Home Page Forums MAME MAME MESS Dumping Project ?

9 more added.

Did someone already dumped Gakken Compact TV Boy?
Or at least have one of these in possession?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ELCcgu-RwE

I believe ranger_lennier has one with all games and if I'm not mistaken attempts have been made to dump it already, but were unsuccessful.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=804&st=2 seems to suggest it's been tried without success, and the cost of decapping is prohibitive on a per-cartridge basis.

If each cartridge really actually has the CPU, RAM, and ROM in one chip, that's going to be a royal pain.

Maybe there's an "exploit" for the 6801. Otherwise, it's pretty much going to *have* to be decapped.

I just glanced through the datasheet and the 6801 has a test mode and data sheet didn't mention any locking features. The mode is programmed by applying certain voltage levels during reset so dumping would need a special programmer.

Or an Arduino or similar single-board computer with a decent amount of GPIOs.

A cart of the super rare fighting bug for PV-1000 (only undumped game for the system) has recently shown up and we are trying to buy it, but will probably need some extra funds for this to happen as it won't be cheap.

If there's anyone here interested on chipping in please let me know. It will probably be a long time before another shows up.

Sorta a thread-necro, but better than making a new one? Anyone got advice on a good source for socket adaptors for a programmer, or any sort of general-purpose advice?.

I'm seeing a huge variance in price, obviously the "brand name" ones are significantly more expensive than the $5 ones from china, and I'm sure there's quality differences as well, but I'm also seeing build differences, adaptors that are clearly just a single board with the pins mapped from from the socket to DIP (e.g. PLCC32 to DIP32), and others for the same socket type but with 2-3 stacked boards and seemingly more going on there (resistors, jumpers, etc). I did some research but I feel like I didn't do the right kind, and that some of this is just stuff you get from experience.

I'm a newb to this but it's something I've wanted for a bit now and finally had a couple reasons for getting one and would like to play around a bit learning, though with luck could conceivably have use for this kind of thing for MESS later...I have various old ROM-based things.

Some programmers don't have enough I/O to support the required number of address and data lines for some chips. For instance, an EPROM could have 16 data lines. So the "fancier" adapters have latches to allow the programmers to talk to those chips. Those adapters are pretty much tied to one programmer (or manufacturer, maybe), since the latches have to be controlled by the software. If you are using your own hardware (Arduino, PIC, etc), you might be able to figure them out.

Jumpers are commonly used to remap pins for non-universal programmers. Jumpers are also often used to select voltage ranges.

So your choice is going to depend on the programmer you have and the chips you are most likely going to encounter. I built several adapters myself with sockets and breadboard and point-to-point wiring, but those cheap ones are very attractive, especially since I don't use them that much.