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12th October 2015 If you have ever played Led Storm Rally 2011 in MAME you will have seen some of the sprites were wrong, either with missing pieces or incorrect data, and the ROMs were flagged as bad dumps. They were not actually bad, they were just from the normal Led Storm ROM set and were being substituted while we waited patiently for the correct ROMs to be dumped. Having almost infinite time on my hands now means I can finally get around to doing crazy stuff like that dumping job for Led Storm Rally 2011.... There were three ROMs that needed to be dumped. The first one was dumped by me on 24th May 2009. Unfortunately I didn't have time to get back to this job for several years. Now the time has come! The second and third were completely different so a lot of research was needed. The first of those took about 3 hours (including research and Guru-Meditation). The second one took about an hour to wire up and about 5 seconds to read. When they were plugged into MAME they still didn't look right. This was due to the data being in a different format so someone figured it out and now it works perfectly :-) Pity about the actual game though, it's super hard and likely not many people will play it for more than a few minutes. Maybe someone with more enthusiasm for the game than me will do a complete run from start to end and put it on youtube. Maybe not ;-) Now here's a tip for those out there who think it's a good idea to have a pissing contest with old Guru by buying things I have and trying to dump them, then failing miserably when you realise just how difficult it really is.... DON'T A better idea is you buy something I don't have and concentrate on that. Or dump the things you've been sitting on for years. Then twice as many jobs can be done in the same amount of time and you'll save some money too. Cooperation is better than competition. In other news, RB emulated Attack Pla-Rail. You can see some emulation screenshots over on RB's site 7th October 2015 I just dumped a very rare Namco System 12 board that arrived here some years ago. This should be coming to a MAME near you very soon! In other news, I picked up a very rare Namco System 246 game called 'Cobra The Arcade'. This is now dumped and in MAME along with several other System 246 games that I dumped recently. The Namco System 246 / 256 status page is looking very good now, only a few games are missing! If you have been watching and waiting for certain arrivals to be dumped then put up for sale it's your lucky day. Most of the stuff I have is now on my For Sale Page. Some of the rare items have gone already but there's still LOTS there..... nearly 700 items. Check it out if you have been looking for some rare PCBs..... but don't mess around, they are selling F-A-S-T 19th August 2015 More arrivals! Street Fighter Alpha 3 (980616 USA SAMPLE Version). Now dumped and added to MAME. Thanks to ocean d for loaning the PCB Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Unlimited on Namco System 369. Thanks to Darksoft If you are paying attention you may notice something trying to get some attention and free publicity by sneaking into the picture frame on the top right of the 2nd pic..... Yes of course it's a Macintosh IIci But it's a very sick and dying Mac IIci.... This was given to me by a friend recently. The internal battery has puked *big-time* after sitting dormant for 10 years and made a real mess. The brown crap is rusted metal combined with battery acid. The entire battery holder is almost entirely eaten away. The only good thing about this is the box was sitting on it's side with the battery at the bottom and the damage is almost totally isolated to the side of the plastic cover. Of course it has the usual start-up issues associated with these old Macs, plus a dead rusted 50MHz oscillator and green crap on the RTC and many of the chips in the reset section, but I'm sure I can get it working with a bit of Guru-Love ;-) I've already cleaned it up and ordered some new chips to re-build the reset section. I might post an update on the repair job later. Let this be a lesson to all of you who have something old containing a battery.... if you are going to leave it there, make sure you sit it on it's side so the battery leaks onto the side of the case!!! Hehehe. No no no!! To be *worthy* of owning something like this remove the battery NOW before it's too late!!! In other news some more arcade items were purchased recently with donations and will arrive sometime in the near future. If you want to see more items arrive and be dumped for MAME you can help by donating funds. Thanks! 