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Handheld Game ROM Dumping and Emulation
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blanka
Atari Cosmos


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Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands

PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2015 9:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Zackman is a Dig-Dug like game by Bandai, based on The Pit arcade game.
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Rik
Site Admin


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Last Visit: 25 Mar 2024
Posts: 1932
Location: California

PostPosted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 1:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

blanka wrote:
Zackman is a Dig-Dug like game by Bandai, based on The Pit arcade game.


Yeah, but it is a completely different game, so it needs to be dumped and emulated as it's own game...

So, I was poking through my Select-a-Game carts, and you can tell from looking inside the edge of the cartridge that they are all pretty much the same inside (an HD38800 chip), except Football. Which obviously has a different chip (physically smaller), and a lot of hand-wired crap... So I took a chance and opened it.

I guess one of the perks of putting the CPU on cartridge is that you can use whatever you want...

And this is the back side of it:


There's some professional work... Is that a chip you can dump?
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Mon Mar 02, 2015 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rik wrote:
blanka wrote:
Zackman is a Dig-Dug like game by Bandai, based on The Pit arcade game.


Yeah, but it is a completely different game, so it needs to be dumped and emulated as it's own game...

So, I was poking through my Select-a-Game carts, and you can tell from looking inside the edge of the cartridge that they are all pretty much the same inside (an HD38800 chip), except Football. Which obviously has a different chip (physically smaller), and a lot of hand-wired crap... So I took a chance and opened it.



There's some professional work... Is that a chip you can dump?


Yeah when I had my select a game, I had football with it. And it looked exactly like that inside, complete with the hand soldered transistors.

Unfortunately that's a TI part, probably a TMS1500 or similar and I cannot dump those yet. I'm working on dumping those (and I have dumped TMS1000/1100 in the past) but TI changed the method a few times and I will have to take a long hard look at the die shot to figure out if I can dump them or not and how. The current method of decapping to dump them optically isn't the best since it's destructive. However, I do have a couple of the games that were dumped this way so if I can figure out how to dump them I can easily do a binary compare to make sure I'm getting good data.

Today I got a qbert and a bambino superstar football and have vectored the VFD and pinned the CPU out on that. PB sure didn't want to spend a single extra cent on that game. It's the cheapest made game yet. Even the enclosure is super cheap. The VFD was "hot snotted (hot melt)" down to the board so it was kinda tricky to remove it but I removed it and pinned it and reinstalled it without damaging it.

qbert is interesting for another reason and that is the VFD uses four different phosphors on it. orangeish, light green, dark green, and cyan. I thought it was just one kind of green but it is actually two.

Here's the Qbert VFD:



And the Zackman:



I played around a bit with the MM78 CPUs in the Mattel World Championship Football and I think I can dump them. Applying 12V to the test pin (11.5 to 12.5V approx) causes it to spit the ROM data out the RIOx pins it looks, so I will make another dumping rig tonight to dump those, the COP411, and the frogger chip when I get ahold of one.

No guarantee that the MM78's will dump but it looks good so I'm going to roll with it. The COP411 is a no-brainer (audio CPU for VFD Turtles) since National gives out an app note for dumping the ROM data.
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 3:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Big update since last time! I'm up to over 20 games dumped and vectored and traced out now!

I have figured out how to dump the MM78 CPUs that were in the Mattel Football game, and have dumped the COP411 in the Entex Turtles game. This brings the total CPU dumpability list up to:

HD38800A
HD38800B
HD38750A
HD38820A
D552C
D553C
D650C
MM78
COP411


I got Frogger yesterday and did some preliminary tests on dumping it. Looks like pin 20 is indeed some kind of test pin, since I can make the chip do some test-like things by changing the state of it. So far not a lot of useful things, but it does indeed "do stuff" (tm)

Also got that Fire Away game and it has a TMS part in it, so I was going to maybe give that a try and see if I can dump it using the TMSxxx dumping method I used before to get a few of the Microvision games dumped.

