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SnakeGrunger

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Hi everyone,

I am a big fan of the Tetris Grand Master series. The first one being quite "affordable", the third one, being TypeX (PC) based and easily cracked, but the second one remains the absolute (lol) most expensive title in the series, myself having tried to bid on one at auction and being outbid every single time.

Talking with @twistedsymphony he did mention TGM2 being the same board as some Mahjong titles from the same company. The main obstacle was, however, the footprint of mask roms on the board, which is a very uncommon TSSOP-II, and there does not seem to have writable chips anywhere on the market that could be used as drop-in replacements.

I brought it upon myself to check pinouts of such chips and find not only suitable replacement, but map out adaptive PCBs that can be used to connect the differently shaped and pinout chips to the existing footprints on the board to give the cleanest result I can create.



So here it is, two small PCBs designed to allow other footprint but compatible flash chips to be mapped onto the original Psikyo board. Remaining chips from the original game, in this case G-Taste Mahjong, does not interfere with the game if not removed, as I'm guessing the game program does not access that section of the address space. There are no exposed wires, however underneath the top two boards, I have to redirect two /CE wires through two holes, on which the flash rom chips lay over, 100% hiding them. This makes it very hard to fix if there was a problem, but I was extremely careful in not making shorts and triple and quadruple checked my PCB layout before laying the boards over it.

One problem is that since the pitch for these TSSOP-II chips is 0.8mm, this is smaller than what chinese PCB fabs allow for castellated holes, so I had to use solder paste and a heat gun over exposed pads underneath the boards to make contact, which was hard and at 3 positions did I just jump those connections with 32AWG magnet wire on an exposed pad on the opposite side when I could not get a connection.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAKILWbk8U

Game works perfectly, animated backgrounds, sound effects, etc. Very glad !!
 
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@SnakeGrunger I hope you were able to grab a bunch of PCBs before you posted this... ;P

I think Tetris is awesome but I have never been sure why this version costs so much!

I'm a fan of the Atari version for causal play, but Tetris Effect in VR is where it's at today!
 
@SnakeGrunger I hope you were able to grab a bunch of PCBs before you posted this... ;P

I think Tetris is awesome but I have never been sure why this version costs so much!

I'm a fan of the Atari version for causal play, but Tetris Effect in VR is where it's at today!
The grandmaster series was meant for those who destroyed the Sega Tetris game. This version is basically the separator between the casuals and savages.

For Tetris effect I'm genuinely not a fan of it as the game eats inputs even if you set your controller to hardwire mode
 
Looks like I'm gonna have to check out this conversion setup... Would like to see how it measures up to an original board
 
as in conversion vs original TGMTAP2. it's me being curious
It is exactly identical. It is the same board, and the data is 1:1 with the original.

This is like wondering if there's a difference between using a 1:1 burned copy of *insert playstation game here* vs an original.
 
@SnakeGrunger I hope you were able to grab a bunch of PCBs before you posted this... ;P

I think Tetris is awesome but I have never been sure why this version costs so much!

I'm a fan of the Atari version for causal play, but Tetris Effect in VR is where it's at today!
The grandmaster series was meant for those who destroyed the Sega Tetris game. This version is basically the separator between the casuals and savages.
For Tetris effect I'm genuinely not a fan of it as the game eats inputs even if you set your controller to hardwire mode
Yeah, I watched the TGM Champion play the NES Championships and they talked about the differences (spoiler, he lost). It's pretty crazy!

I'm for sure a casual, but you are 100% right about the delay, I know if I can feel it, it must be shit for the pros. I just love the game, I do get the Tetris Effect (TM) if you will when I play... :P
 
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