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(Tools) Arduino Mega Shield to asses Official Konami System 573 PCMCIA cards

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Dion

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Hello,

This is my own private tool, made sometime ago. It is arduino mega shield originally made, because of frustration at konami flash card rarity. Back then, i have 2 'Bad' cards which i hope to be able to check them properly, without having pulled the each flash chip out and test them individually with a programmer.

At first, i tried to use this pci to pcmcia card to read them.
pcitopcmcia.png

But apparently, they need a special driver for each kind of flash card, which i can't find anywhere that compatible with konami cards.

And so, the arduino shield made, with pcmcia slot gutted from this very pcmcia pc card.
Here is what it looks like, with a bare konami flash card inserted.
shield.png

It's not really that fancy, but it do the job. The source code and schematic is here. I hope it can be useful for someone.

Regards
 
what does the game do if you use a CF adapter like in the VIPER hardware??
 
uhm... i don't quite understand what you mean. If you mean, can we use pcmcia adapter that comes with viper h/w. yes, we can. but you need to adapt the pcb footprint.
 
with some code modification, yes, particularly, the time stamp for each chip.

iirc, after sometime, i find out that these 'bad' card showed by 573 games, they're actually caused by 'slow' or you can say 'degraded' flash chip. since konami uses it's own timeout mechanism to verify the card. but actually, the chip itself is still okay, they're just 'slow' a bit.
i can't say a lot, because i just have 2 flash card to play with. maybe some other bad card can actually have real bad flash chip inside.

wierdly, after those test (reads, writes, and erases), i put the card back to 573 games, and find out they're not bad anymore, so i puzzled here.

anyway, this project is just for reference.
 
Cool project, clever solution. Great tool to have if you need to replace flash chips and verify your work afterwards.

I didn't even know such a thing was used for 573, now I'm curious to learn more about the system
 
so interested in this project because my pcmcia card is broken...
..any news?
 
the project is done and it works to some extend.

if you just have one broken card, there's nothing you can do about it. you need a donor card, which, i guess, if you don't have one, it's better buy a new and working one.

the project useful, if you have multiple broken card, and you need to know which chip is good and which not. so, you can swap them and make a working one.
 
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