Another Prototype May Be On eBay

[TerryMasters]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Midway-MORTAL-KOMBAT-video-arcade-game-pcb-JAMMA-/310264703319?pt=UK_Video_Games_Coin_Operated_MJ&hash=item483d37a957

I'm a collector of special game boards; prototypes, betas, bootlegs, the works. What I do, is dig into these boards to find the differences between them. And if my theory is correct, this board is a prototype.

If you look at the board you'll see it's clearly a Y-Unit - the older version of the board. In the video of the Proto 4 thread, you can see the title screen text is colored green. The next highest up, emulated version of the game (Proto 8 ), has blue text, and this trend stayed with the game through every revision until 5.0. This board has green text.

Which means for this Y-Unit board to have green text, it would have to be anything Proto 7 or under. So unless MAME is emulating the title screen incorrectly, this board is an undumped beta.

I wanted to post this before it fell through the cracks.

 

[TerryMasters]

My Y-Unit 4.0 has PA roms too, and at first I thought they represented prototype roms as well but the region thing makes more sense. There are PA's, L's, and LA's with brown, black, and white labels for reference. My PA's however are game roms not program roms too like his are. I'm glad you mentioned this.

 

[TerryMasters]

I haven't determined the link between the colors and labels yet, but I don't think that any particular color indicates a final or prototype board - for instance I've seen brown label LA1's that were a final revision which wouldn't make sense if the browns were just protos so I don't believe that's the case, but I could be wrong. I do recall seeing both PA's and L's being protos, however.

About the two different board types though: The Y-Unit's have the CMOS battery under the dip switches, while the T-Unit's CMOS battery can be found to the right of them. The board you linked is one I've also had my eye on and could potentially be a prototype as well, though it was harder for me to determine based on the pictures the seller uploaded. It doesn't surprise me that all of these prototypes are coming out of the woodwork now that Midway has collapsed.


Edit- In retrospect the labels could mean anything. Just sitting down and thinking about it there are so many possibilities that get cancelled out, but then oh wait what about this... it's a huge mess. I may just ask Ed Boon what's up via Twitter.

It could be regions because of the text itself, like you said - PA = Pennsylvania, LA = Louisiana, L could be Local (IL) - but it also can't be locations because I haven't seen one T-Unit MK that was anything other than L - which means that if they were locations, that they suddenly stopped production in two areas as it was booming and then, you have the prototype white label L boards which also cancels that out so it can't be locations either (if the game was developed in Chitown, how could it be proto in two places at once... right?). But then if the labels reflect the versions and PA's are protos how do you end up with both PA and L1 prototypes... this whole thing is a humongous facepalm. Unless some PA's got mistakenly labelled with the finals and vice versa; that would actually explain some of this but I just can't see that happening. I'm lead to believe that the colors meant nothing and you never know, they might have just grabbed colored labels from leftover boards they never made roms for; pull a brown label from something that would have been Smash TV, take a white one from NBA Jam, etc. One of my theories is that they used the brown labels during testing, and switched to white labels around the time 1.0 went into production - then when the game took off, they might have run out of white labels and went back to the brown ones they had plenty of, who knows. All of this could mean nothing. But these are just the possibilities I've though of.

God I love stuff that makes you think.


Edit 2- Well I've got some bad news. If you know who I am, you'll know I have a few YouTube channels. One of these is a gaming channel: www.youtube.com/TerryxMasters. It's here that I have a series called, 'Glitching Out Mortal Kombat', and in the first video I show the Double Ice Backfire trick in MK1 - using my Revision 4 Y-Unit... that I just now noticed has green text.

This means that either MAME is infact emulating the color incorrectly, or it changes on a seemingly unknown variable, but it pretty much debunks my original post as the game being a prototype (though it is still possible being an L1).

 

[TerryMasters]

Fingers crossed - that board has too many PA roms to not be a proto. If it isn't, I'll be very surprised.

I don't know where to begin if he said the board isn't working, though the easiest solution would be to just pop the roms out and swap them with a known working board. If you don't have one, let me know what happens when you fire it up and I'll be more than happy to try and help you get it working

 

[Pr0fessor]

Just curious, why would there be a warranty sticker on a prototype board?

 

[TerryMasters]

I'm not sure this is the problem, but the MK games ran at a ~53hz refresh rate which could be messing with your video board. If other JAMMA games work, that would explain it, but I don't know if you have any other types of boards to test it with.

 

[Jason Shearer]

This means that either MAME is infact emulating the color incorrectly, or it changes on a seemingly unknown variable, but it pretty much debunks my original post as the game being a prototype (though it is still possible being an L1).

Regarding the title screen text color, I've often wondered about this myself. As it stands now, the text is green on revision 5.0 in MAME, but blue in all previous revisions. Though I can almost swear this wasn't always the case (where MAME is concerned). I'm hoping this is clarified at some point.

 

[TerryMasters]

That could be it. I typically run my boards at about 5.09 - it's a nice medium because certain systems need more juice than others (NAOMI's can have problems if given 5.01-5.02, same with Model systems) and at the same time, it won't give them too much juice.

