First of all id like to thank Windowskiller for sharing battletryst. Unfortunately i have two boards and none plays it. It seems that each game has its own board setup. I have three games cd but only one plays on its board. Anyone knows what is exactly responsible for each game,bios another chip? I think that in fz 35s doesnt have a chance in playing a game. Hardware misses a lot...
I grabbed a copy of the roms (copies of the silicon, not the cd images) for all five m2 arcade games. The main rom, which I would guess is the bios, ends up producing the same CRC for all games with the exception of Polystars (same size though, might be either a regional thing or the way it was dumped). With the exception of Battle Tryst, all of the games seem to have an additional rom of varying size included (evil night and heat of eleven each use [different] real world clocks). I'll go out on a limb and say that the hardware might be slightly different between each of the machines preventing them from running. Edit: What game are you getting to work on your board? Edit2: In fact looking at the source code of the mame driver for m2 hardware would also suggest subtleties between some of the hardware (e.g. Total Vice appears to have a separate rom dedicated to sound samples). The only game I would expect to *possibly* work across all machines would be Battle Tryst since it doesn't seem to have any additional hardware on it. However pitsunami has proven that even that doesn't work.
i have an evil night board that works and plays only evil night. i tried my total vice original cd and just get a black screen.then battle tryst and polystars give me a hardware error.the only differences between total vice board and hell board is the different lower board,and a different number chip on the second board.i tried everything switching boards and stuff but nothing...
Can you give me any details on this error? I'm wondering if there is some sort of crc check for the CD built somewhere in the rom.
Ugh... can't seem to figure out what the difference is between JAC, JAA, and EAA is on arcades. Region coding? Do you get "ver.jaa" no matter which disc you put in?
Does Battle Tryst say ver.jaa or ver.jac? Hours of searching and I still can't figure out what these damn abreviations are for. However the above question will help me with mapping out what exactly is going on during startup. Does it say anything about the hardware error before it reboots (description, error codes, anything?)
nothing...just recognizes that a game is in cdrom and when starts loading gets a hardware error,nothing more. maybe if sb hacks m2 games just to start without checking would be great...:-(
You were saying that you get this error when you put in an invalid disc: device check 11k k ver.jaa Now when you put in battle tryst, is it still saying ver.jaa or does it say ver.jac. I'm trying to figure this out to see if the hardware test is failing at the rom level or at the software level.
I think its just a silly version abbreviation Konami uses. JAA would be Japanese version A, JAC would be Japanese version C. Konami uses this for all its arcade games. Theres also UAA (USA) and EAA (EURO) etc etc... Search the Mame romset at http://www.mameworld.net/maws/ for "ver UAA" or "ver EAA" or something. Its not an M2-thing.
I new that it was an arcade thing and not an m2 thing, but didn't make the connection that it was a konami only thing until you mentioned. Thanks for shedding some light.
That means that the games are actually loading and running their diagnostic routine but failing there. So its the game refusing to run based on the hardware, not vice versa. Do you know if/where theres a test switch on these things? Can you try bridging it while you start the machine? Also, what happens when you start it up with no disc in the drive?
there is a test switch but test only is accesible on evil night when it boots and later. the other games dont let me. the boot process is :1.device check 11k ok,2. rtc check,3.eprom check,4.mask rom check then game boots. if no cd is inserted os keeps searching for cd and after a few secs reboots,then searches again...
So then I guess the lines of code in the arcade discs aren't debug after all. Once I get ahold of an evil night disc, I might be able to see exactly what its checking and what the checksums of the roms may be. I'm starting to think konami may have married the discs to the hardware so they could sell more units by keeping people from simply copying/swapping discs.
Konami GV ( among other Konami systems ) use eeproms with special values in, which the game checks on startup. It looks like at least some of the M2 games have eeproms or battery backed up ram. Expanding the M2 emulation in MAME is probably the easiest way of exploring the hardware. smf
As far as I know the systems used nvram for high score tables and what not, but I don't know about any eeproms. Whats curios to me now is that startup performs both a eprom check AND a mask rom check. I'm now on a quest to figure out what is what. It's the most surefire way, but I wouldn't say its the easiest by a long shot. Main processing still needs alot of work in how it handles dual cpus. The biggest hurdle would be the graphics chips which were completely proprietary asics, for which no real documentation exists unless it was recorded in the m2 dev kit manuals.
As I said, in other systems Konami defined "what not" as also ( along with high scores ) storing specific values that the games checked for that prevented people using another cd. smf
