MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: 2015 Is Almost Over: What Do You Guys Expect/Hope For in Mame/Mess?

> > > Might as well get this thread started.
> > >
> > > I hope that the following are emulated:
> > >
> > > Seibu Cup Soccer
> >
> > I think one day it will all fall into place and just click, not sure when tho...
> >
> > > Tobe! Polystars
> >
> > Um.. yeah, me too, the problem is we know there's a much better driver than the one
> > we have, and nobody really wants to step on toes or repeat work.
> >
> > > The music in G-Darius
> >
> > didn't we emulate that LAST year? it might not be 100%, but it's something..
> >
> > >
> > > I'm not holding out much hope for the decapping of Toaplan sound chips, though,
> but
> > > who knows?
> >
> > yeah, I wouldn't hold much hope either, I'd love to close the book on that driver
> > pretty much for good, but I don't think anybody even has the first idea of an
> > approach for them now.
>
> Guru updated his page recently with some decapping news that worth reading. It seems
> that we can hope for something next year in this subject. Of course, if you want a
> particular chip to be decapped/photographed soon, you may have to spend some money
> yourself. Otherwise, have a seat and waaaait.
>

and I'll believe it when I see it, the last thing we need is another over-hyped under delivering scheme, the previous one burned such an unbelievable number of bridges I'm surprised anybody has any confidence in us at all now (there's a fair bit of stuff you haven't seen emulated due to people still being pissed off over that and we really should be offering a deep apology) I would take anything said on Guru's page with a pinch of salt, we're even having to apologise all over the place for his behavior, it's becoming a full time job.

Decapping is not a magic solution, unles the parts are MASK parts it guarantees nothing, even MASK parts can be tricky if they're modern. For anything else you're basically depending on there being a read mechanism, having the right adapter, and being able to locate and disable whatever read protection is in the chip, by no means an easy task. Not all chips have read mechanisms, and some are truly custom so you won't find an adapter to read them.

So far, even with a guy who was considered one of the most knowledgeable in the field, all we got were simple mask rom cases, and chips where the deprotect bits were well documented, even then we got a lot of bad dumps and things that needed to be hand fixed. The guys actually doing the best decap work (but again only covering MASK rom cases where decapping is a viable solution) have mostly been working on decapping stuff for the MESS side of the project, quietly, without any real hype.

> Right now I'm looking for a Jaleco Saint Dragon PCB and a Taito Tokio PCB to buy and
> have both of them dumped and their MCUs decapped. But the big challenge here is to
> find these rare boards!

Tokio should be ok, the Jaleco MCUs I've not heard anything suggesting we can deal with.