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Originally Posted by hap
What's disappointing?

That patent description contains more than enough information to make an emulator for Rockwell B6000.

Oh, really? I hadn't even looked at it.

[EDIT] I guess? Still seems pretty high-level to me, not what I'm used to seeing in datasheets. If you say so, then that's good. smile

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I've looked through a few boxes of stuff recently and noticed that I also have a Mattel Baseball handheld.

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I dumped the S&S TMC0351NL and TMC0352NL and the Vowel Power TMC0350NL/CD2302, and got the same bytes as the previous dumps.
I do have one odd issue- the data is dumping at a different address than it should be. Something about how I'm setting the address must not be correct, since all 3 VSMs are offset by nearly 1K.
I built a very simplified interface- just power and ground and 4 signals (CLK, M0, M1 and DATA/ADD8). I tied the address lines to ground with resistors so that the address is loaded with 00000, then read 262,144 bytes to cover the full 18-bit address range (it takes 54 seconds).
The '352 and '350 dumped all the correct bytes, but about 1K sooner than they should have. The '351 started dumping in the middle of the ROM, then dumped a bunch of zeros, then dumped the beginning of the ROM. When I cut and pasted the two parts together, they were correct.
It appears the address is somehow getting loaded with 3F000+/- instead of 00000. It's usually 3F002, both when doing sequential dumps and powering off between the dumps.
I've used a logic analyzer to compare the signals to the datasheet's timing diagram and everything looks OK. My timing is not rock steady; it varies a bit but stays within range (100-200KHz). But all the bits are dumping correctly; it's just the address that's wrong....

I blowtorched the S&S TMC0271NL and TMC0281NL. Unfortunately, the '271 die stuck in the plastic, and when I was working on it I must have stressed one corner, because about 1/4 of the chip flaked off. Of course that included part of the ROM array frown The '281 came out fine. I've only got quickie ICE composites so far- www.seanriddle.com/tmc0271quickice.jpg and www.seanriddle.com/tmc0281quickice.jpg ICE didn't do a very good job, and I'll replace them when I have time. Not surprisingly, the '281 looks a lot like the '280 on siliconpr0n, and the '271 looks a lot like their '2708.

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Originally Posted by ranger_lennier
I've looked through a few boxes of stuff recently and noticed that I also have a Mattel Baseball handheld.
Can you open it and check out the CPU? The case might have those funky triangle head screws, but I can usually get a small flat blade screwdriver to work.

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that's unfortunate, better luck next time =)

I've added a mix bag of roms to the new tispeak.c driver in MESS:

For snmath: the mcu rom from the patent i typed in recently, the 2708 PLAs from the recent die pic, and the vsm dumps we had.
snspell: the mcu rom typed in by Lord_Nigh, the 2708 PLAs, and the vsm dumps of the 1st US snspell release.

After improvements to the CPU core emulation, the roms boot up and look like they're trying to communicate with the 5100 speech chip. I believe the next step is to improve our 5100 emulation: it currently lacks ctl-read support. The speak & spell hardware relies on it not only for speech, but it also reads text from it.

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Originally Posted by seanriddle
Originally Posted by ranger_lennier
I've looked through a few boxes of stuff recently and noticed that I also have a Mattel Baseball handheld.
Can you open it and check out the CPU? The case might have those funky triangle head screws, but I can usually get a small flat blade screwdriver to work.

It does have the triangle screws. I couldn't get any of my screwdrivers to work. I'm visiting my parents in a few days, and I'm sure my dad has a much better screwdriver collection than I do. So I could try that.

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Originally Posted by seanriddle
I've only got quickie ICE composites so far- www.seanriddle.com/tmc0271quickice.jpg and www.seanriddle.com/tmc0281quickice.jpg ICE didn't do a very good job, and I'll replace them when I have time. Not surprisingly, the '281 looks a lot like the '280 on siliconpr0n, and the '271 looks a lot like their '2708.

The PLAs are all visible on the tmc0271, and 80% of the rom is intact; between that and the patent rom we may be able to get something that runs.

High res images plz :P

LN


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I figured out the VSM dumping issue- I was waiting the extra time (80us at 200KHz = 16 clocks) after the dummy read in the initialization, but not after the dummy read after setting the address. I guess starting to read early interrupts the address load. Now all the VSMs are dumping as expected. I'll dump the 2 chips on the working S&S just to make sure there are no surprises, and I'll blowtorch the '351 and '352 from the other S&S just to take a look at the dice.

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We got Speak & Spell and Speak & Math to a playable state. The output PLAs differ though, and we only have the one from snmath. So indeed, if you have higher resolution photos of tmc0271, it'd be very useful even though the bottom-left part is a great piece of liquorice. (yeah i'm craving candy a bit right now;p)

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Bonus link to imgur album for people who haven't compiled their own MESS: http://imgur.com/C7qxS6A,ovl9du5,BIE0lzZ,sbQOy1h,yEOeHt3,Iyx8qLf,0qpG0kQ#0

1) Code Name: Sector
2) Comp IV
3) Mathemagician
4) Merlin
5) Simon
6) Star Wars: Battle Command
7) Tandy-12

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