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Reverse engineering 161 in 1 cartridge to change Rom games

Neo-Alec said:
I have a couple of NeoSD's, but it would be great to have an instant-loading multicart with all the official games on it. I use the 161-in-1 with the Unibios pick'n mix for my cab's demo mode.
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Same here. I have Neo SD AES/MVS and Darksoft MVS but I prefer the 161 in pick'n mix for the instant loading.

The Darksoft is great for going between my favorite 3 games though.
 
Hi All.
I have released all information about our 161-in-1 Multicarts including Excel, Photos, Datasheets, Dumper Schematics, Gerbers and Sources, Compiler Binaries and Sources in this github repository: link
Other information including Verilog sources for CPLD's will be added there as the project is tested and completed.
Stay tuned.
 
Great work so far! Looking forward to seeing the end result (and how complex it is.) It seems like you won't have the time yourself, but if anyone here wanted to 'make' these I think there would be a tidy profit in it as the carts can be bought from Ali for well under $100 now. I would happily pay $350 for one of these with a decent, almost-complete selection of games (or more for 2 carts with everything.) As above I love Pick n Mix with my current 161 v1, and have no interest in the Neo SD or other similar solutions due to the load times.
 
kuze said:
This is a really neat project, I love the 161 in 1 cart for PicknMix mode and being able to customize games will be the cherry on top.

Keep up the great work!
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It's extremely likely if you customize the games PicknMix will no longer work, as it's designed to use specific games for an existing list. Razoola hasn't updated the Unibios in quite some time, as he announced he was taking a break long ago.
 
I think Razoola would be very into the idea of working tweaks into the Unibios for Vortex, he dreamed of a optimized 161 or all-in-one
 
This was to be a pm reply to Vortex but i'll put it here for the interest of others, perhaps other people here have experience with these STC chips?

Regarding the stc, as far as I could make out there's no way to dump it, so there's no code to examine, it's a case of writing a new firmware from scratch.
All it does is act as a small storage space for the cart, really just a glorified eeprom.
It stores soft-dip settings for each game (16 bytes per game, non-volatile) and current menu position (1 byte, volatile?)
It's connected to the cpld with a simple 8-bit bus (d0-d7, rd, wr, ale). There's also an INT line hooked up but I think it wasn't used?
There's 5 commands, rd game#, wr game#, rd softdips, wr softdips and some kind of verify/checksum which I never fully figured out.
It's easy to see the actual commands just by looking at the cart menu code.

I found a suitable free compiler - SDCC
It didn't have a header file for the exact chip but that's easy to create from the datasheet (just defining register addresses etc.)

Also found a program tool - STCGAL which uses any generic usb->ttl adapter (ft232 etc.) to flash the chip in-circuit.

I started writing some initial code, had it communicating with the menu code in Mame (created a custom cart device with a 8752 core mcu) Never tried it on the real cart/chip although I did confirm STCGAL could communicate with the chip.

I'm going to go back through my old stuff and anything useful to Vortex i'll push to the Github repo. (Should have done that long ago:D )
 
Have updated post #150 with details of this latest cart.
We really need to come up with some better way of numbering these cart versions, the latest "v3" (as stated on label and menu) is actually v7 by our reckoning :D

Also, just noticed the latest version cart now has 11F16XE mcu, haven't looked if there's any differences other than flash size (16K vs 8K) but potentially 2 stc firmware images will be needed for supporting all carts.

Dug out schematics I made of 120 and 161(v3)* carts, will push to the repo.

* that's the "old" v3 by our numbering, not the latest "v3-on-the-label" v3 - see what I mean, this will get confusing :D
 
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those STC MCU chips actually do not need to be reprogrammed, since they perform the function of eeprom and are already programmed.
but in case of reproducing a multi-game flash cartridge (if one ever appears) we certainly need to know everything.
As for the version numbers, I suggest relying on the full name of the cartridge (with the date) indicated on the PCB.
and we also have boards for AES ...
 
Wonder if this socket would work? Kinda pricy thou :/
But would be neat for the MSP55LV100S

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32895512146.html

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I'm DONE!

Two sets of cartridges containing all the official SNK games, several bootlegs, some "warez" and one utility. 157 in total.
The PCB's was completely reverse engineered, PCB's for the programmers were developed, firmware for the programmers was written, all flash memory modules were reprogrammed, a program was developed for compiling sets of games and creating index files on verilog. Verilog designs were re-developed from scratch for all cartridge CPLDs.

Credits goes to:
@Butter Meister - for the idea of RE
@rockbottom - for RE flash chip
@iq_132 - for help with games patches / decryption
furrtek - for RE of Neo Geo chips and verilog implementatrion.
everyone who helped in the development of the project.

All development results were published on my github: Link
Feel free to use them, just be sure to credit all authors.
I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Enjoy!


 
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