Thanks for the pic Assembler :icon_bigg It looks like the PIF-NUS hadnt even been officially named yet! At location U5 where the PIF-NUS normally is there is a chip with the same number of legs marked:- LR350J01A SHARP JAPAN A quick Google doesnt seem to turn up any results though :shrug: Have I got the code wrong? Would love to see some scans of both sides of the board if you have time ray: Does anyone know how many Ultra 64 revisions there were in total? I wonder if anyone has them all?
Doubt it's a public chip. Probably something internal between Ninty and Sharp. Surely some kind of revision of the PIF-ROM. But I wouldnt set hopes too high, nothing hints at the fact that there is a CIC in that PIF at all on the u64 boards. The fact for example that the CIC pins (data in / out) are connected to nothing hints that way.
It's a public chip, it's just rare. Googling around for Sharp LR350J01 turns up a number of results for IC distributors, likewise Sharp LR35001Z. I'm willing to bet dollars to cents that it's just a rarely-used repackaging of a standard Sharp microcontroller of the era, as Nintendo are also theorized to have used re-badged 4-bit Sharp microcontrollers for cartridge CICs as well. This'll be proven one way or another once I finally get around to getting the chips decapsulated.
Are you going to decapsulate one of these 'PIF-NUS Z' or 'LR350J01A' off an Ultra64 board? If so I cant wait to see the results :icon_bigg
Sure, if it's an amateur with a fume hood and some nitric acid in his garage. However, if it's a professional reverse-engineering company like Flylogic - http://www.flylogic.net/blog/ - which is the company that the MAME team are going to be using, they can also use UV to erase only the read-protect security bit in any MCU that uses that method, other methods to reconnect security fuses that aren't ROM-based, and if all of that fails, they can use Focused Ion Beam methods to physically bond new traces onto the exposed die and manually read out EEPROM or other internal ROM types. Of course, this is almost prohibitively expensive, as they're offering the MAME team an extremely lowered price of $7500 per batch of chips, and I don't know how many chips are in each batch. I'm intending to get an instance of CIC-NUS-6101, 6102, 6103 and 6105, all of the major chips on an NTSC N64's motherboard, and the PIF chip off of a Seta Aleck 64 motherboard, which was a Nintendo 64-based arcade platform, into the second batch that gets sent off. Am I going to send one off for decapping? I don't know, I don't have one right now. I'd say a safer thing to do would be for me to send a standard NTSC N64 off for decapping, and if it turns out that what drives the PI is actually a microcontroller with its own internal ROM (note: this is different from the embedded boot ROM), then I can see if anyone is interested in sacrificing an Ultra 64 dev board for the cause. There isn't really any pressing time constraint here; it takes time to build up the $7500 or so necessary for each decapping batch, so this is all going to happen over the next couple years. We're not talking about a time frame of weeks or even months, here.
I have a broken one. Shit. >_<! Looks like it could be my turn again... I don't know what exactly is broken in there, I still have to check it out. I assume it has a burnt RDP. The RSP and R4300i work fine. Problem is I don't have a chance to check it, as my Indy and the OS are 2000 km away from me.
I have seen the MAME page here:- http://www.mameworld.net/gurudumps/decap/index.html It has the PIF-NUS from the Aleck64 listed as "Decapping/Processing In Progress". They say the cost is $330 per chip, so I imagine each batch has roughly 22/23 chips? If you would like a PAL 'PIF-(P)NUS' aswell drop me a PM and I would be happy to donate one to the cause :icon_bigg
MooglyGuy > Any plans to throw in the SNES CICs in the batch too? ^_^;; Would be great to have a CIC clone of it just like the Ciclone for NES.
Actually, the $330 per chip figure is from an entirely different decapping company in Japan. They handled decapping the first few Namco chips that you see listed on that page. However, with the discovery of Flylogic, who seem to have better facilities than the company out in Japan, contact was made to inquire about how much decapping would cost. I'm not 100% clear on the $7500 figure, but I do know that that's the amount that Guru was originally trying to raise, so that is probably accurate. As for the SNES CIC, I'd be glad to look into it once I've seen some kind of results in decapping N64 chips. :icon_bigg
Sorry for reviving this old thread, its title and topic seemed close enough to not start a new one. I came across a Youtube video on the SGI Onyx Infinite Reality (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXQOOkrSpq0) – the video quality is not great. Around the 7:30 mark it zooms through a 3D model of an unbranded N64 and early controller. It then shows a CAD model of what is probably N64 hardware on a small PCB: one chip is blurrily labeled “RCP†alongside a PGA R4300i. It looks to be smaller than the U64 board, no PCB traces or vias are visible. I cannot recognize the other ICs on the board, but given their quantity and layout, they are perhaps programmable? Are the heatsink-covered RCP chips on SGI boards branded as MIPS RISC (as shown in the video) or Nintendo? Was this PCB just a demo/concept or an actual early internal SGI test board?
Great find! I would assume that it could be a test board as SGI had to test their first tapeouts of the RCP and CPU after they had been produced at NEC... There is no RAM visible on that boad so it could really be a test board for CPU and RCP. If thats the case the board could be from around April 95 - also the PGA R4300i points in that direction... but if the version of the shown RCP is already Rev.2.0 it could be from August 95
This actually makes a lot of sense. The R4300i datasheet does mention the 179 pin PGA packaging is used for debugging. If this board did truly exist it was mostly likely for testing/debugging like you said, it has a small footprint as a single width GIO32. The lack of memory led me to wonder if the QFP with the golden heat spreader next to the RCP (RAC side) was programmed to behave as a Rambus channel slave device - behaving as RDRAM or debugging the channel. Rambus does mention on several of its patents and cell datasheets that they can provide verilog code for their RAC and RMC cells for testing purposes.
