> coolmod dumped VJ Dash 1.2 by Jaleco but it appears to be missing a board or large > data holder
It is likely similar to Jaleco's "Stepping Stage" hardware -- using a PC computer with mpeg decoder card for music/video playing back, and (maybe) another 68000 board for driving the 3 upper screens.
I will say lucked out in finding earliest release. It will probably be impossible finding earliest releases of several other IT games other than earliest release versions already supported so far.
>SHVB dumped X-Men: Children of the Atom (950331 BRAZIL)
Impressive. Actual photo of a CPS-2 Brazil region pcb.
I waded through the file src/mame/drivers/cps2.cpp and will now say the future romset name in MAME will be: xmcotab It's a no brainer when seeing the romset names for other sets already supported.
So the next guess is how many regional set versions still yet to be found and added to MAME.
Going with this list and assuming there are not many multiple bug fixes involved pertaining to a language regional version....
- dumped X-Men: Children of the Atom (950331 BRAZIL)
Assuming Capcom's official idea was to have two releases of bug fixes instead of all the multiple unintended bug fixes, this means there three language regions yet to be found and supported in MAME in order for X-Men: Children of the Atom to be considered fully documented and complete.
(USA 950331) (Japan 950331) (Asia 950331)
Multiply that with number of other CPS-2 games and regional versions and that likely leaves remaining CPS-2 sets yet to be found and supported at about 75 to 100 imo.
> I would guess the region rarity goes something like > > USA > JAPAN > EURO > ASIA > HISPANIC > BRAZIL > OCEANIA > > The dump is from new DU members in Brazil who are looking for more Brazil regions
IIRC one game (can't remember which) has a string for a KOREA region, which would easily make that the rarest of all if it was ever actually used on a production board.
>The dump is from new DU members in Brazil who are looking for more Brazil regions
I hope they luck out and find remaining alternate Brazil region versions of CPS-2 games not yet found.
I probably spent 5 to 10 minutes just on one title for an example to see how many remaining sets of a specific CPS-2 game there could have been made back then. Safe to say the numbers will almost match the number of remaining Tiger Electronics handheld games yet to be emulated.
Made a working stepping stage driver, and then tried the new dumped vj with it. Yes, vj uses the similar hardware -- two 68000 based boards, and a Windows PC as a slave device (contains 3x mpeg1 decorders, at least for stepping stage).
However, in mame's tile viewer, vertical stripes are shown from the two 16-bit 4-MegaByte rom chips (mr98053-03.ic14 and mr98053-04.ic36). Checked using hex editor, all even bytes are filled with 0xff in their front half part. Maybe these 2 rom chips use non-standard pin configuration of address/-cs/-oe lines?
In addition to the dumped GAL and CPLD, there is another GAL chip(IC 57), which hasn't a sticker, close to the 68000 CPU and the already dumped GAL. Dump it may help understand the address decoding.
Thanks for your information. Just did some further studying: the 0xff only happened in the front 2MBytes of the two 4MB rom data files, while the 2nd half data look good, but the graphics content are the same as the 1st halves(repeated?). However, some necessary in-game graphics can not be found, for example, song titles.
Looks like for these two 16-bit 4-MByte rom chips, their highest address pins(A20), and word/~byte mode pin are reversed?