SnakeGrunger
Professional
Hi everyone,
I am a big fan of the Tetris Grand Master series. The first one being quite "affordable", the third one, being TypeX (PC) based and easily cracked, but the second one remains the absolute (lol) most expensive title in the series, myself having tried to bid on one at auction and being outbid every single time.
Talking with @twistedsymphony he did mention TGM2 being the same board as some Mahjong titles from the same company. The main obstacle was, however, the footprint of mask roms on the board, which is a very uncommon TSSOP-II, and there does not seem to have writable chips anywhere on the market that could be used as drop-in replacements.
I brought it upon myself to check pinouts of such chips and find not only suitable replacement, but map out adaptive PCBs that can be used to connect the differently shaped and pinout chips to the existing footprints on the board to give the cleanest result I can create.
So here it is, two small PCBs designed to allow other footprint but compatible flash chips to be mapped onto the original Psikyo board. Remaining chips from the original game, in this case G-Taste Mahjong, does not interfere with the game if not removed, as I'm guessing the game program does not access that section of the address space. There are no exposed wires, however underneath the top two boards, I have to redirect two /CE wires through two holes, on which the flash rom chips lay over, 100% hiding them. This makes it very hard to fix if there was a problem, but I was extremely careful in not making shorts and triple and quadruple checked my PCB layout before laying the boards over it.
One problem is that since the pitch for these TSSOP-II chips is 0.8mm, this is smaller than what chinese PCB fabs allow for castellated holes, so I had to use solder paste and a heat gun over exposed pads underneath the boards to make contact, which was hard and at 3 positions did I just jump those connections with 32AWG magnet wire on an exposed pad on the opposite side when I could not get a connection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAKILWbk8U
Game works perfectly, animated backgrounds, sound effects, etc. Very glad !!
I am a big fan of the Tetris Grand Master series. The first one being quite "affordable", the third one, being TypeX (PC) based and easily cracked, but the second one remains the absolute (lol) most expensive title in the series, myself having tried to bid on one at auction and being outbid every single time.
Talking with @twistedsymphony he did mention TGM2 being the same board as some Mahjong titles from the same company. The main obstacle was, however, the footprint of mask roms on the board, which is a very uncommon TSSOP-II, and there does not seem to have writable chips anywhere on the market that could be used as drop-in replacements.
I brought it upon myself to check pinouts of such chips and find not only suitable replacement, but map out adaptive PCBs that can be used to connect the differently shaped and pinout chips to the existing footprints on the board to give the cleanest result I can create.
So here it is, two small PCBs designed to allow other footprint but compatible flash chips to be mapped onto the original Psikyo board. Remaining chips from the original game, in this case G-Taste Mahjong, does not interfere with the game if not removed, as I'm guessing the game program does not access that section of the address space. There are no exposed wires, however underneath the top two boards, I have to redirect two /CE wires through two holes, on which the flash rom chips lay over, 100% hiding them. This makes it very hard to fix if there was a problem, but I was extremely careful in not making shorts and triple and quadruple checked my PCB layout before laying the boards over it.
One problem is that since the pitch for these TSSOP-II chips is 0.8mm, this is smaller than what chinese PCB fabs allow for castellated holes, so I had to use solder paste and a heat gun over exposed pads underneath the boards to make contact, which was hard and at 3 positions did I just jump those connections with 32AWG magnet wire on an exposed pad on the opposite side when I could not get a connection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAKILWbk8U
Game works perfectly, animated backgrounds, sound effects, etc. Very glad !!
Last edited:
Now , the journey about finding a donor will start 
