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 tha...
2023-09-30 17:25:30 +0000 UTC View Post
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 c...
2023-06-10 18:20:54 +0000 UTC View Post
The MiSTer TMNT core beta is finally available: https://github.com/furrtek/Arcade-TMNT_MiSTer
M.I.A...
2023-04-28 14:40:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Work on the Konami 053260 "KDSC" sound chip is finally done !
The traced overlay, schematics, and some infos on Toshiba logic cells are here: 2023-03-22 10:23:04 +0000 UTC View Post
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...
2022-11-27 20:01:24 +0000 UTC View Post
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:
<... 2022-10-07 06:06:43 +0000 UTC View Post
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 ...
2022-09-12 11:39:20 +0000 UTC View Post
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 th...
2022-09-05 17:21:41 +0000 UTC View Post
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, ...
2022-05-13 14:46:21 +0000 UTC View Post
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 b...
2022-04-07 02:27:02 +0000 UTC View Post1. CPU read signal not used for ROM access decoding
Access 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 C...
2022-02-11 10:19:51 +0000 UTC View Post
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 s...
2022-01-23 02:51:35 +0000 UTC View Post
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 2021-10-07 21:51:09 +0000 UTC View Post
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 notice...
2021-10-07 04:31:06 +0000 UTC View Post
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 i...
2021-07-26 05:47:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Confused about those 05xxxx Konami chip numbers yet ? ;3
As previously mentionned, this one goes in pair with the last one I worked on: the 051962. They're both used to generate the scrolling...
2021-06-22 17:55:49 +0000 UTC View Post
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, ...
2021-06-06 03:23:33 +0000 UTC View Post
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 currentl...
Today's schematics release of the Konami 007452 chip comes with a "funny" story.
The main ...
2021-04-13 15:27:11 +0000 UTC View Post
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 ...
2021-03-31 05:52:56 +0000 UTC View Post
A few days ago I shared an "artistically" colored render of the Konami 007121 video chip's vector trace on...
2020-11-29 02:37:08 +0000 UTC View Post
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 connecti...
2020-10-21 08:04:10 +0000 UTC View Post
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...
2020-09-24 15:34:01 +0000 UTC View Post
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 t...
2020-09-10 16:09:58 +0000 UTC View Post
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 Kona...
2020-09-02 19:59:38 +0000 UTC View Post
EDIT: The last one was the Konami 007232. It's now done, files are available here: https://git...
2020-08-27 07:17:03 +0000 UTC View PostI'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...
2020-06-18 05:34:47 +0000 UTC View Post
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 w...
2019-08-26 05:29:13 +0000 UTC View PostBecause 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 du...
2019-06-13 17:59:41 +0000 UTC View Post
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 don...
2019-04-19 13:15:50 +0000 UTC View Post