Anyone Able to Dump a TV Boy?

[Omegamatrix]

The first came from a 208 in 1 cart. The second menu is on the Screen Search console. You discovered that menu rom a few years back.

 

I have no doubt that these menus were probably recycled on at least a few different consoles. Both menus are related to each other, and there exists at least a third version that is undumped. Here is a picture of it. Maybe it will show up on one of these TV boys.

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Thanks. Yes, the menus are from the same origin. The 3rd one you posted is not from the TV Boys. I just today received the ROMs and they show the same menu as the other TV Boys. Where did you find the screenshot?

 

BTW: Can you post the complete ROM of the 208 in 1 cart, please?

[slydc]

21 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

But there exists another menu ROM which displays the following screen (and has different music). Where does this one come from? Maybe from another TV Boy variant?

 

This is the first time i'm seeing this select screen, so don't know which variant it comes from. Maybe it comes from an Atari 2600 or

2600 junior clone with 128 built-in games or simply a cartridge with 128 games. There are so many pirate clones (like Rambo TV games)

that needs to be cataloged

 

 

Nice job find the two roms from MAME and they are both 338k size zip files.

 

There is more TV-Boy clones i forgot: the Game Link 2001, the SilverStar (which this one has 64 games built-in) and the Akor Super TV-Boy III.

 

Found a page that someone dumped a 128-in-1 cartridge: http://www.sromero.org/ext/atari/atari2600_128in1.php

and you can download the rom.

 

Other dumps but from a Junior PAL clone:

 

https://www.emulatorgames.net/roms/atari-2600/128-in-1-junior-console-chip-1-pal/

 

https://www.retrostic.com/roms/atari-2600/128-in-1-junior-console-chip-2-pal-83429

 

https://www.retrostic.com/roms/atari-2600/128-in-1-junior-console-chip-3-pal-83430

 

https://www.retrostic.com/roms/atari-2600/128-in-1-junior-console-chip-4-pal-83427

 

Now i'm of to bed...RRrrZZzz......

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Thanks for positing the links. Too bad that the 128in1 archive doesn't contain the original file.

 

Here are the TV Boy dumps I got so far. Note that the TV Boy (NTSC) one is a bad dump which is severely broken.

 

Note: The next Stella release will support the TV Boy ROMs directly.

 

Super TV Boy.bin TV Boy (NTSC) (bad).bin TV Boy (PAL).bin TV Boy 2.bin

Edited May 26, 2020 by Thomas Jentzsch

[Omegamatrix]

17 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Thanks. Yes, the menus are from the same origin. The 3rd one you posted is not from the TV Boys. I just today received the ROMs and they show the same menu as the other TV Boys. Where did you find the screenshot?

 

BTW: Can you post the complete ROM of the 208 in 1 cart, please?

Do you mean a single image of the 208 in 1 cart? It wasn't dumped with all at once with an eeprom reader. I had to read each rom individually using a 7800 dumper. It took several hours as I recall.

 

The screenshot of the third menu is from a console that Spirantho had.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Too bad.

 

I wonder if we could reconstruct the original single image. Would that be just the individual ROMs merged?

 

The screenshot is interesting. It is most likely doing nothing in the console, because the hardware doesn't support the bankswitching. So there must have been existed a console or cart which supports it. And its contents got simply copied (pirated) for this console.

Edited May 27, 2020 by Thomas Jentzsch

[kmg]

On 5/25/2020 at 10:33 PM, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Thanks for positing the links. Too bad that the 128in1 archive doesn't contain the original file.

 

Here are the TV Boy dumps I got so far. Note that the TV Boy (NTSC) one is a bad dump which is severely broken.

 

Note: The next Stella release will support the TV Boy ROMs directly.

 

Super TV Boy.bin 512 kB · 41 downloads TV Boy (NTSC) (bad).bin 512 kB · 40 downloads TV Boy (PAL).bin 512 kB · 43 downloads TV Boy 2.bin 512 kB · 43 downloads

Thanks for these. Thomas, do you know the origin of the two ROMs that didn't come from MAME? Do you know if the PAL one is a Systema or Akor? And do you know why the NTSC is marked bad?

Edited August 6, 2022 by kmg
grammar

[Thomas Jentzsch]

No idea, I took them from some collections.

[kmg]

I examined the differences between the TV Boy I and II ROMs. They are almost entirely identical but games 57, 64, and 119 have been swapped out.

 

The one other exception was Enduro which has had one instruction:

179: ad be 00  lda $00be

changed to a zero page addressing:

179: a5 be     lda $be

The subsequent code is moved up a byte but otherwise is identical. Both TV Boy II and Super TV Boy have this change (same game ROM), but no other Enduro ROM does. I wonder why this was done? Assuming it works properly on these units, then it's necessary due to some incompatibility in the clone SoC? In MAME it causes a timing issue that messes up the lower half of the display.

 

A side note here is that the Enduro extract from TV Boy I has CRC 9973b4b5, which means it's Rom Hunter's Unknown PAL version. The TV Boy II/Super TV Boy version didn't match any known dumps.

[alex_79]

I don't think the change in "Enduro" was intentional, but rather a bug introduced by recompiling the disassembly of the rom after hacking it (by changing the framerate for PAL and removing the copyright graphics). The assembler used to do so assembled the instruction "lda $00be" as using zeropage addressing, since the address is actually in page zero, and ignoring the leading zeroes.

 

E.g. "Dasm", which is used by most homebrewers, behaves like that: you have to specify if you want to use absolute addressing, else it will just choose the addressing mode depending on where the address actually is, no matter about leading zeroes.  I imagine whatever assembler they used at the time, it worked in the same way, and the (lack of) testing/quality control did the rest.

 

I also doubt it displays properly on those clones, as if they have such differences in timing, it would probably break compatibility with many other games.

Edited August 7, 2022 by alex_79

[Thomas Jentzsch]

8 hours ago, alex_79 said:

I don't think the change in "Enduro" was intentional, but rather a bug introduced by recompiling the disassembly of the rom after hacking it (by changing the framerate for PAL and removing the copyright graphics). The assembler used to do so assembled the instruction "lda $00be" as using zeropage addressing, since the address is actually in page zero, and ignoring the leading zeroes.

Makes sense. But why did they recompile? They already had the (working) ROM from the TV Boy I.

Edited August 7, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch

[alex_79]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

But why did they recompile? They already had the (working) ROM from the TV Boy I.

No idea!

Maybe the buggy one was actually an earlier version and they sent the wrong file to the chip manufacturer...

[+Atari_Warlord]

Pulled my NTSC TV-Boy out yesterday and played it for the first time after sitting in storage for 25 years.  I went through all the games and a good 30-40% were glitchy, a few to the point of being unplayable.  Not sure if it was bad roms, poor emulation, or a poor signal.  I had to run it through a VCR since I haven't had a CRT in a long time and we have several local stations close to and including the required 13. 

 

Here is a scan of the manual.

 

 

[Buckaroo]

Found a TV Boy 3 for sale and had to get it (it's the only one I've ever seen). 

 

The chips on this one are 2x COB blobs which are soldered on a separate board to the controls and power. 

 

I don't have the knowhow to dump this as I have no idea about the pinouts but it looks as though there's enough connections to run traces from.  

 

I haven't unsoldered the boards yet.