What's new
^ that there is the reason why this forum roolz
 
Hi @sylphia

You must have bought the other one the seller had! :D that's great news yours is in better shape than mine - if you would be happy to supply your main program ROMs I would really appreciate it

Would you also be happy to have them submitted to MAME? I am happy to dump the rest of the ROMs on my board to complete the set and happy to supply any of mine that might be working if yours have issues

If the ship speed is too fast that's likely a modification made to the bootleg (the original is known for being all the more difficult with the slower ship so who knows) - but with working main program ROMs it may be possible for someone to correct it

If I can get mine to fire up I'd be happy to record the sound but since it's missing one of the Oki chips it's not going to be the same as original
 
Hi,
Yes I bought the other copy the seller had !
I am attaching both files to this message. Sorry, I very stupidly named then "1.bin" and "2.bin" and I do not remember which one is going where, but you should be able to figure it out easily by comparison with your dumps.

I already contributed very modestly in the past to MAME ROMs, so no problem for the submission of these ROMs to MAME. Happy to help !

I will let you know if I need any information/dumps from your board.

Thanks
 

Attachments

  • 1.bin.7z
    62.8 KB · Views: 146
  • 2.bin.7z
    38.1 KB · Views: 152
Thank you very much for your help - now that I have working main program ROMs if there's other faults I have somewhere to start :D

I will continue posting in this thread as I resolve issues, if you would like to do the same as you work to repair yours that would be good, up to you. We can compare notes :P
 
So I quickly turned the PC on and put my working EPROM in to see if it verifies against yours - and it does, so we at least know that one of the ROMs (2.bin) in mine is good :D

I'm really interested to do a comparison now between the bootleg code and original for 1.bin - but I don't have any 27C020 EPROMs on hand (I used 27C040 and doubled up to burn the original set for testing) so it will have to wait until my 27C020 get delivered.

Edit: I'm erasing a 27C040 now to see if it works....
 
@sylphia

Something I noticed looking at my board, yours may be different. But my edge connector is absolutely filthy and covered in gunk, particularly the middle section of pins. If yours is the same this could explain the second button not functioning correctly. It may also help improve your sound. Not sure if it will help with the background issue you're having though.
 
Survey says! No dice.

Still doing the exact same thing. I also noticed if I remove the ROMs completely now, it does the exact same thing just with no garbage on the screen. It seems to be locked in some kind of test mode. The good news is that it is trying to boot.

Edit: I just ran my scope across the sound section and that's not firing up at all. Everything is low. I don't even know where to start on this giant thing :/ there's no obvious broken traces, nothing to prevent it from booting (which is I assume why it's just running this endless loop of garbage) - it's possible that it's because I've doubled it up on a 27C040 and it doesn't want to run that way, so I need to wait until 27C020 chips arrive to test this theory.

What does strike me as unusual is that with no main program ROMs installed initially it just froze on a static screen which would make sense to me, where now it still keeps trying to run. I'm thoroughly confused at this point.

@Hammy and @Hatsune Mike

If you get an opportunity to have a look at the code above for 1.bin - I would be interested to see what you think.
 
Last edited:
@sylphia

Something I noticed looking at my board, yours may be different. But my edge connector is absolutely filthy and covered in gunk, particularly the middle section of pins. If yours is the same this could explain the second button not functioning correctly. It may also help improve your sound. Not sure if it will help with the background issue you're having though.
Thanks for the suggestion. My edge connector is not so bad, some soldering has been done on the +5V, but nothing major. I already cleaned up the P1 control pins this weekend but it did not fix the B button issue. I will have to look at the TTL, resistor arrays and traces involved when I have some free time.

For the background issue, I already desoldered some RAMs which were all tested good out of circuit. I tried to short some TTL pins to see if I could locate which part of the board was responsible for the background layer, but I could only locate the one involved in the foreground. I also tested a number of suspicious traces but all passed continuity tests successfully so far !
 
