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Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
#377042 - 06/21/18 06:48 AM
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I've been going through a stack of systems I've acquired over the years, testing and cataloguing everything properly. In the case of my arcade boards, many of these were bought as untested or broken for bargains, and went straight into storage for future projects. This is certainly the case for my Sega Hang-On board, which has literally been sitting in the original shipping box I got it in, on a shelf in my garage for the last four years. Here's the picture I had saved of it from the ebay auction:
I dug this out over the weekend, wired up a harness and plugged it in, and sure enough it wasn't working. Immediately on power-on, I was presented with a screen full of garbage, similar to this one:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L0R-HMkl3BM/V...00/IMG_3470.JPG
Since this garbage appeared the very instant of power-on and changed each time, I assumed this was data from uninitialized memory, and that this memory was supposed to be cleared by the CPU(s) shortly after boot but wasn't being, so I started looking at the CPU board. I found it odd that every EPROM on the system had a hand-written label. I decided to dump and verify the ROMs on the cpu board first before moving on any further. The dumps went well and were consistent, and the data looked good, but when I looked for the corresponding MAME roms, I discovered the dumps I'd made weren't in there. The EPROM labels for the program code on my board are as follows:
EPR-6838
EPR-6839
EPR-6848
EPR-6849
EPR-6850
EPR-6851
In the "hangon2" set I found four roms marked as "a" revisions with the same EPROM numbers, but the contents didn't match. Somewhat concerningly, that same set contained name matches for EPR-6838 and EPR-6839 without an "a", but mine still contained a different code revision. I went ahead and did a dump of all ROMs on each board. Here are the board pics:
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/IMG_0741.JPG
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/IMG_0742.JPG
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/IMG_0744.JPG
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/IMG_0747.JPG
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/IMG_0750.JPG
The problem with this game is actually visible if you look closely at the CPU board. See if you can spot it, it took me half an hour.
Only six of the dumps from these boards are different from the base "hangon" set, the ones that contain the code for the primary and secondary CPUs. I found it interesting though that one EPROM was labelled as EPR-A6844. The contents of this ROM are a binary match for the existing EPR-6844 dump, so I'm not sure why this one EPROM is marked as an 'A' revision. Here's a link to the "upgrade" rom set, which I've informally labelled "hangon3". I included the "EPR-A6844" dump too due to the different name, even though it matches an existing dump.
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/HangOnDump/hangon3.zip
This set can load and run in MAME. I haven't looked for differences with the other sets, but I can verify this set of roms is for an upright version of Hang-On, not a ride-on version like the hangon2 set.
Adding this into mame is a bit unclear, as there's real confusion between this set and the existing hangon2 set. First of all, there's a clear and obvious error in the ROM naming for hangon2. In the current set, the rom names of epr-6838.ic63 and epr-6839.ic51 are wrong, as the ROM numbers have been swapped for those IC positions. See the following image, taken by the guy who originally submitted the hangon2 roms to mame:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150224223839/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cmonkey/IMAG0528.jpg
You can clearly see the chip in position IC51 is EPR-6838, and IC63 is EPR-6839. Somehow the dumps got mislabelled along the way. The original picture from that board along with my boardset confirms the correct order, so the roms should be renamed, which would also make the subcpu ROM name order consistent with the other hangon dumps. The current epr-6839.ic51 should become epr-6838.ic51, and epr-6838.ic63 should become epr-6839.ic63.
Even with that confusion cleared up though, it doesn't solve the problem that EPR-6838 and EPR-6839 are both labelled the same on my board and this one, and yet they clearly contain different code. My boardset doesn't have original labels though, so it's possible that it should have some kind of revision letter, but the guy who wrote them didn't bother to add them. Confusingly, both boards have "rev A" on them though. It does appear my board has had a ROM change, as those EPROM labels are too clean and white to have been on this board since it was made. They should have at least turned yellow like the board stickers, so it's likely someone copied these EPROMs from another system. If those were marked with an "A" or the like though, surely he would have copied that when writing the labels? Why would he have written EPR-A6844 on one of the other chips if he wasn't copying revision letters? But at the same time, why is EPR-A6844 a binary match for the EPR-6844 rom dump in other sets, which aren't labelled with an "A"? And why go to all the effort of copying the EPROMs at all? Every chip is labelled with a new label, and the datecodes on plenty of them are well into 1986, which is well after Hang On was first released in 1985. Why then do they contain an earlier revision of the game than has previously been found? Wouldn't this dump have been discovered by now if it was being sent into arcades for two years? If the EPROMs are from a later system, you'd think this is a conversion, but why then is the board marked with an original Hang-On sticker?