16th August 2015 A few nice items arrived.... Mahjong Raijinhai Mahjong The Mysterious Orient Part 2 The former won't be working in MAME due to protection but I'm sure the latter will be emulated in record time so keep an eye out on Luca's site ;-) Thanks to Dyq for sending out these PCBs. and a couple of 8-Liner games.... Dino Dino by Astro Corp. Fruit Paradise by IGS Unfortunately it's unlikely either of them will be working in MAME due to protection. Thanks to klove Also arrived, some more bootleg Mortal Kombat and Streetfighter II PCBs thanks to Marco! In other news, I dumped a strange and uncommon sticker machine board a while ago and Luca got it working in MAME. Check Luca's site for pics and info. Thanks to several donations recently I've picked up a few more wanted items and they are currently in transit to my dumping lair. If you want to see more items arrive and be dumped for MAME you can help by donating funds. Thanks! 9th August 2015 Some time ago RB and I bought a rare Namco System 12 PCB called Techno Drive. I dumped it recently and after a herculean effort by RB, today it's *mostly* working in MAME :-D You can check out more pics of the emulation on RB's site. The game is entirely in Japanese so I think to give this game true justice, some introduction and explanation is needed. Here's the back story.... In 2305 the traffic war is overheated by a dramatic increase in traffic volume, the main road was completely paralyzed, logistics system collapsed, victims of traffic accidents also reached the milestone of 1 million injured a day. The government had been subjected to a policy that greatly strengthened the penalties for traffic violations, such as 10 years imprisonment for a parking violation and life imprisonment for worse traffic offences. However, future driving technology had gotten significantly lower. The governments harse policy caused a big drop in the number of people driving..... 2310, the government reaches a desperate conclusion and it goes ahead with an implementation of a new policy called "Ability Gene Enhancement Plan". To ensure the driving skills of the future of mankind, they impliment a bold plan that will enhance the driving skills of the human race at the genetic level. A device is developed. Playing repeatedly will encourage the strengthening of the driving skills gene, the breakthrough device also results in the revolution of driving awareness at the same time. The device was named 'Techno Drive', and put their last hope in solving the problem of the past. Experience the Techno Drive, regardless of strengthening the gene! To use it is to save the offspring! Game Summary.... Based on the results of the mini-games the machine will measure the driving skills of the player. Measurement is carried out in the three items "steering technique","footwork technique" and "practical". Steering = Use only the wheel. Footwork = Use only the accelerator and brake. Practical = Use all of the input devices. Each stage has five tests prepared. The player receives a measurement by selecting any one game from among them. After completion of the measurement of all three tests (the mini-games), the game-play is analyzed and the result is printed out to paper as "The players' driving skills revolution guidance document". Details of each stage.... Steering  |  Footwork  |   Practical Note the 'Details' pages are unedited and only roughly auto-translated to English using Google Translate. It's enough to get the main ideas ;-) If you want to see the original page, which is entirely in Japanese, it's here. 6th August 2015 Since about the middle of last year it seems there are a few 'elite' people out there with decrypted ROMs for Sega System 32 games and they think they need to protect us from ourselves by keeping it all secret. WOW guys, just freaking WOW! We (as in MAMEDEV) spent the last 15 years emulating this stuff and gave you 10000+ arcade games for free and now you have the outrageous insolence to keep this info from the rest of the arcade community who just want to repair their original Sega suicided boards. You should be ashamed of yourself. Very ashamed. People like Porchy have gone to great lengths to collect and host an almost complete list of decrypted ROMs for most of the Sega FD1089/FD1094 encrypted games purely as a gift to the community. Other guys like Darksoft are actually doing hardware-related things to revive dead boards that were previously only good for scrap. In doing so this has actually reduced the high cost of bootleg conversions because you can actually do it yourself for free with a bit of effort. Now because of the hoarding, unscrupulous people are taking advantage of the lack of System 32 decrypted ROMs and are making a killing selling converted