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RealMFnG

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post some pics of your 'dark' conversion process please :thumbup:
By request of the forum owner, here is my project log for my Major Title 2 conversion to R-Type Leo. I am still a newbie at all of this stuff so I have written this up so that someone with my experience level or lower can follow along and perform this themselves.

This effort consists of two phases which I shall discuss over two posts:
  1. Rom board jumper re-configuration (surgery/soldering is required)
  2. Rom burning/swapping
Stuff you will need for the first part is listed here:

  • Major Title 2 Irem M92 board
  • 3x jumper caps (.100"/2.54mm spacing)
    • Optional 2x jumper caps needed for running unencrypted sound roms
  • 3x Pin headers, 3 positions each (.100"/2.54mm spacing)
    • Optional 2x Pin headers w/3 positions needed for running the unencrypted sound roms
  • A good soldering iron with spade/flat tip
  • A solder pump
  • Needle nose tweezers
  • Flux
  • Solder
  • Cotton swabs
  • Isopropyl alcohol
  • A little tape
  • Minor soldering skills or some testicular fortitude

There are three jumpers that you need to reconfigure on your Major Title 2 board to prepare for the conversion to R-Type Leo. These jumpers are:
  1. J8
  2. J15
  3. J16
Optional:
Recent efforts have decrypted the sound roms for R-Type Leo. If you choose to run the unencrypted sound rom set, you must also reconfigure the jumper settings at:
  • J1
  • J6
The advantage of running the unencrypted sound rom set will be explained in the next post. Below is a screen a shot of where they are situated on the rom board. The J1 and J6 jumpers needed to run the unencrypted sound roms are boxed in purple:

WireBridgeOG_SVGA.JPG

Now, these jumpers are simply wire bridges soldered into place. That works great for the longevity of this game as originally intended. But doesn't work well for us tinkerers that want to convert this game to R-Type Leo. As we work to reconfigure these jumpers, there is a consideration we have to make here. Other methods discussing this conversion around the Internet simply state to replace this wire bridges once you have moved them into the alternate jumper position. Since this forum is populated by a bunch of arcade snobs (me among them), we are going to do this a little bit cleaner. There is one more ancillary benefit for doing this which shall be discussed later. For now, here is a snap of what the wire bride looks like at J8, J15, and J16:

WireBridge.JPG

To remove the wire bridges, perform the following:

  1. Apply a small amount of liquid flux on a cotton swab and brush it over the 3 points of the J8 jumper on the components side and solder side of the rom board. This helps the solder to flow easier. Do the J8 jumper first as this one has the most clearance and is the easiest one to do.
  2. Place your iron on any one of the 3 points of the jumper on the component side of the board and with the solder pump extract the solder for the thru-hole point until you can see space through the solder point.
    • Repeat for the two remaining solder points for that jumper.
  3. At this point, the solder pump should have pulled the solder from the other side of the board. If not, repeat step 2 on the solder side of the rom board.
  4. From the solder side of the rom board, place the flat side of your iron tip so that it touches both of the ends of the wire bridge. Apply gentle pressure as the wire bridge heats up. Do not push hard or your will bend the pins, making life harder on yourself. The idea here is that as the wire bridge heats, whatever solder is holding it in place shall melt and you will be able to push the wire bridge most of the way out. If you do this correctly, the pins will be flush with the rom board.
  5. Flip the board back over to the component side. Now you will have clearance under the wire bridge and will be able to use needle nose tweezers to pull the wire bridge out. If you are lucky, there is no solder holding the wire bridge fixed to the board and it will come right out. If you have any kind of resistance, DO NOT apply any force to pull out the wire bridge. Apply your iron to one point of the wire bridge and pull that side until the bridge comes free. Repeat the same for the other end of the wire bridge if needed.
    • Pay particular attention as you do this, be sure not to scratch the board with your tweezers! You may cut a trace in doing so.
    • Also be sure not to pull the wire bridge out if it is still soldered in place. You may pull the point along with it!
  6. Discard the wire bridge. You won't need them anymore.
  7. Apply a small amount of isopropyl alcohol to a cotton swap and clean both sides of the solder point of the flux residue.

The below photo is a blue jumper cap salvaged from a early 2000's era PC motherboard along with a row of .100"/2.54mm spaced header pins which I happened to have handy. It just so happens those salvaged jumper caps fit perfectly onto the .100 header pins! In any case, with some flush cutters, snip off 3 positions from this row of headers. You'll need three 3-position header pins as there are three jumpers we need to reconfigure.

HeaderNJumperCap.jpg
NOTE: If you decide you want to run the unencrypted sound rom set, you will need to snip off two more 3 position headers from your header row for J1 and J6. As mentioned earlier, this is optional.

