MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Question...

>Just figured the discrete guys had a set to work from first.

For Atari Shark rom set, I am certain they did have roms to work with. As mentioned in other post, some of the 1970s era pcbs such as a couple of the Atari boards have an odd setup in which the roms have to be handled carefully when using adapter to read the data from the roms. Andy W. had an informative explanation about some of the 1970s Atari boards when reading roms, but I misplaced that.

The Kee Games Tank rom is one of those custom roms which had to be indentified correctly beforehand before dumping data from the rom. I believe a rom of Kee Games Tank might have come from a repair shop that does repair pcbs, but not certain.

>That's definitely a unique way to go about working on something. I don't think I could
>spend that much time doing something like that only theoretically.

The only time that I recall logic schematics (for discrete audio only) were hand drawn from scratch was for audio for Spiders about 6 or 7 years ago iirc.

The part that would be preferable of not having to do is trace logic circuits of an entire pcb just to draw logic schematics from scratch in case logic schematics are hard to track down these days for some of the games. Several Meadows non-cpu videogames have had the associated roms dumped, but finding logic schematics for Meadows games is next to impossible. I believe they were printed separately from the green covered service manuals. I have never seen Meadows logic schematics before. The only one I do have is for Meadows Flim Flam cocktail table model, but it is a photocopy of a poor quality photocopy.

One of the former MAMEdev members preferred not to hand draw logic schematics for Ramtek Trivia and I would agree with that opinion after finally getting Trivia schematics 6 pages total (11 x 17 ledger size). Ramtek Trivia might look simple, but it involves a fair amount of work since it also makes use of a tape player system to handle 8 track data tapes when loading data (audio format) that a chip proceeds to convert audio data from tape to ascii text output of the quiz questions that appear as readable images on the monitor. An ingenious method imo since game developers/engineers had to find work arounds since chips were either expensive or technology was limited back in mid 1970s and companies wanted to keep manufacturing costs to a minimum if possible.