Home Page Forums MAME MAME TMS-09xx/1xxx thread (was New Dumps)

That's exactly what I used to think reading Kevin's posts! But it turns out that once you get some experience doing this stuff, you can run through a lot of possibilities pretty quickly. I really didn't think I'd get this one to dump, but I just tried a bunch of stuff and got lucky.

The TMS1x00 chips have 3 programmable features- the ROM itself, which contains the game program; the output PLA, which determines the O outputs patterns; and the instruction PLA, which let the chip's opcodes be customized. We can't electronically dump the instruction PLA, but I think we've only seen modified instruction PLAs on TI calculators. We can't directly electronically dump the output PLA, but I have been able to get TMS1100 chips to execute opcodes to output all 32 possibilities, which is just as good. We can electronically dump the ROMs of TMS1100 rev B chips, and 7 bits of each byte of the TMS1000 and TMS1100 rev E chips.

For the chips that only output 7 bits of ROM, we can execute the instruction at each byte and then look at the program counter to see if the instruction was a branch, which means the high bit was a 1. But sometimes those results are ambiguous, and we can't tell for sure. We could most likely figure out the ambiguous bytes by running the game in the debugger. And we could probably figure out the output PLA of TMS1000s by looking at the PCB and running the game. And it's not impossible that we could figure out a customized instruction.

The other TMS1x00 chips (1400, 0980, etc) look like they have circuitry that would only be used to dump the ROM, but we haven't figured out the method. But someone might; Igor told me he spent every day for a month trying different things to get the chip in the Russian LCD games to dump!

So more TMS1x00 chips are dumpable now than before, but there are still some where we can't get a complete dump. But even dumping 7/8 of the ROM can be useful- I decapped the TMS1100E from the Radio Shack Microcomputer Trainer and damaged the die so that I couldn't visually dump all the bits, but someone dumped the chip electronically, and between the two of us, we had all the bits!

More like Crab People

Btw, why not to use the descreening filter on the backgrounds to remove those offset printing circles? These aren't visible to the eye on the real thing, but are perfectly visible and annoying on the modern displays even if resized and opened in the small window.

Entex Pac-Man 2 artwork is re-done:
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Z_Imgs/MESS/artwork/epacman2.zip
And a version with the all-red Pac-Mans:
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Z_Imgs/MESS/artwork/epacman2_red.zip

Hey Rik or hap, if you're gonna update artworks after you create them, could you possibly either ping the thread or turn on the timestamps in the directory browse? I almost didn't realize bultrman and cdkong had been updated once again.
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Z_Imgs/MESS/artwork/
http://tsk-tsk.net/net/temp/

When it comes time for 0.173 I want to make sure MESS Artwork page has the latest, I'm sure AntoPisa wishes the same as well

Got it. TMC0274N2L P DAS 8101 and TMC0355CNL P CD2602 DU 8127

Stiletto, sorry I wasn't paying much attention to this thread yesterday, yeah I will poke you on the chat if something's updated =)

TMNT seems to act randomly when using the second bomb in Game 2. It sometimes freezes right away, sometimes beeps weirdly and allows to continue until the next item is grabbed, then hangs. Also, I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with the air meter.

Awesome work on those graphics and on making these work, by the way.

I always post in the thread here when I upload a new version, that's the only way I know to tell people I'm updating them.. Or is there another thread you are referring to? (This is the only thread I follow here...)

Added timestamps too, that should help.

Ah, okay. No this thread is what I meant. Anyhow it was maybe cdkong I was concerned about and... oh, "ZIP file is updated."
I guess I was reading too fast and missed that. If it's not asking too much, could you post the link again when you do that please? Thanks.

I uploaded the Spelling B 2nd generation info: www.seanriddle.com/tmc0270.html

I messed up and didn't think about putting a logic analyzer on the TMC0355 until after I had decapped the TMC0274. When I tried to electronically dump the TMC0355, I ran into the same problem as I had with Mr. Challenger- the chip clocks itself, and my rig gets out of sync with it. With Mr. Challenger, about 20% of the dumps were identical, but I dumped this one hundreds of times with no duplicates. So I decapped it and visually dumped it. The data is in the same format as Mr. Challenger, so I verified the words and pointers.