It's all very confusing. To add some more confusion, there's also the fact that the (speculative) ROM names for the hangon2 main CPU code are also EPR-6848, EPR-6849, EPR-6850, and EPR-6851, allbeit with an "A" suffix as the board was marked revision A. The main CPU code is definitely different between the upright and ride-on versions though, so why would they use the same ROM numbers? That board had black labels with no writing on the main CPU roms though, so the ROM numbers were unknown. It seems likely the ride-on ROM names for the hangon2 set are guessed wrong, and should actually come later (IE, EPR-6852+). The sub-CPU sticker was genuine though, and its contents are different than mine. I believe, but can't confirm, that those ROM names actually came from the 420-5244 Hang-On manual for the ride-on version (IE, this one: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/162773340773), in which case, we might have the rather horrifying case of Sega using the exact same EPROM number for what amounts to two totally separate "branches" of this code for two distinct cabinets with separate code requirements, the upright and ride-on versions of Hang-On.
So, maybe this new set is the original revision of the upright hang-on, or maybe it's revision A, or maybe it's something else entirely. No idea, I give up. All I know is, the EPROM names here are really screwy.
At any rate, enjoy the new dump. Oh, and the board is up and running now. Somehow the guy who had it last managed to insert the secondary CPU the wrong way around. I spun it back the right way, and the board booted and ran perfectly. 
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| gregf |
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Ramtek's Trivia promoter
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision *edit*
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377047 - 06/21/18 01:13 PM
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>I've been going through a stack of systems I've acquired over the years, testing and
>cataloguing everything properly. In the case of my arcade boards, many of these were bought
>as untested or broken for bargains, and went straight into storage for future projects.
>This is certainly the case for my Sega Hang-On board, which has literally been sitting in
>the original shipping box I got it in, on a shelf in my garage for the last four years.
>Here's the picture I had saved of it from the ebay auction:
Impressive writeup there. You might have a couple other pcbs that might come in handy for helping document earlier already supported rom sets in MAME.
Edited by gregf (06/21/18 02:53 PM)
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377048 - 06/21/18 02:11 PM
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fwiw MAME already recognizes everything in the zip you uploaded
[MINGW64] D:\mame2018\200618>mame64 -romident k:\mameseed\hangon3.zip
Identifying k:\mameseed\hangon3.zip....
epr-6838.ic51 = epr-6919.ic51 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
= epr-6919.ic51 hangon1 Hang-On
epr-6839.ic63 = epr-6920.ic63 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
= epr-6920.ic63 hangon1 Hang-On
epr-6844a.ic119 = epr-6844.ic123 endurob2 Enduro Racer (bootleg set 2)
= epr-6844.ic123 endurobl Enduro Racer (bootleg set 1)
= epr-6844.ic123 enduror Enduro Racer (YM2151) (FD1089B 317-0013A)
= epr-6844.ic123 enduror1 Enduro Racer (YM2203) (FD1089B 317-0013A)
= epr-6844.ic123 enduror1d Enduro Racer (YM2203) (bootleg of FD1089B 317-0013A set)
= epr-6844.ic123 endurora Enduro Racer (YM2151) (mask ROM sprites, FD1089B 317-0013A)
= epr-6844.ic123 endurord Enduro Racer (YM2151) (bootleg of FD1089B 317-0013A set)
= epr-6844.ic123 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
= epr-6844.ic123 hangon1 Hang-On
= epr-6844.ic119 hangon2 Hang-On (ride-on)
= epr-6844.119 shangonho Super Hang-On (Hang-On conversion, Japan, FD1094 317-0039)
= epr-6844.119 shangonrb Super Hang-On (Hang-On conversion, bootleg)
= sho-philco-s-22-c-d2.bin shangonrb2 Super Hang-On (Hang-On conversion, Beta bootleg)
= epr-6844.119 shangonro Super Hang-On (Hang-On conversion, ride-on, Japan, FD1094 317-0038)
= epr-6844.ic123 sharrier Space Harrier (Rev A, 8751 315-5163A)
= epr-6844.ic123 sharrier1 Space Harrier (8751 315-5163)
epr-6848.ic6 = epr-6915a.ic6 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
epr-6849.ic8 = epr-6916a.ic8 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
epr-6850.ic20 = epr-6917a.ic20 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
epr-6851.ic22 = epr-6918a.ic22 hangon Hang-On (Rev A)
Just as you say, the names are different
So there's no new revision here, just different names
Unfortunately as your board has handwritten labels it's likely that it was a user upgrade, maybe from an older MAME (or other emulator) romset with the incorrect names.
