Arduino game cartridge dumping

 Arduino  Comments Off on Arduino game cartridge dumping
Nov 232014
 

Continuing on from the Gameking post I made yesterday. I have been working with Team Europe recently to help dump some cartridges for inclusion into MESS from the Leapster range of devices.
I adapted my Gameking dumper program a little to be more suited to the Leapster but in doing so I believe it made it more generic and therefore easier to be adapted to other devices too.

First off this program relies heavily on two additional IC’s being used in the circuit. These are 74HC4040‘s.
These chips are binary counters and they are great in the fact that they only require 2 inputs each from the Arduino and they cover 12 address bits out each too. So a simple bit of maths tells us that by using 4 output pins from the Arduino we cover 24 address pins. For those of you that thought my Gameking dumper wasn’t possible due to the low number of pins used on the Arduino then this is the reason why.
They are also good to use as they are both 5v and 3.3v tolerant and as a lot of these cartridges only use 3.3v its ideal.

If you are even just slightly familiar with how to hook up a ROM for reading then you will have no issues in wiring this circuit up.
Here is the circuit drawing made by Team Europe
dumperdrawing

And here is the circuit
dumperwired

Of course all of this is useless without the Arduino program itself which you can DOWNLOAD HERE
If you use this program for anything useful then please let me know and also please give credit where credit is due.

Thanks to Team Europe too for their testing, feedback and providing the pictures used in this post.
You can visit Team Europe’s blog here https://team-europe.blogspot.co.uk/

CPS1 Ken Sei Mogura

 General  Comments Off on CPS1 Ken Sei Mogura
Jun 012014
 

Here is something a lot of people wouldn’t even know existed and those of us that did had given up hope of one being found. As luck would have it though, DrGlitch on the Jamma+ forum located not one but two of these machines here in the UK.
Even better he loaned me the boards to dump and they are currently in the capable hands of Haze who is working on getting this thing running.
Kensei0

Here you can see the usual CPS1 PCB stack.
Kensei1

Whats not normal is that this stack is only used as a video board and the rest is controlled by this
Kensei2
kensai3

We also got the manuals for this thing too.

Its an excellent find and cannot thank DrGlitch enough for loaning me the boards so we can get them dumped.