250EUR.

Fire Trap (Japan)

Brian bought a board, a couple of month's back and sent me the MCU from it. Sadly it broke while decapping it...
I put in my own money and bought a second board to get the mcu again.

MCU now dumped! => Costs (both boards): ~800EUR

Chelnov - Atomic Runner (World)

I also bought this so we get a MCU dump.

MCU dumped! => Costs: 450EUR

Birdie Try (different MCU)

While i already decapped the MCU from Birdie Try a couple of weeks ago, ee got a what could be
 different revision of the MCU.
And yes, it's really a different revision. 7 bytes are different to the existing dump.

MCU dumped! => Costs = free!



All of these new dumps got programmed on a fresh 89C51 and tested with the boards. Confirming that all dumps worked on the real hardware.

Donations are highly needed, as the secured postage fee's are already taking a lot of money! So please, if you can, donate some money to crazy2001@cooltoad.com

Super Cassette Vision - 32KB RAM Multicarts

You have most likely already seen this: https://team-europe.blogspot.com/2019/07/super-cassette-vision-32k-ram-multicart.html

This old design basically worked, but no matter what i did, it drained the battery within 3 days. So i had to look for another solution.

Basically only one of the 32KB games need the battery and this is POP & CHIPS for the HIGHSCORE table.

So i reworked the design to use F-RAM chips and now POP & CHIPS worked like a charm. But DRAGON SLAYER did not, this one only worked with the S-RAM chip. Luckily it looks like, it really only needs the RAM for gameplay and not for saving.

The conclusion is, we now need two cartridges:

The good thing, none of these two cartridges now needs a battery and the F-RAM cartridge will hold your data for at least 30 years.

DIP 5 & 6 are the DIPS for the RAM-Banks. Each cartridge has 4 of it. Which means you can save four different Highscore-Tables for POP & CHIPS if you want.

Both cartridges have a lot of space left, so many homebrew games could get designed for the Super Cassette Vision:

Here are the DIP-Settings for both cartridges

More MCU's...

I just decapped three MCU's, which i got sent from Brian.

Bad Dudes

Heavy Barrel (World) 

 

Last Mission 

 

i'm pretty sure those dumps will get added to MAME in the next few days!

CASIO PV-1000 - Multicart - Complete Edition

I got myself a CASIO PV-1000 console some month's ago and while it's already almost impossible to get this console, it's even harder to find cartridges for it. That's the reason i started to build this Multicart.

Short facts about this cartridge:

• Contains all available 13 games for the PV-1000
• Games are selectable by dip-switch
• Got a nice cartridge case (Megadrive/Genesis, fits perfectly)
• Got a professional printed cartridge-cover. (not selfprinted, like on the other multicarts)

If anyone wants one, it costs 38EUR

Let's play real Golf!

Birdie Try is another game, which is supported in MAME since years. Bryan McPhail added it in Version 0.36b2 and Angelo Salese simulated the MCU in december 2002, making the game playable.
The real MCU was not decapped so far, so Ivan and I teamed up and bought a complete board of the game.

I received it today!

MCU - before i did start the decapping-process

Using the "typically" way to decap the 8751H, it took about 3 minutes to remove the cover, another 3 minutes to put some nail-polish on the eprom-area and about 30Minutes under the UV-eraser.

8751H - cover removed and Eprom-Area covered

Close-up of the covered die

Afterwards i got this:

small part of the dumped rom

I wrote the dumped data to a new 89C51 and tried it with the real PCB and IT WORKS PERFECTLY!.
Afterwards i clued the original 8751H together and now it looks like it was never ever opened or touched.

If you want to donate so we can aquire more MCU's for decapping, just paypal to crazy2001@cooltoad.com