Home Page Forums MAME MAME Epoch Cassette Vision and uPD77X chips

Advanced a bit more.
The commands are 7 bits wide + a clock from cartridge and an ack from uPD779

here is a schematic of SD208 8049 based cartridge:

basic config from 8049 is
P1 : bit 0-6 : command bit 7 : clock
P2: 4 line of IO + ack from uPD779
bus: 4 lines IO

IO lines are direction + fire + game select + game start + unknown.

Nice to see some progress, also nice to hear you didn't fry your cart and/or console after all

Since the SD-208 is a 8049 too you can also dump that one right?

yes the dump should work, I just need to unsolder the 8049 and find my AVR dump code (my eprom programmer cannot read a 8049)

One of the designers of the uPD777 has posted some design documents, including the schematic and IC layout, at https://www.oguchi-rd.com/LSI%20products.php. This might be of some use.

This has been around for some time we already looked into it and sean even managed to decode de graphics rom. The program rom (and cpu) is still a big mystery though and those diagrams don't seem to help much on those. They are way over my head, but both sean and kevtris checked them out and don't think there's enough info there to figure the bit ordering.
Also unfortunately they don't show any way to dump them electronically so all games will need to be decapped. If someone can make any further progress that would be great though.
I tried contacting mr ogushi to see if he could provide us any further info, but never heard anything from him.

Any idea if the Soundic 290/hanimex hmg7900 would be easier to dump? If anything, could the game carts (aside from the first which I think is gobeurs) be dumped?

Should be the same thing, it seems it's the exact same chip with writeable memory. This is unconfirmed though, I want to send a machine for sean to decap, but I'm waiting for someone to send me another one from France since I want to keep a working one in case someone wants to try to reverse engineer it. Haven't heard from him for a while, but due to the corona pandemic people have other things on their mind so it might take a while longer to get it.

Sd-201 has nothing to dump, game is built into the console chip. Sd-204 is already dumped and sd-208 is dumpable as well not sure if Gilles ever got around to do so. The rest seem to use some motorolla mcus which sean thinks he might be able to dump electronically, I also intend to send some games with the console so this can be verified.

That’s great to know. Thanks for your interest.

I have the following Epoch Cassette Vision carts...
Baseball, Monster Mansion, Battle Vader, Yosaku, Monster Block & Galaxian.
If they are needed for dumping I could post them out to the person who can dump them. Or if/when a dumping method is finalised, I can dump them using whatever method is required. AVR is mentioned so I assume it is some kind of Arduino-like device that can be built from a relatively simple circuit diagram. Anyway, the carts are here so contact me if/when they are needed.

Guru
http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1_nbn/gurudumps/

Monster Mansion is already dumped/decapped the rest are still needed, but they can't be electronically dumped so the process will be destructive. If Sean is willing to decap them (and you're ok with the destructive nature of the process) you could probably send them to him.