Home Page Forums MAME MAME Do you know about the Bandai Playdia?

I've just been reading about the Bandai Playdia. It was released in Japan in 1994 and reminds me of the Casio Loopy from 1995. Both are were for kids, and both have great content for girls.

Is anyone aware of a driver being worked on for this or of an emulator elsewhere?

Here is a video on the Playdia:

We know about it. I don't know what's known about the internals though.

There's a PR open with some CD dumps: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/3189 , but without a driver it doesn't make much sense to merge it.

Here's a PCB pic (credit: incog): https://imgur.com/a/1LO1QKo

According to Robbbert there are at least 2 chips with internal ROM:

uPD78214GC = CPU with 16K of ROM and 512 bytes of RAM, various i/o, uart, timers, etc

TMP87C800F = CPU with 8k ROM and 256 bytes of RAM, various i/o, timers, etc

We emulate both of those CPU architectures, if not those specific chips (78K-2 and TLCS-870). Presumably at least whichever is the main CPU could be trojaned, but I'm not volunteering :-)

I'm not sure there's any external code on the disc, unless I'm thinking of a different platform, so trojans might be more difficult than you'd think.

I just went on Ebay to see if I could buy one to send to whoever wants to trojan it, but it's far more expensive than I thought. I just wasn't expecting it to be a collector's item... I thought the system wasn't supposed to be very fun.

Neither was the Philips CD-i, but prices are through the roof on players there, too. The retro market's pricing is sadly extortionate these days.

Everything is a collectors item these days unfortunately, prices have skyrocketed during the last couple of years and show no signs of dropping back.

Ebay is not a good place to buy something like rhis thjough, you'll find much better deals on Japanese auction sites like yahoo, rakuten, etc.

here's a message to those "collectors" who just sell their shit for "money": STOP CHARGING HIGHER PRICES!!! THEY'RE ALL INACCESSIBLE!!! VALUE DOES NOT EQUAL MONEY!!! NO ONE CARES IF YOU NEED MONEY!!! GO HOME AND TAKE YOUR GREED WITH YOU NOT SPREAD IT TO OTHERS LIKE IT'S SOME SORT OF VIRUS!!!

Same price hikes as we're now seeing for a lot of the 'crap' we picked up when I was buying random bits and pieces.

I'm glad we picked up what we could while it was still available for cheap as I hate to think of the struggle we'd be facing if we'd waited another 10 years.