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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