boards for thousands of dollars. Do you really want to see this happen.... ripping off MAME and selling at huge profits? It's happening now. The excuses I'm reading are very weak.... to protect rare releases of the games from people suiciding them on purpose to convert them to other more valuable games. Errr, wake up guys. For starters there are no rare releases of System 32 games, it's half a dozen obscure games that almost no one wants to play anyway, except the die-hard collectors who own the originals. Protecting us from ourselves didn't work for System 16 or CPS2, it's not going to affect System 32 either.... in any case most, if not all of them are already dead anyway. In fact several boards have popped up for sale on eBay and Yahoo auctions and have sold for prices 10X what the game is worth. Essentially forcing a dedicated arcade fan to buy it at rip-off prices just so he can continue to play the original game he owns. The excuses are particularly thin especially when all of the games are dumped and emulated and are basically worthless now anyway, just like every other game perfectly emulated in MAME. We have basically screwed ourselves by dumping and emulating all of these games for free and in doing so have made most arcade PCBs worthless. I'm personally sitting on many hundreds of PCBs that I bought and can't even sell to buy more stuff for MAME. Why? For the good of the community and for the preservation of arcade games. Here's an idea: We have already given you 10000+ games for free and the info to decrypt the ROMs to fix your PCB(s) via MAME source code, plus info to fix many other PCBs like Sega System 16 and others, since MAME has a wealth of technical info which could, and in fact is used to help repair arcade PCBs. You have enjoyed MAME for many, many years, all for free. How about you release the full set of decrypted System 32 ROMs and associated info to the emulation community as a payback for all of the hard work we (MAMEDEV) have done over the nearly 20 years we have been doing this. Sounds like a fair deal to me. That request also goes out to all those people who have enjoyed MAME for many years and are holding onto undumped PCBs (particularly rare titles from the 80's distributed only in Japan.... which are known to be dumped and emulated for several years). I'm not just talking about traditional old-school arcade PCBs either. That also includes NAOMI/Triforce/Chihiro conversions by people who take our dumps, hack them and sell them on CF cards and Lindbergh multi-game conversion of dumps taken from MAME. Don't force us to spend years scraping up funds and have to shell out thousands of dollars to buy and dump what is already available now in private collections. Since you are a collector you value the hardware and you're not going to sell them anyway so the value remains the same. Keeping it locked away only artifically inflates sale prices at places like eBay and Yahoo Auctions and just helps the vultures make huge profits. Don't look away and pretend you don't know who these people are. You have been blogging and/or posting on forums for years about your collection. You have exhibited photos of boards that have been repaired with MAME ROMs (i.e. System 16, CPS2 etc). There are many of you and you are known. You have enjoyed MAME for years, now it's time to give something back to us. You will get the warm fuzzy feeling like I still have after doing this for 15 years. That is priceless :-) Just remember we WILL get there eventually anyway regardless, and we will take the credit for all of it. Or you can go from zero to hero and help us. Or not, and remain at zero. To the rest of the MAME/emulation/arcade community reading this, why not help out by buying one or more of the PCBs I'm holding here that has been dumped for MAME. Even if you have no intention of playing it or don't even own an arcade machine, you can help just taking these off my hands. Or just donate because you enjoy MAME so much and can't live without it. If you own/made a MAME cab you are in even more debt to us than the rest of the community and you should definitely donate ;-) If everyone who used MAME donated we would have enough to buy up all of the remaining undumped PCBs out there..... that would effectively be a 6 figure number. You will also get that warm fuzzy feeling and you will have pleasure in knowing that money will go towards more undumped PCBs that will eventually be available in MAME :-) 4th August 2015 Some discoveries and a MAME fix..... the hard way ;-) A couple of days ago I was looking through some old PCB's that arrived many years ago. I found 3 Psikyo PCBs (Mahjong G-Taste x2 acquired as junk for free, one was dumped the other