Home Page Forums MAME MAME First Bandai RX-78 game dumped, but not working

I adjusted the driver to handle 32k carts, and then rearranged the rom a bit, and sekigahara loaded up and showed a screen. However there's keyboard issues that prevent it going any further.

The motocross lower rom has a problem, both halves are identical. Can you try dumping it again?

The tape could not be loaded, producing a CHECK SUM ERROR. It sounds rather wobbly, any chance of a redump?

Haven't heard from SSJ in a long time.

Do you have the RX78 currently in your possession?
Glancing over the MAME driver, there is a lot of guesswork, caused by not knowing the hardware details. Simple things like the Z80 frequency and the amount of internal RAM.

After poking about a bit with sekigahara, got this:

I do have the RX78 in my possession and will be happy to assist however I can with improving the driver. The colors as have been noted before are wrong and are in Takeda's emulator as well.

I'm a bit confused with Motocross, upon looking at the chip numbers i see 64 in them so maybe it's a 2764 chip and not 27128. So I redumped both and put them in the folder, once as 128 and once as 64. Hopefully these may work, I just wonder if they're linked differently due to being the longer PCB than small one all the others were.

Tried another recording of the tape, this time at 22hz though for me that made no difference sadly.

That's promising on Sekigahara! I got a bit of translation from the manual on how to maybe play the game?

1) Press space
2) "Which number will Tokugawa Ieyasu be?" will be displayed on screen
3) Tilt joystick 2 in any direction from 1 through 4.
1 corresponds to unit 7; 2 to unit 8; 3 to unit 9; 4 to unit 10.

Also just uploaded photos of the 3 PCB types I came across while dumping these. The first pick contains pcbs for Motocross (The long one) and sekigahara. The other one is the one i found in all the others.

I contacted the guy who's blog i linked to earlier with the pinout for the long cart and he said that was his pro wrestling cart. Which mine was the shorter PCB. So both types were used for the various games it seems. Glad that was the only long one I have run into so far.

I managed to find Excite Baseball and Space Enemy on some random Japanese shopping site and had a friend in Japan order them for me so will have those soon and get them done. We're getting there!

are these standard audio tapes?

remember volume can be important (you typically want as high as possible *without* clipping)

Sample at whatever the highest setting your input device has, if you're using something with fancy equalizer settings, make sure they're all turned off etc. as bass enhancements and fake spatial effects aren't going to do us any good here as they're more likely to corrupt the data ;-)

try a different cassette deck etc.

most cassette media, unless it was well stored, is gong to be in a bad state at this point unfortunately.

sometimes with these old games, the game was recorded on the b-side as well, so if one copy becomes corrupt the other might not be (no idea if Japan did this too)

I'm not sure if these are standard tapes but I am assuming so. Yeah I recorded at a high volume while avoiding clipping, i will try on a higher rate again just to see. No equalizer settings or anything either.

This is a deck I recently picked up that successfully dumped quite a few Fujitsu FM-7 tapes I had previously had issues with on two other decks with so I think it should be okay hopefully. Tapes are for sure are a difficult media to preserve though in my experience.

I've been around here

This progress is promising, finally we are managing to make some decent progress preserving this incredibly rare (and expensive!) system.

Would be nice and some others interested on this would let us know so we can coordinate on buying some of the rarer games if/when they show up, we've seen some going for up to $2k a pop.

@hap, Hubz has the system already asked him to check the colors which are very wrong. Would be great to have that fixed while the system is still on his possession.

@Hubz, 2 more games that's pretty cool! Seems bringing some attention to the system is paying off. I hope the tape is good, if ranger_lennier was around he might be able to help cleaning up the audio, but he seems to be MIA unfortunately.

I've scanned all the stuff now so I can upload whatever you need for that as well. I've uploaded the Sekigahara manual to that previously posted link if you'd like to view to maybe help play the game.

hap, i scanned the system manual as well which may have some of the information you're looking for. It's uploaded here - https://archive.org/details/bandai-rx-78-gundam-manual-scans