furrtek posts
Posts: 67
Files: 121
Project schedule poll
It's been a while since the last update !Explaining this is a simple fact: although I've been hard at work on the Super A'Can sound chip, for now there hasn't been much exciting findings that I could share.Tracing is now 90% done and the schematics currently consist of 42 pages (have...
Super A'Can soundchip progress
A short post with some good news and (mildly) bad news: tracing and cell boundaries of the UM6619F A'Can soundchip are 99% done after 265 hours.The bad news: that was the easiest step. Now cells need to be understood, which will involve some guesswork due to the transistors not being individuall...
TMNT MiSTer core beta release
The MiSTer TMNT core beta is finally available: https://github.com/furrtek/Arcade-TMNT_MiSTerM.I.A. Missing In Action also comes with the buy-one-get-one-free offer ;)Can't say this game is comparable to TMNT regarding quality, but it does start up and is playable despite some background tile is...
Konami 053260 schematics release
Work on the Konami 053260 "KDSC" sound chip is finally done !The traced overlay, schematics, and some infos on Toshiba logic cells are here: https://github.com/furrtek/VGChips/tree/master/Konami/053260The sad thing with gate array chips that do N similar things, is that most of the logic mus...
Konami 053260 tracing done
First time tracing a Toshiba gate array and it was awful. Not 007121-awful, but still.Identifying the cells and reverse-engineering them required individual stitches at 50x magnification but apart from that, it was rather easy.The routing however took much more time to trace than expected. Like Oki,...
Konami 051316 reverse-engineering
I've just finished reverse-engineering the Konami 051316 chip.This one is a ROZ (rotation/zoom) plane generator, which is visually equivalent to the SNES' famous Mode 7. It was used by:* Ajax* Bottom of the Ninth* Chequered Flag (in pair)* Dive Bomber Squad (in pair)* Hot Chase / WEC (in pai...
Interlude: Konami 051316 and 053260
Before modifying tiers to allow voting on what I should work on next, I'll be working on the Konami 051316 (rotozoom chip used to generate perspective planes such as maps and roads) and the 053260 (PCM audio).These got on my todo-list when I intially wanted to build upon the TMNT core to support...
TMNT sprites and future work
The second part of TMNT's video system is now working well enough to show the title screen and a few MAME VRAM captures properly !There might be some glitchy edge-cases related to scaling that I will have to look into, but basically everything is now implemented with no deviation from the real h...
TMNT first pictures
Here are the first pictures generated by simulation.The self-test screen was generated with the main CPU running, meaning that everything is working well enough for the main program to run, for all RAMs to pass tests, and for text to be displayed properly on the fix layer.The graphics ROMs are repor...
TMNT core progress
Most parts of the TMNT hardware have been implemented and connected with each other. The lenghty bug-hunting process began.To do this without having to wait several minutes for the core to be synthesized and used on a real FPGA, simulation is used. Simulation is an essential tool for debugging, it&#...
Technical curiosities found in TMNT so far
1. CPU read signal not used for ROM access decodingAccess to the code and data ROMs for the main 68000 CPU is only decoded with address lines, not the "read/write signal". Meaning that the CPU could "fight" against the ROM on the data bus if it wanted to perform a write to them.The g...
All Konami TMNT video chips traced !
This is it, the second-to-last post about Konami's TMNT hardware.There are a few things I want to address in this paid post:1) The results !The schematics an svg trace for each chip are on Github, they're not 100% cleaned up (could be presented in better way, some nets still have to be named...
Konami sprite chips: I'm a dummy
A few hours after posting the news about the unusable dies, I remembered that I had a dead Ajax board from which I had already taken the 007232 sound chips.I didn't immediately update the post because I wasn't sure what had caused the decap failure, so the new attempt could have given the sa...
Konami sprite chips setback
A few days ago I wanted to resume work on the Konami chips, by starting to trace one of the two remaining sprite chips (051937 and 051960).Pulling the dies from my small collection, I noticed that they were awfully blue, unlike the tilemap chips which appeared silvery with a very slight yellow tint ...
Not Konami : Sega 315-5195
Two weeks ago I took a hike from Konami land to the Sega mountains to help Jotego with his System16 work, by tracing the smallest of the 3 custom chips used by the system.The 315-5195 fits in the list of early (bad) attempts at hardware security in arcade PCBs.Half of the chip is used for memory map...
