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Knarfian

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  1. FWIW - These references all came from personal contacts, MAME, or the datamath.org website
  2. These are the undumped/bad dump things on our list at the moment. I think there is some overlap with your list. People have already mentioned other things too, just since my last post. GI PIC7040-519 8604 CAY DIP40 PIC7040 Sewing Machine - Singer ultra unlimited 6268 TI ? DIP40? TMS7042 Exelvision ExelTel Aux CPU TI L11001 DIP40N2 TMS70C20 HX-2000 Wafertape TI ADC1984C C11202NL DIP40 TMS70C20 Architectural Data Corp - Data Dimensioner TI C14018 DIP40N2 TMS70C20 HX-3000/P RS-232+Parallel Interface TI C14020 DIP40N2 TMS70C20 HX-1000 Video Interface TI C71003 DIP40N2 TMS70C20 HX-3100 Data Modem TI TMC70016 DIP54N2? TMS70C46 TI PC-324 Printer TI TMC70035 QFP60 TMS70C46 TI Financial Investment Analyst FIA-10 TI ? ? ? Pinball - Technoplay - X Force - Audio CPU TI C61013? TMS70C40F? (C)1987 TI PLCC44?? TMS70C40? Tiger - Punch Your Lights Out (some versions)
  3. I wanted to give an update on this. We've been working hard making this dumper work for every known TMS7000 variant in existence First off, the original design works fine for many of the chips, including all the 40pin DIPs (normal and narrow) and 44 pin PLCCs. As of yesterday, we've finally tested all these variations. We are gonna send these out in the next couple days to the 2 folks who need them. Then, we realized that there are 28pin "TMS70CTXX" variations which don't have enough pins to support the way were doing the dumping! So, we prototyped a new design, using a different way of using the pins and hopefully working for every last variation. Along the way, we found a way to support the "piggyback" chips which may have up to 16K ROM as well. And we found we could minimize the external EPROM to only 4K. This design has now been tested with a CT chips, and it works for those too. (We got one from broken CD-player) Next, we looked at the TI calculator chips which have limited documentation - the TMS70C46 series. These come in 54pin narrow dips and a QFP60 pin, that we know of. We reverse engineered the pinout of the 54-pin dip from the TI-74 schematics and hardware, and then applied that knowledge to the QFP60 pinout in the TI FIA-10 calculator, which is currently not dumped. These chips have a built-in address/data demux, so the adapter for this chip will plug into the new design replacing both the TMS7000 footprint and the LS373 latch. We will be able to test our new dumper on both of these chips soon, but we believe it will work fine. Interestingly, every chip we've tested have internal ROM, even chips which supposedly do not contain internal ROM. Finally, we discovered there is yet another late variation, the TMS70Cx8 series. These appear to come in PLCC 68 and DIP 64 narrow. It looks like these were only released in Europe, as we have only found a 1991 databook and some chips from there. We will also be testing the new dumper design with these chips soon, we just need to make adapters. So, in short: 1) We have the original design that handles the common stuff, and has been fully tested. (40pin and 44pin stuff, 2K, 4K, and 12K rom support) 2) We have a new design which we are still prototyping/testing, but should to work for all known (to us) variants 3) We have examples of every chip type we know of. There are a number of undumped chips out there that we know of, and probably more we don't. Please spread the work that this tech exists! I recently learned that one rare chip was decapped prematurely, when it could have been dumped first!
  4. FYI, we just updated this repo last night and changed the name, FWIW. https://github.com/palazzol/TMS7xxx_dumper It now supports all these chips: PIC70XX, TMS70XX, TMS70XXX, TMS77XX, TMS70CXX, and TMS77CXX Also, there is a brand new blog entry about it here: https://abzman2k.wordpress.com/2022/12/23/tms7xxx-dumper/
  5. Hi, This may not be the cheapest, easiest, or most convenient solution - but it is open. My friend redrew the Original Mattel Intellivision T-Card schematic, and did a board layout very close to the original. You can make your own boards based on this design, and depending on the complexity of the memory map, you might be able to get away with only partially populating it. It uses standard ROMs (or RAMs), following the directions from the original T-Card description earlier in this thread. https://github.com/abzman/intellivision-t-card It seems to work - so far I've tested Astrosmash anyway, in the first bank. I haven't tested anything else. -Frank
  6. FWIW - I had some small issues with this conversion. It seems the triangle arrowheads didn't encode properly. I re-encoded this doc, along with the 4 chapters of De Re Intellivision, and hosted them on my github here: https://github.com/palazzol/intvdocs/ I used the online tool I found here: http://codelobe.com/tools/cp437-converter
  7. Also, abzman and I dumped the RX80 already. It's the most recent binary file added here: https://github.com/palazzol/miscroms It would be nice to get skeleton drivers for these into MAME at some point in the future.
  8. Not sure if you still need these - but FWIW I have an MX-80 on order and the equipment to dump the Intel chips. So hopefully those dumps will be forthcoming. I also have an RX-80, which used a single NEC processor and a single 2764 data rom.
