What's new

CV1000D Multi! NOT A BOOT CHAT THREAD - Formerly: A huge project is approaching....

The prices for those seem to just keep going up. They left the $50 price range in the dust a bit ago. Getting to the point where SNK may start making multicarts :p
It's WILD. Whoever was bidding on that goodwill auction is going to be in an awful spot. It's buy that for over 250, plus tax, plus shipping, then ship to me or leonk or one of the euro dudes, then pay that fee, and shipping both ways, and they could have had a DS at that point.

The whole void that cart filled was the low price fully functional cart one. We already had high priced fully functional carts that were a heck of a lot less effort, lol.
 
It's WILD. Whoever was bidding on that goodwill auction is going to be in an awful spot. It's buy that for over 250, plus tax, plus shipping, then ship to me or leonk or one of the euro dudes, then pay that fee, and shipping both ways, and they could have had a DS at that point.

The whole void that cart filled was the low price fully functional cart one. We already had high priced fully functional carts that were a heck of a lot less effort, lol.
Im guilty of this. I will fully admit that I paid $300 to get a cart with faster/more reliable shipping. I didn't even get the blue cart that I wanted, but compromised :p. This was after I didn't have luck with the SD cart, granted it was probably user error when I did find the super secret 1 way source to get the specific games and they finally played, but kept restarting and I returned it. I was in "Give me Neo Geo Now" mode and thus why I paid what I did.
 
Im guilty of this. I will fully admit that I paid $300 to get a cart with faster/more reliable shipping. I didn't even get the blue cart that I wanted, but compromised :p. This was after I didn't have luck with the SD cart, granted it was probably user error when I did find the super secret 1 way source to get the specific games and they finally played, but kept restarting and I returned it. I was in "Give me Neo Geo Now" mode and thus why I paid what I did.
Did I not send you a blue cart? I have maybe 3 spare blue shells and one or two yellow.
 
I had only got a yellow from the Motherland. I guess they ran out of blue. I questioned it, but the guy was cool and showed me it was just how the new batches were coming.
 
I would so buy the blue one from you!!! I was going to ask about if anyone has ever designed a Vortex Cart and Shockbox label yet? Southtown Homebrew has other 161 in 1 Shockbox labels but so far nobody had submitted a design for the Vortex yet.
 
I would so buy the blue one from you!!! I was going to ask about if anyone has ever designed a Vortex Cart and Shockbox label yet? Southtown Homebrew has other 161 in 1 Shockbox labels but so far nobody had submitted a design for the Vortex yet.
Someone did cart labels. I think they're in my thread? Real nice with holo and everything. Pay the shipping and I'll drop it off at UPS, no need to pay, it's just taking up space here anyway :)
 
Ok sent you some US currency. If you happen to find any of those Chinese stainless steel screws that only fit in their carts, I wouldn't mind either ;). I need 2. Messaged you the address too
 
IMG_6825.jpeg

IMG_6728.jpeg


I guess ill let the cat out of the bag, I funnily enough started looking into a solution sacrificing a bootleg just prior to rewrite making this thread and weve been going back and fourth in dms. My idea works as a quick-swappable pair of cartridges. One cart for sound another for the prog/graphics.. This works as POC but assembly is very error prone and quite difficult, not a great product overall. Connectors are expensive and aren't rated for a large amount of connects and disconnects either. awesome for testing but not something im proud to release.

Regarding RTC game issues, NFI. But i hope once the ball gets rolling those more educated with software REing sh3 code can find some workaround to skip whatever part prevents them booting. Ghidra wasnt playing nice for me when dissasembling prog roms and missed large chunks of functions.
 
FPC connectors
Main thing im a bit worried about is people accidentally pulling one of those cables a little in the wrong direction is fairly likely to fuck up the pads since theres so little surface area.

I guess if its a bootleg used as install its not the end of the world.
 
Main thing im a bit worried about is people accidentally pulling one of those cables a little in the wrong direction is fairly likely to fuck up the pads since theres so little surface area.
The board will sit on top of the main PCB on standoffs kind of like the Cavewich. So once installed one time, there's really no reason to uninstall it, and no real way to mess with it unless you're shoving a screwdriver between the boards or something.

Regarding RTC game issues, NFI. But i hope once the ball gets rolling those more educated with software REing sh3 code can find some workaround to skip whatever part prevents them booting. Ghidra wasnt playing nice for me when dissasembling prog roms and missed large chunks of functions.
Here's the other gent who has brilliant ideas that I'd mentioned! I had the same luck with ghidra. I could not even find the manufacturer ID check for the flashroms with it.
 
The MAME debugger might be more useful for debugging CV1000 game code. Maybe you could reach out to the guys that did Pink Sweets Suicide Club for advice.
 
The MAME debugger might be more useful for debugging CV1000 game code. Maybe you could reach out to the guys that did Pink Sweets Suicide Club for advice.
Both excellent ideas. This has been a back burner project for a long time, and it'll still be a while until I have enough time to really put anything more into it since I'm setting up a whole new workshop, but at least the most basic of solutions will be out there and open source and if someone wants to be speedier than me about finishing it, they're more than welcome to fork it as long as they are also not intent on commercializing it.

I'd have continued pretty quietly in the background and finished it entirely but I started seeing a bunch of folks spending a lot of money and winding up being disappointed to varying degrees, so wanted to prevent that from continuing by at least offering another option to look forward to. As well as *something* now, which after install will not require any real work to change between games. Just drop in 4 new roms and go.
 