Follow the below steps to install the new jumpers:

  1. Dry fit the header pins into the jumper point onto the component side of the board. If you removed the wire bridges from the previous step correctly, the header pin will just sit perfectly in place. If they don't, you have some solder blocking the header pin from sitting flush. To remove that excess solder, apply more flux and solder to the point that has the blockage. Then use the solder pump to remove the solder. This will clear the blockage. Be sure to clean with isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swab after you remove the blockage before proceeding further.
  2. With a cotton swap, apply some some flux to the bottom side of the header pins.
  3. Fit the header pins into the jumper solder points from the component side and with a piece of tape, tape down the header pins so they stay in place.
  4. Flip the board over to the solder side and apply solder flux to the jumper points
  5. Solder the header pins to the jumper points.
  6. With a cotton swab and isopropyl alcohol, remove the flux residue from the solder side of the work area of the board
  7. Finally, remove the tape as the header pin is now fixed into place with solder.
Congrats! Now repeat the two previous steps for jumper points J15 and J16. If you choose to run the unencrypted sound roms, you do the same for J1 and J6. Once done, the solder side of your board will look like this!

SolderSideSVGA.JPG

In reality, it doesn't look all that much different than from before you started this. But this photo just illustrates everything is in order now that the soldering is done with! You can now put away the soldering tools.

Now, we want to place the jumper caps over the header pins for Major Title 2 operation, and not yet for R-Type Leo operation. For Major Title 2 operation, the jumper caps should be positioned as follows:
  1. J8 = OT position
  2. J15 = OT position
  3. J16 = 2S position
And if you decide to use the unencrypted sound roms, you'll need to set those jumpers as follows:
  • J1 = S
  • J6 = S
Re-assemble the board completely, re-attaching the rom board to the main board. Screw everything back into place. Now hook up the board to a JAMMA cab to test if your board still works. If all is well, Major Title 2 will still boot up and work perfectly as below!

CheckingWork2.JPG

The reason we don't want to position the jumpers for R-Type Leo operation yet is because we want to eliminate or reduce the possibility that the solder surgery that we performed is incorrect in some way. It allows for less troubleshooting as we proceed to the next step in the next post.

Big thanks to @ekorz for the tip pointing out that the jumper solder points are indeed thru-hole type and using header pins rather than just wire bridges to get this going correctly.
 
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The 2nd Phase of the Major Title 2 conversion to R-Type Leo of involves rom burning, swapping of the roms, and re-positioning of jumper settings. The method we are performing allows the conversion to be easily reverted back to Major Title 2 (which is a really fun game). Given this, we want swap out all roms rather than erase and recycle the few EPROM's that are already on the MT2 board. There is one other consideration as we proceed forward.

The sound bin files for R-Type Leo are encrypted. The rest of the program roms, all available in MAME, are not. There was an effort by a UK programmer who goes by the name of vcx that released a hacked set of sound bin files. Unfortunately, there are sound drop out and cue issues with this hacked sound bins. Luckily, a member on this forum who goes by the name of Apocalypse picked up this effort and completely decrypted the sound roms. Details of his effort and the different approaches between vcx and Apocalypse's work are posted over at his website. He sells these roms over at his site and provides full support for your purchase.

This log will detail how to use both efforts but I encourage you to contact Apocaplyse and obtain the better sound roms from him. If you put in this much effort, might as well produce the best possible outcome for yourself.

The tools you will need are as follows:
  • 3/8" colored electrical tape (I used yellow)
  • A fine point black permanent marker
  • IC extractor or a small flathead screwdriver
  • Programmer (I used a Top3000)
  • A 1/4" sheet of foam rubber packaging
  • 4x - 27c020 EPROM's
  • 2x - 27c512 EPROM's
  • 4x - 27c080 EPROM's
  • 5x - 27c040 EPROM's
  • R-Type Leo MAME rom world version
  • R-Type Leo conversion sound bin files:
    • vxc's hacked set are posted on this site as IPS patches; search for them
    • Apocalypse's decrypted set can be purchased directly from him
Removing the EPROM's and Mask ROM's:

Not all of the ROM's need to be removed, the ones that do are identified in the photo (IC8, IC9, IC10, IC11, IC12, IC14, IC17, IC31, IC32, IC33, IC34, IC42, IC43, IC44, and IC45):

RTLConversionMap.jpg

Before removing the roms, you'll want to label them first! Doing so makes reverting the board back to Major Title 2 easy; it is also good tidy practice. Cut the 3/8" colored electrical tape into ~1" strips, label them "MT2 + IC Number". I wrote MT2 vertically so that I could write the IC number fairly large so that it is easily identifiable. Once labeled, you can remove them all in one shot. Then insert them into the foam rubber sheet so you can put it away for safe keeping. Here is a photo of how I did it:

IMG_1949.JPG

Burning & Installing the EPROM's

From here, you will need to burn the bin files to the EPROM's. As you burn the roms, label them with the with your electrical tape and marker pen with the IC number of the rom. Do this immediately after you burn the rom before you put the next rom into the programmer to burn or install them into the board. Doing so will prevent you from mixing up the IC's and relieve the pain of troubleshooting later. It is also a good idea to install the EPROM's onto the board as soon as you are done burning and labeling them. This will prevent mix-up.

