MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Toaplan Decapping

> > I understand very well, you guys have explained the issues and challenge with that
> > sort of job, so it won't happen tomorrow nor the day after for good reasons.
> >
> > What I meant is for people who are in a hurry to play those few sound-less Toaplan
> > games, and if they are not aware it's a poor solution, well too bad for them...
>
> fair enough, at least you acknowledge that it isn't really a great solution, i've
> found it quite depressing reading elsewhere that people now consider these 'done'
> because of the sample support.
>
> getting the code out of the various MCUs on arcade boards is going to be a long and
> expensive task, not just toaplan, but plenty of the others too, I would say probably
> one of the most difficult and expensive undertakings we've seen, for results a lot of
> people aren't going to notice, but given the way PCB prices are rising at the moment
> there's room for debate there (and of course, the worst case scenarios of when
> prototypes have MCUs, nobody wants to risk those without a solid non-destructive
> solution! and yes, some did have MCUs, especially ones which were near production
> stage)
>
> we do need to work out what priorities are with such things, personally I'd say any
> MCUs containing important game data that can't accurately be represented without the
> MCU code should be the key ones, and as the Toaplan ones contain all the music
> sequence data (that you would struggle to reconstruct 1:1 from just hearing the
> samples or even probing the commands sent to the YM) those count.
>
> unfortunately previous decapping efforts, too many chips that weren't REALLY needed
> got sent, chips that when decapped told us absolutely nothing we didn't know, while
> ones that were critical to getting games running properly were left untouched. we do
> need to avoid a repeat of that ;-)
>
> decapping isn't even the magical solution it's made out to be, although it can tell
> us more about the chips in order to maybe find another way to read them out, anything
> that isn't using a MASK rom internally can't be dumped using visual techniques and a
> lot of these MCUs, including the Toaplan ones fall into that category. All decapping
> might help show us is where the protection bits in the MCU are, giving hints at how
> we might be able to wipe them in order to read the chip out without destroying the
> actual game data etc.
>
> the worst part is, none of this is something us software dev guys who contribute to
> MAME can really help with, it's in the hands of the hardware guys and those able to
> make contacts, and supply the funds + chips to make it happen.

You mentioned earlier in the thread that people who help on the non-arcade sytems in MESS/MAME have a lot better hardware dumping contacts than Guru's.

Would any of their expertise be of help on such specialized chips?

It can't hurt to ask, after all.