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Midway (Williams) Y unit (Z unit and T unit) Discussion, Serial Numbers etc

mypinballs

mypinballs

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Bought myself another Y unit pcb recently to fix up. Smash TV! Fixed a lot of this era of boards over the years, as love the hardware. Probably because I've spent 30 years fixing pinballs so williams hardware is my happy place, ha ha. Also the diagnostic boot screen on this hardware is great to.

So thought id start a discussion on the hardware. First up Serial Numbers. Is there a place that documents the midway serial numbers so you can confirm from the official williams labels if the board is original or converted? Another cool thing on williams hardware is official serial stickers.

So far I have these (will update as I find more):

40003 - Trog
40004 (40104) - Smash TV
40009 - Terminator 2
40010 - Total Carnage
40017 - High Impact Football
40023 - NBA Jam
40025 - Mortal Kombat
40029 - Mortal Kombat 2
40030 - WWF Wrestlemania
40039 (44039) - Mortal Kombat 3 (Ultimate)
40043 - NBA Jam TE
40047 - Killer Instinct
40064 - Killer Instinct 2
40069 (44369) - CarnEvil


Secondly on the back of a smash tv pub (Y unit) looks like some bodge wiring, but seen it confirmed on a few boards now with the same serial number, so maybe is a factory alteration, but it doesn't seem to match up with the schematics. So unsure what its changing and why. Also smash tv pcbs have no revision number, but terminator 2 has rev b on the trace layer.

IMG_6057.JPG
IMG_6067.JPG
s-l1600.jpg


Something else I've always wondered is whether you could get Narc to run on Y unit hardware??
 
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You get everywhere mate, don't you?!
 
mypinballs said:
Is there a place that documents the midway serial numbers so you can confirm from the official williams labels if the board is original or converted?
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When I was developing my consolidation kits I ended up with a near complete collection of T and Y unit games and noticed that there were a lot of differences between the boards so I started cataloging the PCB IDs on the mobos and sound boards: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/187hDbbW7TGaGQd30-FcVxwTrSuexIaEoCB7RrBjhKyA/edit?usp=sharing
games like Smash TV are actually Rev "-" this is common in engineering revision schemes to make the original revision a "-", we can assume that this comes before Rev-A.

mypinballs said:
econdly on the back of a smash tv pub (Y unit) looks like some bodge wiring
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I can confirm that my smash has similar bodge wires.

Given that this is the earliest revision of the board it's possible that this is fixing a design mistake that wasn't caught before manufacturing.

mypinballs said:
Fixed a lot of this era of boards over the years
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I need to pick your bran because I have a few that need repair. A Smash sound board that doesn't work, MK2 that developed graphics issues before failing to boot altogether, and a NBA Jam that stopped booting for me as well.
 
twistedsymphony said:
When I was developing my consolidation kits I ended up with a near complete collection of T and Y unit games and noticed that there were a lot of differences between the boards so I started cataloging the PCB IDs on the mobos and sound boards: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/187hDbbW7TGaGQd30-FcVxwTrSuexIaEoCB7RrBjhKyA/edit?usp=sharing
games like Smash TV are actually Rev "-" this is common in engineering revision schemes to make the original revision a "-", we can assume that this comes before Rev-A.


I can confirm that my smash has similar bodge wires.

Given that this is the earliest revision of the board it's possible that this is fixing a design mistake that wasn't caught before manufacturing.


I need to pick your bran because I have a few that need repair. A Smash sound board that doesn't work, MK2 that developed graphics issues before failing to boot altogether, and a NBA Jam that stopped booting for me as well.
Click to expand...
Alas no serial numbers on your sheet :) I guess I am obsessed with these because in pinball they are the grail to have all your pcbs match your cabinet serial. ha ha. I think they are useful though to know which board is which originally to on arcade pcbs.

Shoot me a message on the boards no problem. Its logic probe and scope time on all 3 of them though :)
 
mypinballs said:
Something else I've always wondered is whether you could get Narc to run on Y unit hardware??
Click to expand...
You could always try to compile a version for that hardware. The code works and can be compiled for original boards, i did a build a while back.
 
Asure said:
You could always try to compile a version for that hardware. The code works and can be compiled for original boards, i did a build a while back.
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I am up for this. The amount of roms for narc originally is mental! If it not been done before I will start a thread about it and maybe make some rom consolidation boards or multi rom boards for other games to
 
NARC is also medium resolution isn't it? can the Y-Unit do medium res?
 
