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

Was the code submitted (GitHub) to support the Coleco Frogger game?
I think OG made already a artwork called cfrogger(?)

Games using an unemulated MCU won't be added before the MCU is emulated in MESS.

Could you try dumping that one by the way?
The LCDC font gfx ROM.

Understand, thanks.

hap: I'm sure that's been done many times. you can't directly dump it (easily) but visually dumping it is no problem. I did this for the noritake VFD displays with HD44780 interface but it was a work project. I just took the documentation and manually banged in the bits into a text file and wrote a program to convert it back into a binary.

Once I got an HD44780 LCD from a copy machine, which had a really strange font ROM in it. Unfortunately I am not sure if I still have the chip; I removed it and put a "Standard" chip on the LCD, and I am not sure if I saved the old one. from what I recall, it had "buttons" made up of ROM characters, like boxes with text in them which showed up next to keys on the display. Display was 40 by 2 line one.

Yeah, that's also how MESS got the chr rom, typed in from the bit patterns in the datasheets.
Which revision did you type in? We only have A00.

Looks like we may be partially in luck on Horoscope and Brain Baffler. When I was putting together info on the PPS-4/1 variants, I ran across part # B90xx in the 1981 Rockwell Electronic Devices Division Data Book, which says that's model MM78LA. There's very little info beyond an entry in a comparison chart, but that leads me to believe that it uses the same opcodes as the MM78. It has the same ROM and RAM sizes (2K ROM, 128 nibbles RAM), but has a few new features- speaker output, including an 8-bit tone generator counter, and 14 segment outputs, using a 32x14 PLA. (Brain Baffler has an 8-character 14-segment text display.) MM78s have a test pin, so it's possible that MM78LAs do, too. But I've been unable to find any more info anywhere.

The other PPS-4/1 chips have part #s ranging from A75xx to B86xx, and the chips in Mattel games Battlestar Galactica, Football and Baseball are labeled B60xx and B61xx. I think that indicates that these chips aren't quite PPS-4/1; I have some Rockwell calculators with chips labeled A48xx, B50xx and A59xx. If we're lucky, the chips in the Mattel games share enough characteristics with the PPS-4/1 that we can get them emulated.

I've decapped Battlestar Galactica, Football and Baseball. BSG has 512 bytes of ROM, and Football and Baseball have 896 (the PPS-4/1 chips don't always have power-of-2 pages of 64 bytes).

After Kevin dumps the MM75 and MM76EL chips that I sent him, I'll decap them and see how similar they look to the Mattel chips. If they are close, then I should be able to figure out the bit mapping between his dumps and the ROM array pics, and I can apply those to the Mattel ROM array pics and see what I get. If we're really lucky, the opcodes will be the same as PPS-4/1.

Rik-
Can you read the label on the chip in Mattel Gravity? Patent 4,364,619 shows a QIP chip, which I assume is a B60xx like in Battlestar Galactica (and I think, Auto Race). An interview with Mark Lesser says he programmed Auto Race, BSG, Football, Baseball, Brain Baffler and Horoscope, but doesn't mention Gravity.

It's a B6102-11 with a date code of 8020.
Nothing else on it but the Rockwell logo.

The Horoscope chip has MM95 above the B9001...

Thanks. Brain Baffler also has MM95 on it. I guess they used that name as well as MM78LA, or maybe MM95 is a later, similar chip.

B6100 is Football and B6101 is Baseball, so I bet Lesser programmed Gravity, too.

Battlestar Galactica is B6001, and I bet Auto Race is B6000. I'm not sure if Football 2 has a Rockwell chip. I know Basketball, Armor Battle and Sub Chase don't have Rockwell chips, and neither do the Funtronics games.