was untouched, and Gunbarich), all the PS5V2 type board. Looking at the MAME source reminded me that there are left-over ROMs on these boards from a nice game called Dragon Blaze (which I actually dumped for MAME years ago then sold). Each board has only half of the chips needed but having both boards means I have a full set of graphics ROMs to make up Dragon Blaze so I thought it might be fun to try to convert one of these boards from junk to a nicer game. If you know anything about conversions you will know it's generally not so simple to bypass the protection. But as I progressed it seemed simple.... or was it? First check the photo..... With reference to the photo let me first explain the programmable parts (*ROMs) and what they are used for. Pink chips are main program, 2x 27C4096 DIP40 EPROMs in sockets. White chip is an Oki MSM27C1652CZ 16M-bit surface mounted mask ROM containing the sound data. The package is TSOP48 Type II and requires a custom adapter to dump them, which I made many years ago :-) Red chips are Oki MSM27C1602CZ 16M-bit DIP42 mask ROMs equivalent to 27C160 EPROMs. Blue chips are the same type of package as the white chip, but they are Oki MSM27C1602CZ.... essentially the same type as the red chips just in a different package. Yellow is the EEPROM, a surface mounted SOIC8 93LC56. The orange chips are the same as the chips nearby but don't need to be changed. There is much work to be done here to convert this. So I did the easiest thing first.... I grabbed the untouched Mahjong G-Taste, removed the 27C4096 EPROMs and replace them with new 27C4096 EPROMs programmed with the main program for Dragon Blaze. To my surprise it booted and gave a EEPROM NG error. I powered off/on and then the EEPROM passed! The game booted up and played but of course with totally corrupt graphics because the ROMs were from Mahjong G-Taste. OK, so some chip swapping is needed. Since Mahjong G-Taste has a full set of Dragon Blaze DIP42 ROMs (the RED ones) all I needed to do was swap the blue ROMs and maybe that would fix the graphics issue. With all of those ROMs swapped I powered on and was greeted with readable text on the start-up screen, ROM/RAM/EEPROM passed and then the first screen with green circles appeared. But not quite, the entire screen was filled with Japanese Kanji characters. It progressed to the PSIKYO logo screen and it was about 50% ok but with some wrong data, and the title screen was almost 90% good, but again with small graphic corruption. Hmmmm. Now what to do? I knew the ROMs were ok because I dumped them years ago and the board had sat in a box for years doing nothing. I needed to do the ROM test but in MAME it's not clear how to activate it on real hardware. MAME says there's a dip switch. Nope, I don't think so buddy. A little more research is required. I mentioned the issue to Luca and he suggested it was close to test/service and could be the tilt signal. Sure enough with tilt activated (by grounding JAMMA pin 15 solder side) and booting while holding player 1 start, the ROM test came up. There was no ROM testing text though, just a mish-mash of junk graphics and blocks but the final 'OK block' was in RED, essentially telling me all of the ROMs were NG (i.e. bad). Since I knew they can't all be bad and some of the graphics were actually good on screen I decided to drop this board and move all of the ROMs to the Gunbarich board. First thing was to swap the socketed EPROMs and see if it boots. It did but had a single red rectangular block in the middle of the screen. Checking this in MAME told me that the block was actually the security test that had failed and it was actually saying SECURITY NG. OK so back to the MAME source to do some reading..... According to how the driver is coded in MAME, there's a debug bit that has to be LOW to make it work. When discussing this previously with Luca we discovered that bit is really the tilt pin on the JAMMA edge connector. On my board it's hard-wired to HIGH by default through a logic chip and resistor network and there is no dip switch or jumper pad to change it. Since this is forced low in MAME to get the games to work, this smells of a MAME hack ;-) I jumpered tilt low with a piece of wire (safe to do because of the in-series resistor network) and the game boots, just like MAME. Of course with bad graphics, but this is progress so I'll take it ;-) The bigger question now is why did Dragon Blaze work on the Mahjong G-Taste board and not on Gunbarich? The key is the 93LC56 EEPROM. Obviously there's some secret info that is kept in there and even when it's cleared only part of the whole address space is re-written. Programming the default EEPROM from the MAME ROM set didn't help