Konami 052109 schematic
Confused about those 05xxxx Konami chip numbers yet ? ;3As previously mentionned, this one goes in pair with the last one I worked on: the 051962. They're both used to generate the scrolling tilemap layers (more commonly known as "backgrounds").As you can see from the free space (white) ...
Konami 051962 schematic
The Konami 051962 chip tracing was finished a few days ago. That's about one fifth of the video logic used by the previously mentionned games.This one is used in pair with the 052109, which I'll work on next.It serves 4 main purposes:* It lets the main 8-bit CPU read the 32-bit wide GFX ROM ...
New Konami project
The decision has been taken: my new Patreon chip die tracing project will involve the 1988 tilemap and sprite brothers 052109, 051962, 051960 and 051937.They have been decapped and are currently being imaged.These were used in:* Ajax (additional 051316)* Aliens (052526 CPU)* Block Hole (052526 CPU)*...
Bonus Round: Konami 007452
Today's schematics release of the Konami 007452 chip comes with a "funny" story.The main reason I started working on the 007121 video chip is because the rolling mines in Jotego's Contra core and MAME followed incorrect trajectories. That along some configuration bits marked as unkno...
Konami 007121 schematics release
Finally !Of the few chips I've traced until now, this one has been by far the most tiring. Much worse than the Neo Geo's video controler.The first reason for that, is that the memory used to store the row and line scroll values wasn't made of a common and easily identifiable RAM block as...
Konami 007121 tracing 100% done
A few days ago I shared an "artistically" colored render of the Konami 007121 video chip's vector trace on Twitter. I felt that writing a Patreon post to share the same thing was pointless, so I just kept going through the next step consisting of drawing the schematics.I only had a few p...
Konami 007121 tracing progress II
More progress. My buggy Python "ERC" (Electrical Rule Checker) script says that tracing is nearly 70% done.The green cells are fully connected, the yellow cells are only missing one connection, and the white ones are missing more than one.For some reason, their placement causes 3 distinct ho...
Konami 007121 tracing progress
Here's what the 007121 tracing layer looks like as of today. Just by looking at that blue cloud, one may guess that about 25% is done, but I'd give 15~20% as a closer estimate.To give you an idea of how many traces are missing in that blue zone: only the cells marked in green are fully conne...
All Konami 007121 cells mapped
It's almost all in the title: the 007121 cell map was completed a few days ago. The total count is 2347 cells, using up approx 88% of the available space on the die.The stats show that the top-3 most used kinds of cells are:-D Flip flop with reset: 401-D latch: 296-3-input NOR: 289Tracing was st...
Half of the Konami 007121 cells mapped
Hello new patrons, nice to see you ! Thanks for supporting this new project :)A short progress post today. I've just mapped out the logic cells of 19 columns out of the 36 making up the Konami 007121 chip, meaning that a bit more than half of the first step is done.The first image shows the cell...
Starting work on the Konami 007121
EDIT: The last one was the Konami 007232. It's now done, files are available here: https://github.com/furrtek/VGChips/tree/master/Konami/007232I've finally decided on a new Patreon-supported project: to fully reverse-engineer the Konami 007121 video chip.It has been suggested by Jotego becau...
Heartbeat and new projects
I've been obviously neglecting this poor Patreon page after most of the NeoGeo work was done. This was meant to be a lengthy update post about what I was up to these last months but nobody wants to read a wall of text, so this will be split up in multiple (free) posts.The most important info for...
Progress August I - Pretty much done
Since a lot of work has been done by the MiSTer gurus and since there has been a whole month without any update from me, I thought it would make sense to write the last paid post now to summarize what has been going on, what's the (little) left to do, and at the same time cover the purchase of s...
Progress June I - Small news before bigger news
Because I hadn't reached the goals just yet, this isn't the previously mentioned paid post. This is a short progress report about a few things.First of all, audio. The tempo glitches were due to a typo in Jotego's code, for which I submitted a patch. It caused the timer registers to be c...
Progress April I - What's cooking ?
Two main things: audio and CD.The audio part's vast majority comes from the work of Jotego, who implemented the YM2610 ADPCM channels during these last days. Something I could have never done in time (along with the whole FM part of the chip).His work on Yamaha chips easily became half of the ef...
