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Erase the contents of your 'diff' folder (and nvram etc folders).
It never occurred to me to check out the cat 702 stuff in the g-net conversions.
I guess that this means g-darius and raystorm for the super football champ rom board won't be too much trouble as security has been worked out.
Thanks for the tip, I've already tried to erase the nvram folder but forgot about the diff one.
Now it boots up to a "SYSTEM ERROR".
 
I'm at this point also...

There is a 'dip switch' for bios flash, but letting it run and resetting does not seem to get them going.
Need someone who's done the real board to chip in now :)
 
here's what happens with the physical board... I sort of feel like you guys know this already but since you don't have hardware, maybe not? Anyway I hope this answers the question.

The GNet motherboards come with bios data already installed, the 'bios' chip socket is empty for normal play. You close a jumper on the physical board, drop in the modbios chip, and turn on the system without a game connected. The motherboard runs what id call a 'firmware' update, pulling data off the modbios chip and seemingly editing the existing bios data. Once the flashing is complete, you remove the modbios chip and jumper. you never need it again.

No idea how that translates to doing this in MAME, but I hope that's helpful a small bit.

Edit: also when you change games, the game data loads from the CF card and the data also goes through a loading period before it's playable. Presumably data is loaded from the CF card to the board itself.
 
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I'm at this point also...

There is a 'dip switch' for bios flash, but letting it run and resetting does not seem to get them going.
Need someone who's done the real board to chip in now :)
On the real board it's a jumper, not a dip switch. You put a jumper on, put in the BIOS chip, it runs for a minute or two with a progress bar and then says it's done. Turn it off, remove the BIOS, remove the jumper, and you're good to go.
 
Didnt play any of these much other than PR2 but would still love to see more of these converted just to try them. :)
 
here's what happens with the physical board... I sort of feel like you guys know this already but since you don't have hardware, maybe not? Anyway I hope this answers the question.

The GNet motherboards come with bios data already installed, the 'bios' chip socket is empty for normal play. You close a jumper on the physical board, drop in the modbios chip, and turn on the system without a game connected. The motherboard runs what id call a 'firmware' update, pulling data off the modbios chip and seemingly editing the existing bios data. Once the flashing is complete, you remove the modbios chip and jumper. you never need it again.

No idea how that translates to doing this in MAME, but I hope that's helpful a small bit.

Edit: also when you change games, the game data loads from the CF card and the data also goes through a loading period before it's playable. Presumably data is loaded from the CF card to the board itself.
Yes I already knew that and by the look at how MAME works it shouldn't be a problem if you replace the OG BIOS file by the modified one. Unless I'm missing something (which is most probable giving the result I got).
 
Another error I get is crashes and garbled text in the high score list with Flame Gunner.
I sat down and played this for about an hour tonight, I played a few levels and set a high score with each of the three characters (levels are completely different depending on which character you choose). It never once crashed on me or displayed any garbled text. High score lists looked great, and you can even use the buttons to swap around to different high score lists after adding your name.

I also played The Block for about an hour to see if it had any problems and again it played perfectly the whole time.

I didn't have an SD card with the 3rd TPS game: Shanghai Matekibuyu (Interestingly Mame lists this game as "Shanghai Matekibuyuu" but the English copyright text on the title screen displays the name as "Shanghai Matekibuyu"... missing the last u).

I burned a card and this game crashed on me a whole bunch. When it crashes it displays a custom ArcadeModBios error screen with some memory locations and then restarts as if you'd turned it off and back on.

First time I played it it crashed when transitioning between the map and the start of the level. Second time I played I was able to play a game and then when I ran out of time it crashed. After that I went into the test menu and did a "ROM check" and it passed all of those, I was playing around and it crashed while I was doing a sound test. Thinking it was maybe a certain sound that triggered the crashes I went back into the sound test but couldn't get it to crash again. I played a few more games after that and let it sit in attract mode but couldn't get it to crash again... I'm not sure what triggers it but each time it was when some new asset needed to be loaded (1. from map to game, 2. from gameplay to end of game, 3. changing sounds) so maybe it's related to access time? I don't know.

I'm going to try this game on a different CF card tomorrow to see if it crashes at all. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the problem (or maybe your problems with Flame Gunner and RC de GO) is related to a crappy cards. I have had a few cards that refused to boot after programming. Trashing them and using a different card solved the problem.
 
I have the best results with sandisk 64, 128, 256 and 512 mb.
The ones with teh red/blue labels.
 
I put Shanghai Matekibuyu on a new card and haven't experienced any crashes with it yet...
 
Someone listed a odd board set on ebay, and it was determined to be a primal rage 2 board set without the roms, hdd or security key (though all of these are dumped in Mame), so I picked it up. I doubt Primal Rage 2 could be used on a Gnet, but having an original board set will at least confirm if it's possible or not.

s-l1600.jpg
 
@CoolFox oh man, definitely keep us posted as you work on getting that running!
 
I see an IDE cable. That's probably a PSX2Jamma adapter.
 
The ZN1 mainboard bios may be something different from the dumped primal rage bios.

There's also a slight chance that the dev kit does not use the security, who knows.
 
The IDE cable on there is for the hard drive that Primal Rage II uses and that SCSI board on the back is to hook the board set up to a computer to debug. Rather than a dedicated Primal Rage II board, this is an arcade dev kit that Atari used.
A-ha....a dev kit...now it makes sense.
 
Look on the ZN-1 motherboard and you should see a protection chip labeled TW01. This is unique to the game itself and locked to Atari corp bios. On the game portion there should be one labeled TW02.

Edit: looking closer at the board yours is missing the protection chip on the game portion at least. It should go in that socket in the bottom-right next to the unpopulated header.
 
Look on the ZN-1 motherboard and you should see a protection chip labeled TW01. This is unique to the game itself and locked to Atari corp bios. On the game portion there should be one labeled TW02.

Edit: looking closer at the board yours is missing the protection chip on the game portion at least. It should go in that socket in the bottom-right next to the unpopulated header.
Yes I did mention this in the original post. I also mentioned both are dumped in Mame and it's possible to make a repro protection chip, so it's not really a problem.
 
do you have any info on how to make a repo protection chip? I've heard that before but I haven't been able to find any info other than the mame driver.
 
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