The actual burning of the roms is quite simply explained best by vcx. Here is an abridged quote:
Using the R-Type Leo "world" rom set all but four of the eproms can be burnt as-is.


NOTE: You can skip the following in RED if you obtained the sound program roms from Apocalypse. The sound program roms he will provide to you are already patched and ready to be burned.

Patches need to be applied to the sound program roms, these are in the form of IPS patches which are commonly used for patching game roms with hacks and tweaks. An application such as "Lunar IPS" can be used for this.

Apply rtl-sh0a.ips to rtl-sh0a.bin
Apply rtl-sl0a.ips to rtl-sl0a.bin


The main program upper roms need to be doubled in size from 128k to 256k by appending the rom image to itself, this can be done within DOS using the copy command and its binary option.

DOS: copy /b rtl-h1-d.bin + rtl-h1-d.bin rtl-h1-dx2.bin
DOS: copy /b rtl-l1-d.bin + rtl-l1-d.bin rtl-l1-dx2.bin

Here is a list of rom images to burn, what type of eprom to use and which socket it needs to be placed in.

rom image burn > chip type into socket

rtl-000.bin > 27c080 into IC42
rtl-010.bin > 27c080 into IC43
rtl-020.bin > 27c080 into IC44
rtl-030.bin > 27c080 into IC45

rtl-c0.bin > 27c040 into IC9
rtl-c1.bin > 27c040 into IC10
rtl-c2.bin > 27c040 into IC11
rtl-c3.bin > 27c040 into IC12

rtl-da.bin > 27c040 into IC8

rtl-sh0a.bin > 27c512 into IC14
rtl-sl0a.bin > 27c512 into IC17

rtl-h0-c.bin > 27c020 into IC34
rtl-h1-dx2.bin > 27c020 into IC33
rtl-l0-c.bin > 27c020 into IC31
rtl-l1-dx2.bin > 27c020 into IC32

Re-positioning the Jumpers for R-Type Leo Operation

The last step is to re-position the jumper settings for R-Type Leo operation. You'll need to move the following jumpers as follows:

J8: change from OT to 4M
J15: change from OT to 512
J16: change from 2S to 4S

If you used vcx's hacked sound roms, you are all set. If you went a little further and obtained the decrypted sound roms from Apocalypse, which I hope you did, then you will need to re-position the below jumpers to allow the sound processor to run un-encrypted code:

J1: change from S to N
J6: change from S to N

All done. Now you can enjoy one of the most iconic shoot'em up series of all time. And if you ever get bored, you can always switch back to Major Title 2!

IMG_1944.JPG
 

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I'll check it out in a few hours. Still waiting for my EPROM's to come in the mail to finish off this conversion. Excited to be able to play R-Type Leo. Though, right now I am having quite a good time playing Major Title 2.
 
Cool. Also thanks for the write up! A few folks asked me for one so I'm just going to point them here now :D
 
Cool. Also thanks for the write up! A few folks asked me for one so I'm just going to point them here now :D
I made some edits to the OP to take in account for running the unencrypted sound roms from @Apocalypse. Speaking of which, I am going to send him an email now to purchase his unencrypted sound roms.
 
Alright, all done! I updated the 2nd post in this thread.

@Apocalypse, there is mention out on the internet that if the MT2 board has a "016" sound chip that the conversion might not work, or something extra has to be done? Can you elaborate, or is this only a problem with vcx's hacked sound roms and not a problem if using your decrypted sound files?
 
Alright, all done! I updated the 2nd post in this thread.

@Apocalypse, there is mention out on the internet that if the MT2 board has a "016" sound chip that the conversion might not work, or something extra has to be done? Can you elaborate, or is this only a problem with vcx's hacked sound roms and not a problem if using your decrypted sound files?
That's because the vxc version is re-encrypted for the '017' sound CPU.
With decrypted files you don't have to worry about the CPU type.
 
i just bought a MT2 board that was converted to R-Type Leo and there is no sound and the rapid fire/charging does not work. Can someone help me out? Who can I send this too to repair? Any help please...
 
Very helpful to succeed the In the Hunt conversion from Major Title 2.
Thank you.
 
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