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Nemesis1207
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Reged: 08/06/14
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Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision
06/27/18 01:55 AM


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.







Entire thread
Subject Posted by Posted on
* Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Nemesis1207 06/21/18 06:48 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Haze  06/21/18 02:11 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision gregf  06/21/18 02:51 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Nemesis1207  06/22/18 02:08 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Haze  06/23/18 06:26 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Nemesis1207  06/25/18 05:42 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Hammy  06/27/18 03:27 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Nemesis1207  06/27/18 04:45 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Hammy  06/28/18 12:09 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision jonwil  06/25/18 02:16 PM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Nemesis1207  06/27/18 01:55 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision Haze  06/22/18 03:08 AM
. * Re: Undumped earlier Sega Hang-On revision *edit* gregf  06/21/18 01:13 PM

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