Glitchy Telstar Arcade cartridge 3 and cart roms?

[Swami]

I just got a Coleco Telstar Arcade with carts 1-3. Does everyone who has a Coleco Telstar Arcade with cart 3 notice the pinball ball seems to go through the paddles a lot and in the selection 2 shooting game, the targets are often mostly or totally off-screen? I notice the same thing in this guys video. Also, since the carts have 512 bytes (0.5kB) of ROM each and a microcontroller (firmware rather than software?), can a repro cart be made for the system? I think Kevtris said each cart chip is a custom MOS chip with its own circuitry that would have to be mapped out (Kevtris:"Unfortunately the telstar used custom game ASICs and doesn't really run code, so there's no way to do anything but a simulation without decapping and tracing out the circuit on the chip itself.") 

 

 

 

[mr_me]

The chip is an mps-7600.  Maybe a chip can be re-created in fpga but it's a lot if work.  Are you looking to have the bugs fixed?  Here's someone who has the chip decapped.

https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-ay-3-8606-another-successfully.html?m=1

[TheProgrammerIncarnate]

As the MPS7600-001 has been decapped, so it can and will be eventually converted into a FPGA, which could be put into a repro cart #1. All other carts use different variants of the 7600, which have not been decapped yet. I'm not confident that a reproduction would fix the bugs you've described, as they're most likely exist in the design and not from a damage to the actual chip.

[Swami]

10 hours ago, mr_me said:

The chip is an mps-7600.  Maybe a chip can be re-created in fpga but it's a lot if work.  Are you looking to have the bugs fixed?  Here's someone who has the chip decapped.

https://nerdstuffbycole.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-ay-3-8606-another-successfully.html?m=1

Mainly, to fix the bugs. I also think the side drains on the pinball game make it unnecessarily difficult. As you can see in the video, every ball life is less than 15 seconds.

21 minutes ago, TheProgrammerIncarnate said:

As the MPS7600-001 has been decapped, so it can and will be eventually converted into a FPGA, which could be put into a repro cart #1. All other carts use different variants of the 7600, which have not been decapped yet. I'm not confident that a reproduction would fix the bugs you've described, as they're most likely exist in the design and not from a damage to the actual chip.

Since the Telstar Arcade is basically just the controller and A/V out, and the games are ridiculously simple by retrogaming standards, if there is a simpler way to feed the recreated game data to the system without recreating each ASIC.