Just want to say @rewrite, that I kept to my word, and never mentioned this to anyone.
Yeeeaaaahhhhhh! What, like 3 years now? lol

2023 and 2024 did NOT go as expected. Here's hoping 2025 makes up for it!

I hope you've been doing great. We'll have to catch up soon! I'm building a whole workshop for working on plastics right now (injection molding, vacuum forming, 3D printers because they're useful for just about everything, and a CNC), and it's a gosh-damn mess. But it's fun and it'll be profitable in no time if I ever get done cleaning/reorganizing/building things.

I have some old notes somewhere from when i did https://github.com/buffis/cv1k_research/tree/main/U2_Replacement

I can dig them up later
VERY much appreciated. Having seen your work there with the U2 replacement I knew it should be possible to find the RTC check as well, but Ghidra and I were not getting along (likely due to the amount of Godzilla stuff in the house). I did pull up some notes from other SH2/SH3 projects that got me part way there and could see SOME code, but nothing related to anything one would hope for.
 
Yeeeaaaahhhhhh! What, like 3 years now? lol

2023 and 2024 did NOT go as expected. Here's hoping 2025 makes up for it!

I hope you've been doing great. We'll have to catch up soon! I'm building a whole workshop for working on plastics right now (injection molding, vacuum forming, 3D printers because they're useful for just about everything, and a CNC), and it's a gosh-damn mess. But it's fun and it'll be profitable in no time if I ever get done cleaning/reorganizing/building things.


VERY much appreciated. Having seen your work there with the U2 replacement I knew it should be possible to find the RTC check as well, but Ghidra and I were not getting along (likely due to the amount of Godzilla stuff in the house). I did pull up some notes from other SH2/SH3 projects that got me part way there and could see SOME code, but nothing related to anything one would hope for.

Yeah, not an easy secret to keep. :D

2020-2024 has not gone, in any way, like I would have expected.....it kicked my fucking ass.

I'm still working to get all the way back on the rails, and get my shit back together, and no step in that has been easy.

Always glad to see any of the crew here, making progress on that front, as shit has gone sideways for quite a few of us this past few years.

Looking forward to catching up with you too!!!!
 
To finish my thought, @twistedsymphony I have a really shoddy wired up set of ZIF sockets on little PCBs when I was testing what games would convert on the bootleg boards and which wouldn't. I turned that into a PCB, just replaced wires with traces. It does work, but none of the RTC games boot, as would be expected. Another gent on here, who I hope will pipe up, has a nicely working similar solution, but the install is even more difficult.
So the 3 problems I was referring to were
1. dealing with the lack of programming access to the sound ROMs, which I think kasaski's solution is quite clever
2. dealing with the lack of an RTC, it sounds like you have some concepts, some better than others. if this can be located on the sub-board that would probably be ideal.
3. dealing with the lack of memory on -B boards for -D games, unless your solution is: only use -D boards as donors?
 
I’m assuming D boards need to be the donors? Which would be quite expensive unless you use a boot (which is also expensive but not as much 😅)
 
VERY much appreciated. Having seen your work there with the U2 replacement I knew it should be possible to find the RTC check as well, but Ghidra and I were not getting along (likely due to the amount of Godzilla stuff in the house). I did pull up some notes from other SH2/SH3 projects that got me part way there and could see SOME code, but nothing related to anything one would hope for.
Ramplings from a old .txt doc on my drive. Not very friendly but hey maybe it helps.
Got some help from Olifante setting this up a long time ago. I'm not great at Ghidra.

Code:
"At startup, the game decompresses and moves the U4 data to 0xc000000 - 0xd000000
Can be extracted with: save u4.dump,0xc000000,0x1000000 in mame
U4 rom needs to be 16bit word swapped otherwise.

Import file as SuperH4 big endian in Ghidra. In Options... change base address to 0c000000 or it wont work-

Open memory map, split executable section from data..
Mark first part R+X. Second part R+W.

Run analysis."

If you dont want to dump from mame you can probably use some tools from here:
https://github.com/buffis/cv1k_rese...lacement#tldr-how-do-i-patch-out-these-checks

You need U4 to be swapped with swap.py and decompressed before Ghidra will run it. Remember to change base address of u4 data to 0c000000
 
Ramplings from a old .txt doc on my drive. Not very friendly but hey maybe it helps.
Got some help from Olifante setting this up a long time ago. I'm not great at Ghidra.

Code:
"At startup, the game decompresses and moves the U4 data to 0xc000000 - 0xd000000
Can be extracted with: save u4.dump,0xc000000,0x1000000 in mame
U4 rom needs to be 16bit word swapped otherwise.

Import file as SuperH4 big endian in Ghidra. In Options... change base address to 0c000000 or it wont work-

Open memory map, split executable section from data..
Mark first part R+X. Second part R+W.

Run analysis."

If you dont want to dump from mame you can probably use some tools from here:
https://github.com/buffis/cv1k_rese...lacement#tldr-how-do-i-patch-out-these-checks

You need U4 to be swapped with swap.py and decompressed before Ghidra will run it. Remember to change base address of u4 data to 0c000000

Idk if I’m reading this correctly but the base config shows the RTC chip is also used as an output, as it has an eeprom. It has a write port and clock. so it may not be something you can “just patch” without losing some function that it serves

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blo...ea01346061087520f/src/mame/cave/cv1k.cpp#L437
 
Back
Top