at all. The security check still fails.... meaning the EEPROM in MAME is bad. I guess this EEPROM was made using the MAME emulation which creates the EEPROM data with default settings. But as stated above it doesn't write the entire address space and the secret security data is missing. I also guess all of the EEPROMs that were created in the same MAME driver are similarly bad. To fix this I needed a working Dragon Blaze EEPROM! But wait.... I have one! I simply exchanged the working EEPROM from the previously converted Mahjong G-Taste board onto the Gunbarich board, and as expected the game works without having to hold tilt low. Obviously when Psikyo modified the original Dragon Blaze board to Mahjong G-Taste they never bothered to change the security, they left it as-is. So as it turned out, jerking around with the Mahjong G-Taste board first actually helped. Without that first failure I would never have known what was really going on. Never under-estimate the value of jerking around with some other piece of shit first when experimenting with the unknown. Anyway, that's problem 1 solved! :-D So now to swap all of the graphics ROMs over again. Gunbarich originally had the blue ROMs but I've removed them and put them on the Mahjong G-Taste board so only 4 of the Dragon Blaze ROMs remained (shown in orange). The red ROMs needed to be changed anyway. After swapping all of the red ROMs and replacing all of the blue ROMs the game now works perfectly! Problem 2 solved :-D I decided to have a quick play of the game to test it. Sure enough it works great. But my ears are hurting. Ouch! What is that screeching sound coming from the speakers??? Errr, oh yeah, the sound ROM isn't the correct ROM. Hmm, that's going to be a problem because it's a strange surface mounted type without any flash equivalents. I guess I'll have to do it the hard way and manually wire in an EPROM. First I need to check the datasheet for the real ROM and get the pinout.... To my surprise the TSOP48 Type II ROM pinout matches the DIP42 version exactly, just the top 3 pins on both sides are not connected. And we already know the DIP42 version is equivalent to a 27C160 EPROM. Great! That makes it easy to wire up. I grabbed a spare blank 27C160 EPROM and programmed it with the data for the sound (SND.U52). I need to make it easy to wire up so first I spread the legs apart then mounted it erm..... onto the board using hot glue in the missionary position... erm... no, no, in a position directly opposite the solder pads where the original ROM was. Now it's ready to be pounded into submission. Just remember if you are going to do this kind of extreme manipulation make sure you keep it trimmed neat and tidy because nobody likes a messy job. We're going to end up with a pile of spaghetti anyway so try to minimize it as much as possible :-) Thankfully the data is 8-bit so only half of the data lines are used. I can see that on the PCB because the upper 8 data lines are not connected to anything. A 27C160 is switchable between 8-bit/16-bit by tieing the BYTE pin (32) low or high, meaning I saved some time by not having to add the extra wires for D8-D15. So after some hours of precision wire cutting and meticulous soldering this is what we have now.... Now working perfectly, graphics and sound :-) If you are paying attention you will see that actually I'm only saving 7 wires because pin 33 is D15/A-1 which is used in the 8-bit mode. With all that sorted I pulled the EEPROM from both the newly working Dragon Blaze and the other Mahjong G-Taste boards and dumped them for MAME so the hacks can be removed. The original EEPROM from Gunbarich seems to be bad, it won't read and gives a bad connection fault on pin 6. It appears to read something out so I'll let a higher authority take a look and decide if it's ok. Over-all this was a successful conversion and a couple of issues in MAME got fixed as well :-) P.S. I've split the older news out to separate pages (like in previous years) because the screws holding the top header were starting to come loose due to having too much bullshit hanging there. So the front page is now a bit lighter on the load ;-) 28th July 2015 With the extra time I have available to me now, I've been looking around for nice undumped PCBs. A few days ago I came across a very rare game never before seen for sale anywhere so I bought it with the help of some additional funds from a couple of paypal donations. I can't say any more yet but rest assured it's a unique and wanted game. Note this is the only kind of PCB I will be buying in future, should the same situation arise again..... we already have a clone king for everything else. So with that item snapped up you might be