As always, all the info is here:

http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/
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Rik
Site Admin


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Last Visit: 25 Mar 2024
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Location: California

PostPosted: Tue Mar 10, 2015 6:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Crap, totally forgot I was supposed to send you games! Although I guess Frogger isn't needed (was it the same chip number as mine? 701P )

Do you need/want the whole game, or just the circuit board? I can probably cram more in a box if I take them apart first... Cool
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 7:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rik wrote:
Crap, totally forgot I was supposed to send you games! Although I guess Frogger isn't needed (was it the same chip number as mine? 701P )

Do you need/want the whole game, or just the circuit board? I can probably cram more in a box if I take them apart first... Cool


PCB only is probably OK, though they should be in working condition. Yes, that frogger I got is a 701P also.

Speaking of, I got the chip to dump tonight, so if you can scare up the other version of frogger with the different chip/VFD I could probably dump it too.
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Rik
Site Admin


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PostPosted: Thu Mar 12, 2015 7:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kevtris wrote:
PCB only is probably OK, though they should be in working condition. Yes, that frogger I got is a 701P also.

Speaking of, I got the chip to dump tonight, so if you can scare up the other version of frogger with the different chip/VFD I could probably dump it too.


I'll take a look at my other two Froggers and see what they are... I don't actually have the one with the green sticker on top which I believe is always the 'other' version, but some black-topped ones also have the variation... I'll see what I can find.

Most of the games I have that I would send are working. There's two that are in my 'repair' pile, I'll have to see if the problem is just simple battery corrosion, or something else. If it's physical damage of some kind, it's usually just a blown transistor from using the wrong power supply...
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Thu Mar 12, 2015 9:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rik wrote:
kevtris wrote:
PCB only is probably OK, though they should be in working condition. Yes, that frogger I got is a 701P also.

Speaking of, I got the chip to dump tonight, so if you can scare up the other version of frogger with the different chip/VFD I could probably dump it too.


I'll take a look at my other two Froggers and see what they are... I don't actually have the one with the green sticker on top which I believe is always the 'other' version, but some black-topped ones also have the variation... I'll see what I can find.

Most of the games I have that I would send are working. There's two that are in my 'repair' pile, I'll have to see if the problem is just simple battery corrosion, or something else. If it's physical damage of some kind, it's usually just a blown transistor from using the wrong power supply...



I successfully dumped frogger I think! I made a disassembler last night to verify the code and it sure looks OK... so I should be able to dump the "other' version if you can find one.

Yes, I bought a Dracula a couple years ago off ebay as "works great". got it and it was dead, with the transistor blown apart. Fortunately I had another exact replacement in stock by chance. the game worked after that, though the directionals don't work very well- the rubber buttons are kind of crappy (need to find a replacement for that).

I have a couple games that are kind of broken too that need repair parts, guess I have to wait for some cheap ones to show up on ebay, like a joystick for turtles.

If anyone was interested, the frogger dump is here along with the disassembly. I commented the init and interrupt code on it, to verify that the ROM dump is most likely correct.


http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/m58dxx.txt
http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/m58d.bin

These will probably go away in the nearish future with the final versions ending up in the proper /coleco frogger/ directory.

I did notice there were four "invalid" opcodes used, but it appears that at least one of them is a left rotate, which I figured out by tracing what the code did (it's the button reading stuff)
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another day, another couple games done!

I have finished all five of the Coleco mini arcades not counting Zaxxon. Full dumps, vectors, and pinouts are now available. I did Ms Pac and Frogger this weekend along with a few others.







