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Estenze

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So, i have several dead Killer Instinct Boards, and a fully working KI2 board with control issues. I wanted to see if it was possible to downgrade the KI2 to KI1 by swapping U96, which is the only difference between boards (other than the sound roms, boot rom, and hard drive, but those are all socketed.)

So i yanked U96 off the board, soldered a 44 pin PLCC socket, and swapped the roms over, and lo and behold i now have a working KI1!

Now, how hard would it be to do a multi on this board, so i can flip a switch and play both games? I have ideas, but i know we have some amazingly talented people on this forum, so i figured i would ask for ideas first.
 
you cant really - yet.

now if MAME ever supports the conversion kit, i could decrypt the ki2 image to work on the ki board.
then you would just need to bankswitch the roms and the select-line on the ide cable.

dont get your hopes up, i have been waiting for them to get the conversion working for several years and i think they wont bother.
 
Right now i have U96 socketed, which means i can play both of them by swapping the u96 from KI or KI2 along with the rest of the roms.

U96 is normally soldered onto the board, and normally you would need the conversion PCB and roms to play KI2.

My thought was to rig up some sort of pcb board, install 2 sockets onto it, have both U96s on there to be able to switch between them, along with the rest of the roms and hard drive.

Let me know if i'm dreaming.
 
Hi :

This is what I was going to do with u96. Awesome. Thanks for the clarification, that this works.


Best wishes
Euphoria
 
well switching the protection is probably not happening without a lot of reverse engineering, because there are no schematics.
(please tell me that's wrong!)

and most people dont have 2 protection chips.
 
You are right, most people don't. I was not looking for some sort of commercial multi solution, just ideas on a way to make it easier to swap without moving a bunch of chips.
 
well to do that, the chip would need some type of "enable" pin, and you would need the schematics or pinout.
*that we dont have.
 
how does the conversion PCB work on the official KI1->KI2 upgrade kit?
 
it fits in between the IDE port and the harddrive.
 
This thread is relevant to my interests - also following :P
 
I was working on this idea a year ago, I am very close to making a kit. If anyone has any broke boards they want to sell me or just the U96 chips off of them I would appreciate it.
 
Aklso following.... I do have a KI2 pcb, nevertheless I love KI1 the most, so a multi/dual would be perfect!!!
 
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Anyone seen this? This guy in russia is running both KI1 and Ki2 on the same board using a switch.
 

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KI1 boards can be upgraded to KI2 with a special add-on board. So there shouldn't be any reason they're not switchable other than having to have a double size boot ROM.

As in the picture above, a switch can be installed to go between the 2 versions of the boot ROM and then you just need a solution to have the 2 different drives with game code connected. That's a nice looking solution.
 
KI1 boards can be upgraded to KI2 with a special add-on board.
the base hardware is the same but there are a few things to convert one KI1 to KI2 or visa-versa
-the 8 Sound ROMs need to be swapped
-the boot ROM needs to be swapped
-the IDE data needs to be swapped
-the IDE controller IC needs to be swapped.

all of those are plug-in swaps except for the IDE controller IC, but that's what the official KI1-> KI2 adapter is
interfacepcb.jpg

it's just the KI2 version of the IC on a board setup to bypass the one on the PCB. theoretically you could convert a KI2 to KI1 if you had this IC mounted on a similar adapter board.


The key for a multi board would be to modify the boot ROM to work with either one of these chips, and maybe pull one or the other game off of the same IDE device. then you'd just have to setup sound ROM bank switching.
 
I forgot about the sound ROMs. But as you said there are ways around that.
 
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