[RELEASED] All IT (Incredible Technologies) Eagle security chips (U53, 90S2313) + EEPROM generator (U61) - Big Buck Hunter, Golden Tee Fore!, etc.

[Ape Cosplay]

Hi everyone,

MAME only has a few, here are all the missing ones (US region now for USA, UK, AU, CAN, NZ and MEX regions).
Not all have been tested but are assumed working.
Credits to Apocalypse.

Big Buck Hunter (bbh) => e2-bbh0.u53
Big Buck Hunter - Shooter's Challenge (bbhsc, bbhsca) => bb15-us.u53
Big Buck Hunter II - Sportsman's Paradise (bbh2sp, bbh2spa, bbh2spb) => bbh2-us.u53
Carnival King (carnking) => ck1-us.u53
Golden Tee Fore! 2004/2004 Extra (gtfore04, gtfore04a) => g44-us-u.u53
Golden Tee Fore! 2005 Extra (gtfore05, gtfore05a, gtfore05b, gtfore05c) => g45-us-u.u53
Golden Tee Fore! 2006 Complete (gtfore06) => g4c-us-u.u53
Virtual Pool (virtpool) => itvp-1.u53

 

[Ape Cosplay]

OK let's try to answer the many questions people have about converting those games.

1) Which game can I convert to what?
You can actually convert pretty much anything to anything with 2 restrictions:
- Big Buck Hunter Call of the Wild and Carnival King require the FPGA to be in version 9. It can be checked upon boot and will appear as "Hardware Version". The FPGA can be updated from the game installation CD and possibly with a chip programmer (not tested)
- Some games require 16MB of RAM but some (early?) green motherboards only have 8. Supposedly one could populate the empty RAM footprints to upgrade their board.

2) What is needed for a conversion?
- Security chip (U53, 90S2313)
- EEPROM (U61, 93C46) => more information at the bottom of this post (Note: it comes in SOIC8 package and is soldered to the motherboard)
- HDD image

3) Isn't serial involved in the security scheme?
No. (Maybe there was a check done when online updating your board but this service is long dead)

4) Are there different HDD images for each region?
No, the region is stored in the security chip.

5) What about the different BIOS images?
The main difference between them is the maximum supported size of the HDD. If you want to play it safe simply use the 2.09 version (fits in a 27C080 EPROM).

6) Now all security chips (U53) are available in MAME or here but what about U61 (EEPROM)?
You can get it from MAME (NVRAM folder) but it will have the fixed serial 1118482. Be careful if you manually modify the serial as checksum must be recalculated otherwise the EEPROM will be wiped on boot up!
To make your life easier Apocalypse has written a quick and dirty tool to generate the EEPROM files for any serial with proper hardware version, keycode and checksum recalculation:
- enter the desired serial
- select the game from the list
- click generate

You're using that tool at your own risks! Don't overwrite the OG chip, just use a new one.

 

[Ape Cosplay]

Pushing it further!
Having all AVR (security chip) files for the US region was already a great achievement, now we also have them for UK, AU, CAN, NZ and MEX!

Apocalypse:

Disassembling both the AVR code and main CPU code (Nec VR4310) I found out the keycode also contained the region on the 4th byte (XXXXXXXX).
According to MAME bit 1 is for tournament boards, bit 2 I don't know, and from me experimenting, bits 3, 4 and 5 (possibly more too) are the region:
xxx0 00xx = USA
xxx0 01xx = UK
xxx0 10xx = AU
xxx0 11xx = CAN
xxx1 01xx =NZ
xxx1 10xx =MEX

Mexico isn't listed in MAME and at the same time I couldn't find some of the listed ones (Europe, Sweden, South Africa).
Could be game dependent, I'm not going to try every possible value, the easiest way would be for people to report the displayed keycode for their region upon boot.
Anyway, I have created the AVR files for the UK, AU, CAN, NZ and MEX regions, keeping the tournament bit intact from the available files in MAME.

First post has been updated.

 

[hatmoose]

Great to see plucky NZ represented Thank you very much for your hard work on this, some absolutely iconic games in that list, BBH in particular, nothing else quite like it