Survey says! No dice.

Still doing the exact same thing. I also noticed if I remove the ROMs completely now, it does the exact same thing just with no garbage on the screen. It seems to be locked in some kind of test mode. The good news is that it is trying to boot.

Edit: I just ran my scope across the sound section and that's not firing up at all. Everything is low. I don't even know where to start on this giant thing :/ there's no obvious broken traces, nothing to prevent it from booting (which is I assume why it's just running this endless loop of garbage) - it's possible that it's because I've doubled it up on a 27C040 and it doesn't want to run that way, so I need to wait until 27C020 chips arrive to test this theory.

What does strike me as unusual is that with no main program ROMs installed initially it just froze on a static screen which would make sense to me, where now it still keeps trying to run. I'm thoroughly confused at this point.

@Hammy and @Hatsune Mike

If you get an opportunity to have a look at the code above for 1.bin - I would be interested to see what you think.
have you checked the 68000 CPU with your scope ? At least the part related to the work RAM ?

On a side note, my board smells quite bad, something like rat piss which might have to do with the broken trace I had close to the CPU when the board was booting to a static screen of garbage.
There was no obvious sign of physical damage other than this bad smell <X
 
Excellent! Thanks for the dumps!
I will check them out later, the sound roms still are interesting, don't forget them ;)

The original rom was most likely crashing because you had mixed the original and bootleg roms.
 
Excellent! Thanks for the dumps!
I will check them out later, the sound roms still are interesting, don't forget them ;)

The original rom was most likely crashing because you had mixed the original and bootleg roms.
I actually got the same reaction with the original/bootleg mixture, both original or now both bootleg.

The fact it now continues to run even if the ROMs are completely missing suggests a larger issue I've never come across.

Sound dumps and other ROMs will be happening soon, other than main program everything is soldered which makes it a pain.

There's also a random 16M mask ROM I think the sprite data is on and the board has provisioning for 4x4mbit ROMs for the same. No idea why this is a mask and the others are EPROM though.

I'm mostly worried that the FPGA may be bad and if that's the case then I'm dead in the water
 
Last edited:
Yes that's a mask rom.

Don't blame the custom without knowing it's bad.
If you have replaced the work ram, it's time to start looking at clocks and chip enables.
Get the 68000 pinout and check all the important pins, and associated logic.

The PCB is huge and 1x bad ttl or bad line can cause death.
The rom may of been damaged by the circuit. Make sure no address or data lines are shorted to gnd.

Without the thing on the bench in front of me it's quite hard to make suggestions.
 
Yep I started doing that last night.

The buffers (245) near the CPU and ROMs are getting extremely hot but that may also be because they're constantly being reset trying to get the board to boot (on the scope you can see the enable lines on the ROMs bouncing)

I'll get there I'm just not used to this much logic on a board lol, that's not a bad thing though since it's far easier to replace

Clocks are good on both CPUs (there's 3 crystals 10, 12 and 16mhz, not sure what the third one is for, in game speed differences for specific elements I guess?)
 
If in doubt, replace.
Your board is very similar to thunder dragon 2 (3) bootleg, dug it out for a pic:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-PZ0Zv-lD3h2rYHO4Lk6rqnZUaa421qw

At least you have some space around the chips! the above board was a swine, and has toaplan level of ground plane heat sink.
Quality board, but they still missed the 2nd oki and the bypass caps.

The issues with the above board was sprites, and replaced the 2 ram as seen in pic by custom and 2x bad 245 connected to the same ram.

The FPGA on this one delt with the sprites. However there was no NMK004 to bootleg for TD2.
I don't think the 004 sends a response, so don't worry too much about the sound section for now (the games were running with no sound in mame for years without the 004 dump)
 
The FPGA here is doing more than sound, but you're right that it probably won't prevent booting

That TD bootleg actually looks pretty good. Definitely laid out better than GunNail but you're not writing about the lack of space.