asking 'what's next'? Well, I can easily continue to look and buy undumped items providing finances are there. I have many thousands of dollars worth of dumping equipment, many years experience dealing with complex electronics and a proven track record of several thousand dumps under my belt. It makes sense to keep doing what I have been doing since 1999 and use my equipment and knowledge for the good of the emulation community, especially with the free time I now have. Things can be as they were a few years back with lots of PCBs arriving every few weeks if a surplus of funds exist. With that in mind, I know there are many people reading this who have enjoyed MAME for many years, support what I am doing and what I am planning for the future. If you want to see more exciting and interesting undumped PCBs arrive and be dumped for MAME, my paypal account is always open to receive your donation. You don't need to ask or inquire, there is always something out there. To ensure these can actually be secured just click the big 'DONATE' logo in the main header above. Note if you want to make regular donations, the donation page now has a check box to set your donation as recurring monthly because several people enquired about wanting to do that. Remember, without your support my good work can't continue. With your support and donations more undumped PCBs can be purchased and dumped.... In other news a Lindbergh RED Satellite version arrived. This is basically identical to the normal Lindbergh RED with an additional smart card reader plugged in via USB and mounted inside the box. The game that came with this system is Answer X Answer V1.0 The photo doesn't show it but the top is silver. Also another Lindbergh game, Initial D Arcade Stage 4 DVD & dongle. Thanks to Darksoft 24th July 2015 A mahjong game arrived a few years back called Mahjong Gorgeous Night but somehow slipped through the Guru-Cracks.... oops! Luckily this has a regular Z80-based TMPZ84C015 as the main CPU, not the usual nasty Toshiba TMP91P640 MCU. I dumped it a few days ago and as usual, Luca got onto it immediately and emulated it in record time :-) Thanks to Dyq for the reminder :-D 8th July 2015 Luca got onto the Mahjong dumps and here's two emulated. All 5 Mahjong boards have now been dumped. Out of the remaining PCBs not shown above only the IGS game was not already dumped although it won't work because it has an IGS027A CPU with undumpable internal ROM. Mahjong Electromagnetic Base and Mahjong Ougun no Pai are in MAME already so these PCBs were actually not needed. The latter has a TMP91P640N with internal ROM and is undumpable. 5th July 2015 I have plenty of free time now. You can read why here. These arrived around April/May.... Mahjong Ougon no Pai (Dynax, 1991) Mahjong Electromagnetic Base (Dynax, 1989) Mahjong Super Dai Chuuka Ken (Dynax, 1995) Mahjong Shuang Long Qiang Zhu 3 (IGS, 1999) Mahjong Magic Lamp (BMC, 2000) Thanks to Dyq Another Mortal Kombat bootleg and Street Fighter 2 CE bootleg Thanks to Marco 15th April 2015 Recently I got hold of a bunch of random PCBs. Some of them could be undumped versions. At the very least they will be used to make Guru-Readme's and added to MAME source. The games are..... Leland Ironman Ivan Stewart's Super Off Road Namco Winning Run (in metal box) Sega Scud Race Drive Board TAD Toki Data East Mutant Fighter Sega Scud Race MPEG Digital Audio Board Sega Shinobi on System 16B Sega Monster Lair III on System 16A (still working with the original battery in the FD1094!!) Technos WWF Superstars Atlus Power Instinct (bootleg) Sunsoft Shanghai II Strata Hot Shots Tennis Technos Shadow Force Sega Title Fight on System 32 Multi Sega Stadium Cross on System 32 Multi (x2) Unknown (28-way mahjong pinout, with black epoxy all over it. Looks like someone plugged it into JAMMA and blew it up) Thanks also to Marco for sending out an alternative Street Fighter 2 CE bootleg PCB and a Tecmo Cool Boarders PCB. 4th March 2015 I dumped the remaining available Koei PasoGo carts and our 'PC' man, Carl, did some work and got something working on screen. Nice :-) This is the PasoGo game list taken from the back of the instruction booklet that came with the last cart (KS-1010), showing all 10 games. 18th February 2015 A couple of items arrived recently.... 2 bootleg Mortal Kombat PCBs. Thanks to Marco! Another one of the rarer Namco System 246 games.... which has been anal-probed ;-D Actually it was covered in 1/2" of dirty black dust (which is potentially fatal if left there for years with dampness) so I just pulled it apart and cleaned it up then documented it for MAME. The Namco System 246 / 256 status page has also been updated. B-I-G thanks again to Darksoft!