The fact the CPU was inserted the wrong way around may also suggest that the original board had a security module instead, and somebody was trying to convert this to an 'unprotected' set and messed up at the final hurdle. We have no dumps of protected Hang On sets, only a protected Super Hang On using the same PCB, although a conversion FROM Super Hang On would explain why every single rom appears to have been replaced (all your labels are handwritten)
Either way I'm inclined to think this isn't "from factory" and that the labels on your chips may actually just be adding to confusion rather than helping to resolve it.
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| gregf |
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Ramtek's Trivia promoter
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Haze]
#377050 - 06/21/18 02:51 PM
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>Just as you say, the names are different...So there's no new revision here, just different names
>Unfortunately as your board has handwritten labels it's likely that it was a user upgrade,
>maybe from an older MAME (or other emulator) romset with the incorrect names.
>The fact the CPU was inserted the wrong way around may also suggest that the original board
>had a security module instead, and somebody was trying to convert this to an 'unprotected'
>set and messed up at the final hurdle. We have no dumps of protected Hang On sets, only a
>protected Super Hang On using the same PCB, although a conversion FROM Super Hang On would
>explain why every single rom appears to have been replaced (all your labels are
>handwritten)
>Either way I'm inclined to think this isn't "from factory" and that the labels on your
>chips may actually just be adding to confusion rather than helping to resolve it.
Bummer. Good to see you took a look at it.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: gregf]
#377063 - 06/22/18 02:08 AM
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Thanks Haze. I use MAME infequently and didn't know about the romident option, it certainly would have made things easier. I was doing manual comparisons, but I must have compared incorrectly to the base set, which set me off on a tangent. I've re-checked, and as you say this matches the existing "hangon" romset, just with different names. The board does seem to have been converted at some point, but it was HangOn originally as shown by the board labels. I guess it must have been converted back at some point, just with incorrect EPROM labels. Quite odd. At any rate, it's still the case that the current hangon2 set has the IC positions swapped for 6838 and 6839, probably worth fixing up sometime.
By the way, one of the reasons I'm dusting off my arcade collection is I'm planning to start doing some hardware testing on these machines in the near future, to help improve emulation. I did quite a bit of work on the Mega Drive a few years back now, but I'm interested in branching out. My general impression is that a lot of drivers in MAME have been written more by bashing away against the games than from testing and verifying behaviour on the hardware. I'd like to start more fully documenting some of these physical chips, and mapping out all their behaviour in various corner cases by constructing test programs to run on the physical systems, and publishing notes of my findings. At this point I've got most Sega arcade systems starting from the System 1 through to the Naomi 2. I've got a bit of an affinity for the 68000-based platforms, but out of curiosity, if you could pick any Sega arcade hardware to more fully verify its behaviour on the physical hardware, which one would you pick?
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377069 - 06/22/18 03:08 AM
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> My general impression is that a lot of drivers
> in MAME have been written more by bashing away against the games than from testing
> and verifying behaviour on the hardware.
That's correct, the majority of the emulation in MAME is figured out from game behavior, with a sprinkle of testing for some of the more non-obvious cases, but even then we don't have all the behavior perfectly nailed down (hence why even things like Sega System 32, and Jaleco Megasystem 32, where hardware tests were done, still aren't properly understood)
Things like sprite limits, edge cases and other hardware limits (waitstates, hardware DMA delays etc.) are rarely measured or implemented.
I know somebody did some tests with the Taito L hardware not long ago and documented some interesting findings about the behaviour of certain opcodes on certain regions, although due to the way the Z80 core is structured it couldn't be easily implemented.
> I'd like to start more fully documenting
> some of these physical chips, and mapping out all their behaviour in various corner
> cases by constructing test programs to run on the physical systems, and publishing
> notes of my findings.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm actually hoping MAME moves in a direction where if somebody writes comprehensive test software for a certain platform it can be included as to do regression testing against etc. That kind of thing is just as important as the actual games.
> At this point I've got most Sega arcade systems starting from
> the System 1 through to the Naomi 2. I've got a bit of an affinity for the
> 68000-based platforms, but out of curiosity, if you could pick any Sega arcade
> hardware to more fully verify its behaviour on the physical hardware, which one would
> you pick?