Here is an interesting page regarding NARC, It also links to GitHub. From the text in NARC.DOC it seems there was a standard resolution version made at one point. It describes how to assemble it but I’m not sure all the tools are available.
I’d love to try it out in std res but the look of the game in med res is what drew me in bitd so it may look strange.
https://tcrf.net/Development:NARC_(Arcade)
 
jamesv833 said:
Here is an interesting page regarding NARC, It also links to GitHub. From the text in NARC.DOC it seems there was a standard resolution version made at one point. It describes how to assemble it but I’m not sure all the tools are available.
I’d love to try it out in std res but the look of the game in med res is what drew me in bitd so it may look strange.
https://tcrf.net/Development:NARC_(Arcade)
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Interesting! I’ll have a read
 
mypinballs said:
Thought it was std res? Well that kind of kills the idea :(
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don't let that deter you.
looking at the driver they're a lot more similar than I thought.
if you look at void midyunit_state::zunit compared to void midyunit_state::yunit_core
you can see the master clock, pixel clock, and pallet entities are the major differences there.

heck, they appear to use the same memory map. and rom region sizes

really the only two differences appear to be the sound board and the resolution
 
twistedsymphony said:
don't let that deter you.
looking at the driver they're a lot more similar than I thought.
if you look at void midyunit_state::zunit compared to void midyunit_state::yunit_core
you can see the master clock, pixel clock, and pallet entities are the major differences there.

heck, they appear to use the same memory map. and rom region sizes

really the only two differences appear to be the sound board and the resolution
Click to expand...
Yes I was pretty confident I could make a rom set to work on y unit. I just need to work out this resolution stuff . The std res option mentioned is interesting though :)
 
Oh wow! There is some absolute gold in the files archived and I can’t wait to have a go at compiling a fresh set of narc files and roms. The setup is very similar to what I’m used to with my RFM pin2k updates

See this tid bit from the rom update notes. Classic software note.

“3.20 ADDED STUPID PEA BRAINED IDEA TO MARK A ROM GOOD IF IT ONLY DROPPED ONE BIT IN A BYTE. THIS WAS FOR ROM TEST. THIS WAS DONE BECAUSE THE 512 PARTS THAT WERE PURCHASED WOULD LOSE BITS OVER TIME. THIS DECISION WAS MADE BY WILLIAMS MANAGEMENT, AND IS ALSO A PRIME EXAMPLE OF THERE INIFINITE WISDOM. SURELY I JEST.- GNP(2/13/89)”

Ha ha ha 🤣🤣
 
I'll thank you here for adding tons of fun to my RFM, here's hoping you can get this going on other hardware :)
P.s. i have a T-Unit (and wolf units) +multisync monitors to test this, but it will be slow burn since we've got our second daughter last year, and arcade has been low on the priority list :)

Edit: I didn't even notice the docs on mid- and standard res rom building when i gave it a MAKE in dosbox some time ago..
 
Asure said:
I'll thank you here for adding tons of fun to my RFM, here's hoping you can get this going on other hardware :)
P.s. i have a T-Unit (and wolf units) +multisync monitors to test this, but it will be slow burn since we've got our second daughter last year, and arcade has been low on the priority list :)

Edit: I didn't even notice the docs on mid- and standard res rom building when i gave it a MAKE in dosbox some time ago..
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The docs on Williams stuff is always a great read :)

First though congrats on your new daughter. Always wonderful when you have a new person in your life. Thanks also for the RFM comments. A labour of love but worth it!

So today I will start to build a z unit dev environment and see how I get on. The fact there are std res build options is very encouraging. Plus the site linked above has some other games I like in it to ;)
 
Made some progress on a std res compile. Read ALOT of files and had some great info/help on links from @Asure . Have managed to compile the system and game parts. now working on sorting out the diag part, which needs quite abit of work to recompile with the later tools. I think the TMS34010 compiler tools used originally were earlier versions for narc and the ones included with revolution x are later ones used on y unit games and later. So narc being 'z unit' is kind of on its own until you update it all. There is certainly a lot changed in the way macros are created and written etc.

My thoughts is to probably write a new roms screen layout in the diag for the yunit narc roms once I get to that point.

Is great feeling when you get things to compile with new additiions

IMG_6160.JPG
 
If i recall, i built the luigi30 git repo with no issues, not sure which tools were used, i'm pretty sure it was just what was leaked at the time, the ones from RevX.

There's a set of others out there as well, maybe older? They are floppy images, and can be found here:

https://github.com/tms34010guy/tms34010-sdk
 
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