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

D'oh. I didn't think to do that since it was "just" a TMS1000 and we have data sheets. But more info is always better.

And my post was unclear- Baseball 1 has a 47pF cap and a 43K resistor always connected, and the switch adds in the 150K resistor.

Well I'm finally here! Sean, did you ever get the TMS1xxx chips to dump electrically? I don't know if I heard if you did or not.

If we can get a better die shot, I might be able to poke around on the TMS1400 to see if I can figure out how to electrically dump it vs. the blowtorch and typing method.

I successfully used the die shot for the NEC D650 to figure out how to electrically dump it, which is how I got the D552/3 dumps for emulating 4 different VFD games.

Turns out a similar method worked on the HD38800/HD38820/HD38750. I actually found factory test code in these parts which I then used to properly dump every bank including the "pattern ROM".

Cool! No, I see the "cycle alignment pulse" or whatever you want to call it, and I have gotten the same repeating sequence of bytes from different chips, but never an actual ROM dump. I got frustrated and have been just blow torching them. I'm building a huge stack of boxes, cases and PCBs with no chips. I kinda feel like a rogue Santa's elf who's destroying games instead of making them....

I've got 3 big Gimp XCFs of TMS1400s: a 6000x5000 top metal shot of Split Second, an 8000x6500 acid shot of Bankshot, and an 8000x6500 acid shot of Total Control 4.

http://www.seanriddle.com\splitsecond.xcf

http://www.seanriddle.com\bankshot.xcf

http://www.seanriddle.com\tc4.xcf

I've also got a 9Kx10K top metal shot of the TMS1100-G die from Super Block Buster that was undumpable.

http://www.seanriddle.com\sbb10000.xcf

I can make other pics as needed- just let me know.

Hap emulated a TMS1100 that you dumped, but we don't know what it is. It's not the TMS1000 M32018 that you also sent to Visual 6502 to decap, but a TMS1100 labeled MP3403 DBS 7836 that you said came off some game board with 7-segment LEDs. Any chance you still have that game board to help ID the game? The reason it's interesting is that MP3404 is Merlin and MP3405 is Amaze-A-Tron. Hap hooked one of the outputs up to a virtual speaker, and it plays different tunes when you mash the keys.

I uploaded the Entex Baseball (1) ROM array with the top metal layer removed. I checked the bits and I didn't find any differences.

I also got the Speak and Read and the black Entex Space Invader with the TI chip. I'll measure the clocks before I decap it. As well as the case and MCU, the overlay is different from the gray one. Makes me wonder what happened that they couldn't use anything from the original run.

Yeah I will take a look. I am not sure if resolution will be good enough to make out the transistors though. Right now I have been dumping CPUs for VFD games, and so far there's only two or three games with TMS parts. The rest appear to be mostly HD388xx and D553's and their friends.


The story on that is kind of a weird one. Had a friend visit me from canada about 10 years ago. He got two boards from a surplus electronics place for $1 each. The boards had 5 7-seg LED displays on each and the MP3403 along with lots of the world's crappiest sockets for incandescents, and some driver chips.

The boards are fairly large, around 10-12" across by 6-8" high. He wanted the displays, so he desoldered those and left me the balance. I still have them, but they are at the bottom of my board box. I talked to hap about it and was going to find them and take pictures and trace it out.

I don't know what game it went to, and it's possible the game was never released.

So far I have been doing pretty good on dumping handheld game micros, I've got 16 or 17 games now and have pulled the VFDs, vectorized them, and dumped some of the micros. I am waiting to confirm my rom dumps are good before I dump the rest because I made a custom adapter to dump the QFP ones, and I don't want to desolder them until I know the dumps are good.

So far I haven't actually killed a game, I will be putting these all back together when we're done.

Aha, I wonder if maybe that board is from some kind of redemption game. Seems like a board like that would cost too much for a home game, let alone a handheld.

Have you dumped any Rockwell chips, especially the PPS4/1 MCUs like the MM76EL? The data sheets mention a test mode to verify ROM contents, but I haven't found any details. When I have some time I'll try activating the test pin and see if I get lucky and it just starts spitting out data, like the COP444L.

Also, do you have any info on Rockwell calculator chips? We've been trying to figure out the Mattel handhelds, which seem to be B6001 and B6100 series chips, but haven't found anything but a few mentions in magazine articles and a couple of patents. I bought a couple of calculators with Rockwell chips, but they both are PPS4/1s, and the B6001 is much simpler.

That's very possible- there's edge fingers on the board where spade terminals plugged in it looks. I will do a full board trace in a few days maybe.


Not yet, but I will poke it soon. I bought a game (Mattel World Championship Football) that has no less than TWO MM78 chips in it. I have them removed and was going to try and poke around with the test pin to see if I get lucky.

I have a COP411 to dump also but there's a complete procedure fully documented to dump them so I'm not worried there. It's the sound chip in the handheld Turtles game. Nope it's not the same as the one on the Adventure vision even though both are made by entex.

There's another mitsubishi CPU that's in the Coleco Frogger tabletop that also seems to have a test pin. I hope I can dump that as well. The datasheet calls it by a strange name which implies it's probably a test pin.


Not a thing unfortunately. I have one of those mattel football games with the chip in it. It's board-only and the chip is dead from what I recall so you can have it if you want it for decapping.

My handheld directory is located here with dumps, pictures, and pinouts for all the things I have worked on:

blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/

Once Hap verifies my HD388xx dumps (hint hint :-) I will dump the other HD38820's. I won't remove them from the adapters until they are verified. I'm 99.9999% sure the code on them is good but the proof is in the emulation. We really need that HMCS programming manual. I know it's being scanned so hopefully that will be done soon.

Yup, I got it from him a few days ago and added a very preliminary MESS driver for it moments ago. PCB wiring info would be great =)

Will do!

http://www.seanriddle.com/bankshot.xcf and http://www.seanriddle.com/tc4.xcf seem to be 404.