  9. When I was first working on the Astrocade driver in MESS, I generated this HTML file with the equation I was using in the emulator: http://www.ballyalley.com/ml/ml_docs/astrocade_palette.html I'm honestly not sure if it's been approved upon since then, and I'm not sure I have the python script anymore That said, MAME still uses the same (maybe identical) code to generate the palette: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/4263a71e64377db11392c458b580c5ae83556bc7/src/mame/video/astrocde.cpp#L78 -Frank
  10. Jamie Fenton is the creator of the arcade games Gorf and Robby Roto, as well as the Astrocade game system, OS and Bally Basic. She recently donated a bunch of items to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Along with various documents, the collection contains an original development system that was used to create and debug software for these platforms. The development system is called an "icebox" - a floppy disk-based Z80 system used as a substitute "CPU and memory", working with the target system hardware. It was used to write programs in Z80 assembly, as well as Terse - a version of the Forth programming language. An early version of the system ran CP/M, but later it was modified to boot a Terse-based OS. Information from this collection is available here: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/nuttingAssoc/ The MAME team is now working on emulating the development system. It can already boot the Terse-based OS in emulation. A number of disk images were also donated, and they are currently being looked at. They contain source code snippets and binaries for various arcade machines and Astrocade programs, tools for assembly and cross-compiling, as well as some possibly unreleased stuff, such as source code for the unreleased prototype of Ms. Gorf. At this time, it's not clear exactly how much stuff there is, or how much we can get working in emulation. But this is a fairly exciting development and I wanted to share the news!
  11. Physically, the tapes are not much different from ordinary cassettes. The leaders would need to be transparent so that the "end of tape" detection (photodetector) would work. They do seem to come in widely varying lengths. The issues with creating new tapes: A) We need fully remastered images. (I am working on it.) B) You would need to use a 4-track recorder capable of recording all 4 channels at once. C) There is an issue with the way ordinary recorders work. There is a generally a DC-blocking filter (usually a capacitor in series) in an audio channel, which causes some distortion of the waveforms. It's not clear right now if modifying the recorder would be necessary to make it work or not. I will probably do a post in the near future to illustrate this. Another way forward would be to make a solid-state replacement for the drive (and probably the tape drive interface board) itself. The interface is a simple 20-pin header connector, which I have fully documented. (I am currently playing around with an Arduino connected to mine.) It would be possible in the near future to use something like an Teensy3.5 board to with a small touchscreen to replace the whole thing. Of course, if you could put the whole KC on a cartridge...but one thing at a time... -Frank
  12. I wanted to give a quick update to this forum. I have been actively working on restoring the tape images I made so long ago, as well as trying to get the emulation going. In addition to the 3 BASIC programs I mentioned in the last update: Family Budgeting Crosswords 1 Crosswords 3 I finished restoring the data for: Data Cassette (formatted tape for saving your own BASIC programs) Physical Conditioning And I have partially finished: Conversational French So far, the error-correction coding layer on the tapes appears to have been good enough to support full restoration(!) To get things to run in the emulator, I basically need to: 1) Remaster the error-free (hopefully) data into new 4-track .wav files. (Python script) 2) Add support to MAME for the tape drive. In the last week, I added skeleton support for loading tape images. I hope to have partial emulator support for the tape drive soon. I will continue to post updates here. -Frank
  13. I worked on this project with a few other folks - thought it would be of general interest here. We made a version of Adventure which matches the end of the book Ready Player One, and interfaced the Atari to the internet https://www.i3detroit.org/creating-anoraks-adventure/ -Frank
  14. Happy New Year everyone! This is Frank Palazzolo and I just wanted to chime in on this thread. The tape images I am working with came from Dan Blitz's collection, which eventually was sold to Alex Pace. I used two different systems to do the dumps - initially I used a "Gen 1" simple stereo cassette player with two passes. The "Gen 2" system I did consisted of a TASCAM 4-track player/recorder which I modded, working with a data acquisition system. Unfortunately, I didn't get to dump everything with the "Gen 2" system, however. So, I do have recordings of "Super Football", as well as other tapes mentioned on the internet. You would think I have all the data I need - but some of the cassettes had some damage, and the system I cobbled together back then wasn't perfect. I am going through the images now, recovering and verifying the data with some python scripts and by hand as needed. I'll post a link soon with the list of images, and their status as far as recovery goes. I may need help with image recovery at some point - and it may be worth trying to re-acquire some of the images eventually. But I don't even know which ones at this point. So far I have recovered 3 images in their entirety - Family Budgeting, Geography Challenge, and Crosswords1. I haven't run the last 2 in an emulator yet. Can't wait to try it though I am upgrading the emulation in MAME as well, so that it can run the various programs. I believe the emulation of the BASIC programs is complete - I just need to get it back into a recent build of MAME. Emulation of the assembly programs, Physical Conditioning, Conversational French, etc. will probably need some more work in MAME to run properly. Thanks for all the interest - I'm glad to be working on something again that people want to see -Frank
  15. Here are a few really old pictures of the board I was working with...and some of the diagnostic code running: http://avoidspikes.com/dsplib/personal/pictures/INTVKbd.html
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