I can't understand missing the decoupling caps, they cost nothing at all. The second Oki would've been a bit more expensive and it's possible they couldn't copy that part of the circuit or that part of the code I guess.

Even if the sound isn't perfect I'll still be happy if it plays

Another thing I noticed is that the 16mhz crystal is actually screened on the board for 12mhz, so I wonder if that's the reason for the ship moving too quickly on the working board.
 
TD2 bootleg is 16mhz, so think that's correct.

Yeah i don't think they worked out the 2nd bank. 'grafting' a 2nd oki to this bootleg is on the low end of my to-do list, if gun nail is the same the 'fix' should be easily transfered if the FPGA is NOT the address decoder.
 
The crystal I was talking about was of the crystals on the GunNail bootleg. A 16mhz but it's screened for 12mhz :P I seem to remember the 68k is 16mhz in MAME though so it's probably correct

Thank you for your help, I'll wait to hear how you go checking the code and await my 27C020 EPROMs
 
The bootleg dumps from sylphia work in mame, with no sound as expected.

327a was a couple of nops as expected, i've not checked what they done with the sound yet.

064FA is where the bootleg code gets jumped in :)

TD2 and gun nail are very close hardware. The bootlegs are of different origin and game, but they will have similarities.
 
Last edited:
So I've dumped another 2 of the EPROMs on this board and replaced a dodgy looking socket for one of the main program ROMs (no, that didn't make it fire up sadly)

I have dumped the 27C020 (on this board an M27C2001) device at 1C (right next to the Yamaha - I'm assuming this is the sound ROM) and the 27C010 (Intel 27C010A) in the dead centre of the board

I still have the 2 16Mbit mask ROMs to do (I thought there was just 1, but there's a second one underneath a board with 2 PALs on it which is going to be an absolute nightmare to remove), and the other 27C010 in the sound section (I'm assuming this is the Oki data) but I want to socket all the ROMs rather than solder them back in place and I ran out of 32 pin sockets (as well as not having any 42 pin for the 16Mbit chips)

@sylphia - the 27C010 might be the tile data? Or possibly the fix layer? (I'm assuming tile data will be quite large so maybe that's in the 16Mbit masks)

When you get a chance would you be able to verify these against your set to determine if they are good dumps or not (or potentially if one of yours is bad) and hopefully this might fix some of your issues :)
 

Attachments

  • 27c020_1c.7z
    170.2 KB · Views: 178
  • 27c010_5g.7z
    12.2 KB · Views: 168
So I've dumped another 2 of the EPROMs on this board and replaced a dodgy looking socket for one of the main program ROMs (no, that didn't make it fire up sadly)

I have dumped the 27C020 (on this board an M27C2001) device at 1C (right next to the Yamaha - I'm assuming this is the sound ROM) and the 27C010 (Intel 27C010A) in the dead centre of the board

I still have the 2 16Mbit mask ROMs to do (I thought there was just 1, but there's a second one underneath a board with 2 PALs on it which is going to be an absolute nightmare to remove), and the other 27C010 in the sound section (I'm assuming this is the Oki data) but I want to socket all the ROMs rather than solder them back in place and I ran out of 32 pin sockets (as well as not having any 42 pin for the 16Mbit chips)

@sylphia - the 27C010 might be the tile data? Or possibly the fix layer? (I'm assuming tile data will be quite large so maybe that's in the 16Mbit masks)

When you get a chance would you be able to verify these against your set to determine if they are good dumps or not (or potentially if one of yours is bad) and hopefully this might fix some of your issues :)
Hi,
Thanks for the files.
I have dumped all 5 ROMs on my board and I am attaching an archive containing the files to this post.
ROMs location on the board is given in the picture below:
3.bin matches your 27c010.5g
5.bin matches your 27c020.1c


0tCdtoO.jpg
 

Attachments

  • gunnail_boot_roms.7z
    302.4 KB · Views: 156
Back
Top