There are a number, things like System32 and Multi32 I'd definitely like to see 100% figured out as right now we still have video effects missing in Golden Axe ROTD (light turning on / off in caves) as well as holes in the background in places for Rad Rally / Rad Mobile and on Title Fight (Multi32) the background has been broken since the previous rewrite. Charles did a lot of documentation of the platform back in the day, but either some bits of it have been misinterpreted / implemented incorrectly or there are still gaps in the knowledge.
Really tho, take your pick, I'm sure there are things that haven't been fully documented for all the platforms.
Outside of Sega, the Taito systems like F3 need further testing, MAME's emulation is still lacking in places. Even a lot of the older Taito boards aren't fully understood. Plenty of the Jaleco and Namco systems have surprisingly weak emulation too, eg. even for Jaleco Megasystem 1 things like the raster interrupt effects aren't emulated (although it isn't clear if the protection devices are interfering with that) SNK's Hyper Neogeo 64 is a beast too, the driver there is almost entirely guesswork and the games make rather conflicting use of it.
but yeah, any kind of work in the field you're talking about is welcome, because while consoles tend to be comprehensively documented (because they need to be due to the sheer amount of software) most arcade stuff has not had that level of research applied.
even outside of arcades some of the less popular platforms are poorly documented, the Super A'Can is a fascinatingly flexible system for example, but the games make sure weird and inconsistent use of the hardware it's been virtually impossible to tie down specific registers to specific behaviours, or understand if some of the stranger modes it uses are just one-off hardcoded modes, or part of some more complex setup (eg the 1bpp mode used for the startup logo)
anyway that's drifted a bit off-topic, but yeah, there's a HUGE window for anybody still wanting to do actual hardware research and either document it or improve MAME directly.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377136 - 06/23/18 06:26 PM
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Oh, I should mention the Sega H1 hardware that was used for Cool Riders, it seems like it's just as capable as System 32, with some features even close to ST-V etc. and the display list system is closer to what I'd expect to see in a 3D system like Model 2.
Everything in that is a pure guess at the moment, a lot of the private buffers eg. sprite ram might actually be CPU visible, just being written indirectly as the 2 things we have on the hardware do things in rather different ways.
It seems to be one of the more fascinating pieces of Sega hardware, a possible final attempt at a Sprite Scaler board before they realised nobody wanted 2D sprite scalers any more.
I'm curious what that hardware could actually do if pushed to the limits.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Haze]
#377167 - 06/25/18 05:42 AM
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I'd really like to get my hands on the H1 system, as I'm intrigued by it too. Unfortunately it doesn't come up for sale very often. I've seen both Cool Riders and Aqua Stage go on ebay a few years back, but not for prices I'd be willing to pay. I had a line on a faulty one that I would've happily paid for, as even non-working or partially working systems are still very useful for reverse engineering, but the owner changed his mind in the end and decided not to sell. I hope to get this system at some point, as I'd definitely like to document the hardware. From a technical point of view it'd be a very interesting system, being the last of the "Super Scalar" line and created around 5 years later than the System 32.
I've focused exclusively on Sega systems (hey, I've got to draw the line somewhere!), but here's the "short list" of unique Sega arcade hardware I currently own:
-Dottori Kun
-Zaxxon
-System 2
-System 16B
-System 18
-System 24 (ROM/Disk)
-System 32
-System Multi 32
-System C
-System E
-Mega Play
-STV
-X Board
-Y Board
-Hang On
-Enduro Racer
-Model 1
-Model 2A
-Model 2B
-Model 2C
-Model 3 Step 2
-Naomi (Cart/DIMM/GD-ROM)
-Naomi 2
I have duplicates for some of this hardware, but those are the distinct systems I currently own.
Here's the list of remaining systems I definitely plan to acquire if they appear at a good price (and I have money):
-OutRun
-System 16A
-H1
There's a spattering of other notable but less interesting hardware I'd get if it's cheap, but these are the main ones left I'd like to acquire for their technical merit.
