A Call for Sega 315-5385 Reproduction

[twistedsymphony]

@caius @Darksoft and others have done some great repos taking the reverse engineering work by furrtek towards re-creation of Custom chips to help old failing board.

Sega System 32s are failing at a high rate due to bit-rot on the 315-5385 custom, this is a system controller/timer and really only used on the System 32.

When this starts to fail Audio in the game becomes scratchy, then it will degrade to completely silent audio and IC16 Checks BAD in memory test (even if the RAM at IC16 is completely good).
I believe more advanced failures cause graphics to start to degrade as well. https://caiusarcade.blogspot.com/2019/11/golden-axe-revenge-of-death-adder.html

Having spoken with Ken it sounds like the design of these chips cause them to become susceptible to moisture and they literally degrade from the inside out. So it's essentially a ticking timebomb for all System 32 board.

Personally, about 1/3rd of all System 32 boards that have passed through my hands have had this issue.

Currently the only solution is to pull this chip off of another System 32 board, which isn't great and only really kicks the can down the road.

I see furrtek already has this chip listed in his Reverse Engineering Github: https://github.com/furrtek/SiliconRE/tree/master/Sega/315-5385
not sure how far along it is to being reproduced in fabric, but I'd like to see if @caius @Darksoft or someone else would be interested in creating a repo for this chip.

I know I would buy at least 2 of them, I've seen a dozen or so posts on various forums with others experiencing the same issue and I'm sure Ken would be a regular customer as well.

 

[msamiullah]

Furrtek is an absolute legend. He has done so much work interms of decapping the chips.

 

[Darksoft]

@furrtek is a legend. Period.

 

[Darksoft]

Personally, about 1/3rd of all System 32 boards that have passed through my hands have had this issue.

I have seen a lot of S32 with that chip dead, very true.

I see furrtek already has this chip listed in his Reverse Engineering Github: https://github.com/furrtek/SiliconRE/tree/master/Sega/315-5385
not sure how far along it is to being reproduced in fabric, but I'd like to see if @caius @Darksoft or someone else would be interested in creating a repo for this chip.

Great news, I know he's very busy right now, but if it's in his list, it will hopefully happen.

I know I would buy at least 2 of them, I've seen a dozen or so posts on various forums with others experiencing the same issue and I'm sure Ken would be a regular customer as well.

Definitely If I do this, I would try to involve @caius and @furrtek. They can sell them, I'm more interested on seeing these chips documented, understood and preserved.

I think my ideal emulator, would be one, that maybe will be done one day, where it will have the schematics of the PCB or a .PCB file as an input and will load the Roms and the equations of each custom, processor or Gate array and will just run the game based on that netlist, like an original PCB would run, at the same frequency in Mhz, with same gate delays, etc.. I know what that implies and it's a LOT but MAME guys have done already a lot of the work. Maybe one day, we can play the games with simulation, not emulation. A dream...

 

[caius]

I think decapping and die tracing is the only way to figure out the functions of this custom IC.I agree Furrtek is pure genius, he is the only guy able to to such things, other people can decap the chip but not identifying the internal structure and, most important thing, writing Verilog code of the schematics.As for me, I can do the hardware part designing a replacement with CPLD or FPGA running his code (I think the latter is needed for this '315-5385')

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[ragefan]

Amazing project !