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Wmgwebb12

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Hey everyone,

We are trying to figure out how to slightly modify or interact with the software for Hoop Fever, an old basketball game from Ice Games.

There would not be any need for hardware modifications as we have already developed our own solution(s) for communication. We are currently able to communicate to the game and see the game communicating to us, but need a way to programatically add a credit and retrieve the score on game end. Again, we have created a hardware component to see the communication but don't know what it is 'saying'.

CAN ANYONE HELP??

Best,
William
 
Maybe if you post more details of your work someone here could help. It's very vague so far.
 
Every game already comes with a method of electronically adding a credit... just send a logical low to the service or coin inputs in order to add a credit.

As for interpreting the score data what you need to do is take a video of the score changing and then give us a time-stamped hex dump of the data you were reading while shooting that video so the various data reading can be correlated to the score changes. Check out my "Vs Billboard" thread for a good example of how we did this with the scoreboard on Sega Versus Cabinets.
 
To answer some things here: We currently can use picocom to communicate via the RJ11 port on the mainboard. We built a USB -> modem cable that has the proper transistors. We are able to see the game communicate and we are able to talk to it as well, it is just that we do not know what it is saying to us and we don't know what to say to it.

I am using the picocom that has binary to hex conversion. Problem is, is it isn't very clear on what is being sent across the wire.

We just need to know what to say to it and how to use the com port to send that message.
 
What is that RJ11 port currently used for? is it something the game uses to communicate between different boards, or was it an otherwise unused port that you found had some data running to it?
 
If it's a network link port then I'd be skeptical that you'd be able to use that to issue a credit.

Assuming you're using this just to collect score data, then my initial request still stands, you'll need to generate an output of the hex data communication between two machines with time stamps and compare that against a video of the score changing on the machines.

In order to reverse engineer something like this you need to see what the machine is doing and compare that against the data that is moving across the lines, from there you can begin to give the data context and narrow down the actual commands.

for example:
when the score on machine 1 changed from 5 to 6 it output this set of commands, and machine 2 replied with this other set of commands.

when the score on machine 1 changed from 6 to 7 it output this different set of commands and machine 2 replied with the same command as before.

Repeating the same thing in different contexts lets you see what data changes and what data stays the same and eventually you'll be able to identify some of the commands as structured start and and communications, other commands as identifying what type of data is being communicated, and finally the actual data you care about.

But we can't figure that out without actually seeing this data, and without actually knowing what was physically happening to the machine when that data was being transmitted.

for an idea of what I'm talking about look at this thread: NAOMI 2/Chihiro Card Reader Emulator (Initial D3/WMMT)

or this one: Sega ST-V/Model 2/Model 3/NAOMI VS Billboard Output.
 
the RJ11 port connects directly to the CPU (HC11). This is old hardware, so the com port connects directly to the CPU and is used to communicate directly with it. We were told by the original devs it is possible, but they are not willing to make any changes for us, so we have to resort to reverse engineering and disassembly.
 
If you believe you'll be able to do things such as issue credits then the above procedure still stands. just apply the context of inserting a credit.

eg: when a coin was inserted these commands were issued.
 
Our biggest more pressing issue is getting the final score. Adding a credit should be fairly simple.
 
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