Only thing I am missing on those 5 are any revisions, like the other Frogger, and possibly other revisions of the CPUs (I have the two Pac-man revs).
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MADrigal
Tiger Jawbreaker


Joined: 20 Mar 2008
Last Visit: 29 Jul 2023
Posts: 206
Location: Australia

PostPosted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 7:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Kev, I send you a warm greeting from Canberra Smile

I have just noticed this thread, wow I am very interested in the work you're doing. The time has finally come to emulate the handheld games! Smile

Are there plans to emulate the games?
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
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Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Sun Mar 15, 2015 11:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MADrigal wrote:
Hi Kev, I send you a warm greeting from Canberra Smile

I have just noticed this thread, wow I am very interested in the work you're doing. The time has finally come to emulate the handheld games! Smile

Are there plans to emulate the games?


Yes, 6 of them have already been emulated on MESS- I am not sure status other than Hap got 6 to run; the first post in this thread has the status on dumps and emulations (I have been keeping it current).

The big huge mess of HD388xx games is kind of embarrassing- we cannot find the opcode bit patterns!!! Yes, Hitachi was a set of bastards and seemed to specifically leave bit patterns out of their data sheets. They seem to have gone way out of their way in fact. The best/only data sheets I have found are sitting in the /handhelds/datasheets/ directory if you wanted to see.

We looked everywhere, including patents. We've figured out MOST of the opcodes I think, except 8 or 10 from what I recall. The HD388xx.txt files in each directory is a current disassembly for that game's ROM.

Fortunately the D553C games don't have this problem, and all of them I dumped so far have been emulated. I am not sure when these will be pushed into the officially MESS distribution though, and if artwork will be done. I just did the dumps and VFD vectoring.

The other CPUs in contention are the HD58846 which I dumped and wrote a disassembler for, which seems fairly good except for a few undefined opcodes which is most likely correct, and our docs are not complete.

Then there's the MM78's which I dumped and we happened to find a patent with some code in it, which netted us almost all of the opcode -> instruction translations, and we figured out a couple more. I think all of them are figured out now, or if not we're stuck on maybe 1 or 2 at the most.

COP411 is fully emulated in MESS too so adding that is no problem.

I would say documentation on the HD388xx parts is the most pressing matter right now. I have over a dozen games done that use this part now.
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MADrigal
Tiger Jawbreaker


Joined: 20 Mar 2008
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Location: Australia

PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for the comprehensive reply!

I think I have a few detailed tech documents:

HD38820
Sharp MC-501
TMS1000
Ball (Nintendo)
Speak & Spell

Not all documents are complete, but please let me know if you want to see any of them. You have my email address Smile

Cheers
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Rik
Site Admin


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PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2015 1:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kevtris wrote:
Fortunately the D553C games don't have this problem, and all of them I dumped so far have been emulated. I am not sure when these will be pushed into the officially MESS distribution though, and if artwork will be done. I just did the dumps and VFD vectoring.


Is this being worked on currently? (Adding the artwork) I tried a couple of the games in MESS, and they just play with a generic grid of dots, and I couldn't immediately figure out how to make it work with the artwork... But it's nice to see emulation working, details like artwork can obviously be sorted out eventually...
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kevtris
Coleco Pac Man


Joined: 07 Feb 2015
Last Visit: 13 Oct 2015
Posts: 34
Location: Indianapolis, IN

PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2015 2:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

MADrigal wrote:
Thanks for the comprehensive reply!

I think I have a few detailed tech documents:

HD38820
Sharp MC-501
TMS1000
Ball (Nintendo)
Speak & Spell

Not all documents are complete, but please let me know if you want to see any of them. You have my email address Smile

Cheers


Sure I'd like the HD38820, sharp, and TMS stuff. What's "ball"? I have all the speak and spell stuff.

I checked but I don't think I have your email address, at least not in my email client.

my email address is kevtris@comcast.net

thanks much
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MADrigal
Tiger Jawbreaker


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Last Visit: 29 Jul 2023
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Location: Australia

PostPosted: Mon Mar 16, 2015 2:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Emails in outbox... Smile

Three emails with attachments, please confirm after you get them.

Ball is simply the first LCD game ever designed and produced, by Gunpei Yokoi of Nintendo. I have the patent docs, not sure if thy may be useful for your project.

Cheers.
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