I'm probably going to start on either the System 16 or the System 32. The System 16 is closer to home, since it's 68000/Z80 based, so I can code for it in my sleep. I played around with the System 32 a decade or so ago though, when I broke the copy protection for SegaSonic Arcade. You mentioned a clear bug in Golden Axe II, and I have that game for the system. I might investigate that one first, and start getting a feel for the graphics hardware. Did an assembler ever turn up for the NEC V60? I didn't even have a datasheet for it back then. There's plenty of V60 docs now (although annoyingly still no V70 pinout), but I don't have any development tools in my archive, and if there's one out there somewhere my Google-fu is currently failing me. Are you aware of something lurking out there that can spit out V60 machine code? If not I might have to hack together a quick and dirty minimal assembler first.
I've also got a couple of dead FD1149's (System32 protection device) I want to get decapped too, as I'm really curious what's driving that. I'll probably have a crack at it myself. I've got some 70% nitric and 98% sulphuric acid in the garage (don't we all?), so I might as well. If it all goes horribly sideways I can send the "backup" device to Caps0ff. Hopefully we can identify a way to externally dump them, assuming there's some kind of data to dump that is. I'd also like to figure out how to externally re-program the FD1089/FD1094 modules. They must have been programmable externally by Sega, so we should be able to program them too. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, one project at a time.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377175 - 06/25/18 02:16 PM
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Has anyone tried to contact NEC about the V60/V70, see if they can provide any useful documentation or assemblers/compilers/whatever? The chips seem to be used in enough different bits of gear that its a lot less likely to be a "sorry, that's a custom part for a specific customer and we can't share it" response as happened with Fujitsu and the TGP chips on Model 1/2.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: jonwil]
#377207 - 06/27/18 01:55 AM
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I personally haven't, although I considered it in the last few days. Unfortunately it's a bit of a longshot. Even though information on these chips was publicly available, it was 30 years ago, and a failed device at that. You need to know exactly what you're asking for, you need to find the right point of contact, the person you get needs to actually want to help you for some reason (even though there's nothing in it for the company, and he really shouldn't bother), that person needs to know where to find the information, it has to be accessible, and it has to actually still exist. These barriers are huge in a reasonably large company that's been through a series of splits, mergers and acquisitions since they made this device. I personally doubt anyone could even find the information we asked for even if they tried. It was almost certainly never digitized, and it's probably sitting in a vault somewhere. It's not even NEC who owns it anymore, it's Renesas, but I bet these particular documents are still sitting in an NEC building somewhere. Never underestimate how many human failures could have occurred in recordkeeping over a 30 year period, even for documents that an organisation cares about, let alone ones they don't. I've had success in document enquiries in the past, but I've also had plenty of failures, even with an inside contact once.
In my experience, the best source for information today is old IC "data books" or conference papers from the era. Those were the "shopfronts" for these companies back in the day, and that's where they were trying to tell you how great their chips were. Data books come up for sale from time to time on ebay, and you can (painfully) mine the information from conference papers via Google Books. IE, a quick search turned up this:
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=VPZ...pport+Functions
Here we have the article "V60/V70 Microprocessor and its Systems Support Functions", by Y.Yano, Y.Koumoto, and Y.Sato, from COMPCON 88. You can use the text search feature in google books to find the next OCR'd text portion, and you can use the OCR'd text to find the next image strip, and slowly piece the article together bit by bit. There's at least one strip omitted from each page. but the text search allows you to fill in the blanks. Here's an example from when I was digging for information on the Fujutsu "TGP" DSP's used in the Sega Model 1:
There's quite a bit of info to mine from these articles, and the best part of them is, being academic articles, they cite references. The reference list gives you links to other material, so once you find one resource, you find lots of others, including often the exact names of the official reference documentation, so if you do want to make a request for documents, you know exactly what to ask for. You can also cross-reference the authors, as if they've written or spoken about the device once, they've often done it several times. I've managed to mine quite a bit of information using this method in the past, including a few successful document requests, like this one:
http://nemesis.exodusemulator.com/Arcade/Model1/FSTJarticle(1989-vol25-no3-p171-193)s.pdf
That was scanned on request from the original and sent back to me, but that only happened because I found it referenced in an article, and I knew exactly what to ask for. I've also bought a few IEEE articles and the like where they were cited and I thought they'd be worth a look, again from reference lists.
For the NEC V60 though, we don't need to worry too much. The most important information is now available (IE, see here: https://archive.org/details/NEC_V60pgmRef), and we have a pinout for the PGA version of the V60. Fortunately, Sega transitioned from the PGA to the QFP V60 for the System32, and they did it by manufacturing later PCBs with both the holes for the PGA version, and the traces for the QFP version, so they could use their stock of PGA chips completely (those chips weren't cheap!) then start using the QFP versions seamlessly, so we know the pinout for that chip too from that board. We also mostly know the pinout for the V70, as the Sega System Multi 32 used most of the same chips as the System 32, with a V70 CPU instead, so you can mostly derive the pinout of the V70 by comparing its connections to the other chips with the corresponding connections to the V60 CPU with the known pinout. I've done some of this tracing myself while repairing a few boards I have.
