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

Hmm, single-chip combo of TMS1x00 and SN76477? Or did they just recreate all the sounds digitally?

The codes are A1-J10, giving 100 preset positions. I think that's an index into a table, since there are constraints on how the grids are populated.

A grid bitmap would take about 13 bytes per game, which seems like too much. 2 bytes/ship (start x, start y, size, direction) would reduce that to 10 bytes per game, and you could crunch that data into 1.5 bytes/ship pretty easily.

Let me know when you've got the driver working and I'll help figure out the missing bytes in the O output PLA.

Did it come with instruction manual? If so could you photograph it? I can't find the manual online for the 1977 version, only for the 1982 version.

BTW Here are the .pla files necessary for emulation: http://tsk-tsk.net/net/temp/bship.zip

I scanned the manual: www.seanriddle.com/electronicbattleship77.pdf

Other than the codebook stuff, I don't see anything in it different from the non-talking manual on Hasbro's site.

Thanks. I tried the test procedure and I think it works, by looking at what the game outputs on the O pins. Next is hooking up the SN76477.

Is the chip corner unsalvageable? I don't think I can get very far with the sound emulation myself.

Yeah, it's somewhere on my driveway, sorry. Even if it came off in one piece, it's only like 1/2 mm x 3/4 mm, so it's pretty tiny. I didn't even notice it was chipped until I looked at it under the microscope.

There's one on ebay now for $10+$15 shipping. I'll email the guy and see if he'll ship just the middle part for less.

I got The Generals today- thanks krick! I torched the chip and took some pics, but I need to clean off some stuck plastic with nitric acid. The top of the chip is labeled 8010 4E-0443 8014, and the bottom, very faintly, says 8010 PHIL. Turns out that 8010 is the part #; it's also on the die, along with C SMC 1979. It's definitely not an MCU.

Boo, I lost the bet.

krick you're not out of luck yet, but this will take a lot of effort to emulate and is way out of my league. I hope this sort of low-level stuff will be a candidate in the future.

I'm guessing that some of the chip is just logic gates for the piece comparison part.

What I don't understand how it plays noises and the victory tune (Taps). Is part of the chip analog for the tone generation?

Does emulating this stuff fall into the Derek Renaud / couriersud domain?

It's nowhere near the complexity of something like pong, so hopefully, it won't need a Dice-level effort.

I don't think there needs to be any analog. It is similar to, but simpler than, Simon. Just a state machine that gets inputs from the pieces, and some of the states output square waves for the tones.

The SMC databooks on bitsavers talk about their custom chip offerings: http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/standardMicrosystems/

The info changes from year to year, but one year they mentioned that custom work was about 1/3 of their revenue. And they mention the different industries that used their custom chips, including entertainment and toys.

They moved into networking chips and got bought by Microchip a few years ago.

After I clean up the die, I'll post the pics.