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Tomy Tutor...anyone?


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Never laid hands on one in real life, but I was playing around with it using the MESS emulator. It has a great BASIC, lots of neat things you can do with it. The game Traffic Jam is a blast, too. I've thought about trying to port it to either the Atari or the C64.

 

Just found this website (while trying to recall the name of "Traffic Jam"). There are a LOT of sweet looking games for the TT. http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/carts.html

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I considered porting my TI-99/4A homebrew version of Pitfall! to the Tutor.

Then I thought who's gonna play it. There are no homebrew PCB's for that machine, so only emulator would be possible for now.

 

I wonder how many Tutor machines there's still out in the wild.

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I have a near complete US Tomy Tutor collection and several Japanese games. It's an alright system (sort of reminds me of the TI or Colecovision) and the games look nice, but they play soooooo slowly. I haven't fired mine up in awhile, but it would be nice if someone could port Traffic Jam and Demon Diggers (well the Japanese version anyway) to the TI. :)

 

Tempest

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I don't have one but around 1990 there were 10+ Tomy games ported to the Myarc Geneve 9640 (both have the TMS9995). I've played these ports on the Geneve and some are pretty fun and look fairly nice.

 

I actually could have had one of these computers years ago at a yard sale, but had other computers already and didn't know what I was looking at. Had I known then what I know now..

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  • 5 years later...

I've got a set of 7 carts on the way... I will need to build a joystick adapter.

 

The keyboard has issues with the left 4 columns. So I just ordered some silver paint to repair the traces on the ribbon. I'm really curious how this can be modded.. I just ordered another F18A, so I'll give that a go. It looks like the memory map is pretty open, once you page the ROMs out. So I want to eventually have some RAM on the thing...

I'm tempted to pick up a recorder. I'm a little conflicted... Can it be used with a digital recorder?

 

Once the F18A is in, I suspect the clock crystal can be switched up to 12Mhz, from the current 10.

 

-M@

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This is great. Please post what you come up with. I'm very interested.

 

Will do.

 

? Is there no archive of manuals for this intriguing machine? In any language? I'm having a hard time finding anything. The http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/tomy/<- floodgap website has lots of information. But I'm surprised I cannot find text archives... I guess it was sold as a child's toy.....

 

I spent a lot of time last night just staring at the motherboard. Like I did as a kid staring at the TI-99/4A when I first opened it up.

 

-M@

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Adding ram looks doable. A cartridge can page out the OS roms, from what Ive read, but i haven't seen pinouts for the cartridge port yet. It looks like the bottom 48k could be ram, and a tiny 8k os on a cartridge can go at 0xC000.

 

Since there is no precedence to follow, the sky's the limit!

 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

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I managed to get the F18A into the Tomy Tutor.

 

I needed to unsolder the TMS9918A, and any of the capacitors on the DRAM that were physically obstructing.

I also desoldered the wires connecting the RF modulator / TV out from the board.

 

Once this is done, the +12v from the power-supply is not needed at all.

 

Here is a short video ( after about 6 seconds my phone focuses )

 

 

I've played around with it a bit. The US cartridges work when the -5v is not connected on the powersupply either. However the -5v does go to the cartridge and rear expansion port. It is otherwise not used on the motherboard, from what I can tell. This is cool because my Tomy powersupply is buzzing, and the requirements to replace it are much simpler... I have sat and played scramble off of just a +5v wallwart. (Oh, I put some molex connectors on the power supply you can see in the video. Just so I can remove this easier... The pinout on that is not matching typical disk drive usage of those connectors. )

 

My keyboard is still not 100%. I used silver conductive paint and recovered 14 of the 16 keys that were failing. However I lost the space bar and '>' along the way. This will just require patience.

 

Some stills:

post-42954-0-50121400-1476338947_thumb.jpg

post-42954-0-74715900-1476338960_thumb.jpg

post-42954-0-32593300-1476338969_thumb.jpg

 

-M@

Edited by jedimatt42
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  • 2 weeks later...

So, Sega Genesis 3 button controllers are just so versatile... I picked up one at PRGE for a few bucks, pulled all of the discrete components and the encoder chip off of the board, and then wired the gamepad up for player 1.

 

The tutor has 2 button controllers, and I only had the bare console and cartridges... So I had to do something... Sorry Genesis.

 

Sega cable -> Tomy Tutor Player 1 ( the pinouts had been documented on floodgap )
pin 1 - brown - player 1 common
pin 2 - red - player 2 common / unused
pin 3 - orange - SL -
pin 4 - yellow - SR -
pin 5 - green - down -
pin 6 - blue - left -
pin 7 - grey - up -
pin 8 - black - right -
pin 9 - white - unconnected -
The inside of the Genesis controller had the pin numbers printed on the board, I don't know if the colors hold up from instance to instance. The buttons and directions already all have a 'common' trace on the pcboard. That serves perfectly for 'player1'. After that, it is just a matter of tracing the function to a thru-hole on the board, and soldering the wire for that function in place. Lather rinse repeat.
My keyboard doesn't work fully yet.. :( So at least now I can try out the 9 games I have... To a degree :)
-M@
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I managed to steal a few cycles this weekend and drive the keyboard matrix from a Teensy 3.2 microcontroller. But the interrupt response time is to slow on the Teensy to keep up. Brute force polling was better, but insufficient to get a clean transition from one key to the next.

 

I'm planning to go upstream from the keyboard matrix to the key selector logic (an LS138 & LS251), and let the microcontroller assert a couple 'pressed' keys to some GALs programmed as 6 bit daisy chainable comparators.

 

The way the Tomy hardware appears to work for keyboard scanning is that the CPU asserts a matrix row with the LS138 (3 to 8 decoder) and selects a column with the LS251 (3 to 8 selector) that responds true or false if the key selected is pressed or not. The 'scan' routines seem to iterate all rows, and all columns, and when the LS251 says 'yes', it believes it has found the key...

 

Connecting 2 6 bit comparators to the 3+3 bits for the matrix, should allow support for 2 simultaneous key presses without having to respond to any pin transitions from the Tomy side. It is an idea... untested at this point.

 

-M@

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