I've got a massive hoard of information I've either acquired or figured out myself over the years, but it's mostly scattered between some disjointed forum posts, semi-organized files and notes on my hard drive, source comments in my emulator, or just plain floating around in my head. I'm planning to try and clean everything up and start sharing it at http://techdocs.exodusemulator.com. Sometime over the course of this year I'm going to start putting stuff up bit by bit. The website mechanics are mostly in place now (markdown files and small data hosted in git, translated to static html via Jekyll and hosted on GitLab pages, backed by a large file store on Google drive), I just need to actually buckle down and start seeding it with content.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377232 - 06/27/18 03:27 PM
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WOW Nemesis! A name from the very long ago past! Nice to see you're still about.
And DOUBLE WOW talking about sega H1 - THE holy grail system...
I have one of each game on the system H1 but one is in use and the aqua is a spare for my cool rider cabinet.
To be fair, the mame emulation of cool riders is very good considering the hardware.
Aqua stage not so much. That said... aqua stage board don't do much either without the pinouts or knowledge of what strange and wonderful things it needs wiring up.
If one board goes bad or sell the cabinet you will be first to be contacted as it's in my best interests to get this documented.
I am also around and happy to run tests on the H1 hardware should anyone require.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Hammy]
#377236 - 06/27/18 04:45 PM
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Wow, getting your hands on both games for this system must've taken some effort. As it happens, since you have access to the hardware, you can help with this quite a bit. I'm interested in looking at this system from a hardware perspective first. When you're looking at a system from a software perspective, the first thing you want is a memory map. When you're looking at a system from a hardware perspective, the first thing you want is a schematic. If you don't have a schematic but you do have the hardware, you can figure out a lot of information with a few datasheets and many hours of tracing and probing. If you don't have either though, some really good pictures can still tell you a lot. I've seen very few pictures of the H1 PCB, and none of the video board, and the ASCII art in the MAME driver doesn't really cut it. If you could take one of your H1 systems, separate each board from the stack, and take some really clear high resolution pictures of each pcb on both sides, where the IC labels are readable and the board traces are as clear as possible, that would help a lot. Taking a single picture for the entire board, then four closer pictures of the board, one for each quadrant (with some overlap), is usually a good idea.
It sounds simple, but you'd be surprised how often questions come up when trying to emulate a system which you can answer just by looking at the physical board. These pictures by themselves won't radically improve emulation, but they at least help to establish some definitive facts about the system. Documentation can be wrong, research can be flawed, and sources can be incorrect, but pictures of the real system are indisputable fact, and we need as much of that as we can get.
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
[Re: Nemesis1207]
#377247 - 06/28/18 12:09 AM
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Not so bad, The cabinet was a very lucky find, and smitt let me buy aqua stage from the dumping union. I know where there were 2 more non workers.. they most likely have gone by now tho as last time i searched was a couple of years ago.
The pcb's are out there but they are in demand as one pcb controls 2 sides of a twin machine.
They are also getting to a temperamental age.
The original aqua stage pics are not that bad:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1UOT1dXYKBP2Or67WYcflAO1Ydt25bh5a
It's a good thing because my camera only seems to be any good at close up's.
Will dig out the pcb soon and get some close ups of everything including the underside.
There are no schematics available, however i believe the guru and Charles have done some trace out work with the hardware in the past.
There may also be something on scrap paper about the sound output section as had to do a repair on the surface mount op-amps on the 1st board.
If there's anything in particular you need buzzing out it's no problem at all, or if you want to do a schematic from the pics and have me fill the blanks that can be done also but i don't have time to do the complete pcb..
The PALS are also dumped, but from memory not sure if that's the address mapping on this system or not. Should test the dumps really, when i dig the pcb out for pics they can get tested.
I also have a manual for the jap twin machine cool riders ( one online is the US model )
Picked up 2 scanners to do the job with that but not had the time yet.
Need an aqua stage manual to see what needs hooking up for the game to work.
The hardware in general seems to be a tech demo. It's like they spent years on the hardware but got the games made fast and don't use much/any of the extra power.
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