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

I'm interested in the whole Merlin die shot too, to confirm if one of the bits was dumped bad or not. (see notes at the bottom of this file: http://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mess/drivers/merlin.c )

Nice! This is totally new to me, so emulation might be possible one day great news. Anyone knows if all Game & Watch games use an MCU or do some rely on discrete logic only?

Thanks for the list hap, nice to have it all put together in one place.

That pic reminds me that to learn more about the MCUs in the R-Zone Ranger sent me, I decapped the handheld LCD games TopGun and TMNT, which used similar Sharp chips: http://www.seanriddle.com/tiger.html

The ROM for TopGun is on my page as well as a scan of the PCB. If anyone's interested in emulating those games, I can figure out how the segments of the LCD are controlled and I can upload TMNT.

I'll find the pics or re-shoot the die with the top metal layer removed.

According to the interview, the first few were discrete logic. Of course, there's been great work emulating discrete logic arcade games lately, so I'd say there's still hope there.

I uploaded the Merlin ROM array and output PLA:
www.seanriddle.com/merlinromacid1280.jpg

www.seanriddle.com/merlinopla.jpg

I'll upload the instruction PLA later.

I uploaded the instruction PLA:
www.seanriddle.com/merlininstpla.jpg

I also converted the fixed Merlin dump back to raw bit order and superimposed the bits on the ROM array picture, and didn't find any differences. Then I changed byte $96 from $1E to $5E and converted that file to raw bit order and I can see the extra bit. So for whatever reason, Kevin's dumping method added that one bit. It would be very interesting to figure out why.

I uploaded Entex Baseball (1) info:
www.seanriddle.com/tms1000.html

Here's a scan of the bezel:
www.seanriddle.com/entexbb1bezel.jpg

And here's a scan of the PCB for the LED positions:
www.seanriddle.com/entexbb1pcb.jpg

Ok, I've updated the MESS merlin driver.
I'm impressed your tool could read the Baseball game ROM data. It took me a while to verify, especially the denser areas.

I did Baseball manually, since it's too cold to go out and Whink the chip. TMS1000 only has 8192 bits I will verify it with my other program after I remove the top metal layer, but I'm pretty confident of the dump (even more so after you verified it).

If I were better at image processing, I'd write a program to take the top metal ROM array pics and highlight the 1 bits.