 

[xDisciplex]

Been away for awhile, been busy last few weeks - missed this topic.

Cool find, glad you were able to snag this board up. I should have some free time to get my board all dumped and to the Mame team soon after, if you can't get your roms swapped over to a working board soon Scheiss I could test them out for you and dump them with my programmer and if they are a prototype I'd know in a few minutes swapping them on one of my many MK1 boards and testing them in my MK2 cab. Then can email you the images of the new roms to have or send into Mame as well, if they are an undiscovered prototype version by chance.

Let me know - I was hoping to get my 4.0 proto to them a long time ago, but had some non stop film/video gigs that have taken up my time. Should be free here shortly to dedicate to this.

 

[TerryMasters]

You can ship the board to me if you want, I can easily swap the roms out and I should be able to dump them too. Depending on how long it takes to get to me I could most likely do it the same day, I know Disciple's a busy guy, hell he can ship me his board and I could knock that out for him too if something comes up that would delay him.

I think most standard resolution Wells Gardner arcade monitors can do 53hz via a jumper setting on the monitor's chassis. Running MK boards on a supergun (i.e. a JAMMA adapter for a regular TV) doesn't usually work out so well with the unusual refresh rate. However, all my rigs are dedicated original cabinets so there should be no reason why it wouldn't work. If I swap out the roms, the worst case scenario for me is that they somehow fry my board that has to get replaced anyway because it's not the latest version, so there's no inconvenience.

But swapping roms is easy as long as you make sure you have the same type of boards (Y-Unit's in this case) and are careful not to bend the pins. They'd just mirror their locations between the two boards, for instance, the 1st rom in the left column goes in the 1st slot in the left column of the working board, etc.

Also, nice work on the Time Killers deal

Edit- These roms should be the program roms, the most important ones to take care of.

Ironically they're missing labels, so be careful not to expose them to certain types of light or you could risk erasing them.

 

[xDisciplex]

That's cool Scheiss - glad he was able to check out what 2 of them were at least. As far as swapping them out from board to board it is fairly easy all you really need is a flat head screwdriver. You put it on one side of the rom and raise it a bit and do same to other side to same height and it will then pop out.
Just gotta be careful putting them in the other board, no bent pins and in the same location and there's a notch in the eprom that has to match the notch on the board or if you put it in backwards you can risk the board possibly frying or frying the eprom. I've seen it fry people's boards when it was backwards and they started it up in their cabinets.

The two Terry circled are indeed the vital two eproms for the MK1 boards, those are the program chips. So with those as far as exposure the only thing to be careful of is UV light, but even sunlight won't erase these easily you 'd have to leave it out in the sun for like 12 days straight to erase it that way. The UV lamps and such are the ones you can't put them by or you can erase them easily with those and quickly. Until you get them sent out to be tested and dumped if they are a new revision by chance, I'd get a sticker or like the sticky part of a post-it to cover the exposed area on top to keep it from accidentally becoming exposed. Also static is bad for these boards so no static electricity around them or you'll risk damaging them same with the eproms.

I'm actually free for awhile between shoots - I'm doing preproduction on a feature we got coming up in a few months, so I'd be able to get it looked at as soon as I got them and test them on my MKII dedicated cab.

Let me know if you have any other questions of if you need my address - I have a Needham EMP-20 Programmer - which is the same workhorse that Stef at hobbyroms goes to for his MK eprom burning/dumping needs

 

[xDisciplex]

Sounds good Scheiss - if you decide to ship to me, I won't need the whole board though. I'd only need those two circled program file eproms to test on one of my MK boards I have here. And if it boots up on one of my working ones, I'll know in a few seconds what Revision it is for you

 

[TerryMasters]

Ah nuts. Looks like somebody picked it up.

Guess we'll find out soon enough. I think MK3Fan would know more about the wire down the middle, as I believe he did something similar to a JAMMA switcher once regarding the -5v (he is YourMKArcadeSource, right?). For a second I thought the roms on this one were labelled L1.0 - the first I've ever seen on an MK board, but upon closer inspection it looks like a Showtime label jumped on for the ride.

 

[TerryMasters]

Well the board arrived this morning, and unfortunately, I have reason to believe the roms are shot.

The windows on every single rom are uncovered, though usually not a problem, one of the program roms appears to have physical damage to it. It doesn't seem bad enough that it would give me the impression it wouldn't work, but it doesn't. I swapped the roms out with my good Revision 4, got a test sound with no visuals. I tried mixing the good roms with these roms, same problem. I even tried swapping them in the event these unlabelled roms got mixed up. Same thing.

Dumping the roms gave me two checksums so data is there, but what struck me as odd is that the chips are 256K roms - and according to the MAME set there isn't a single 256K chip amongst them. This could mean nothing, provided the actual program data doesn't take up the whole 256K space. But firing it up in MAME causes it to instantly crash.

I'd like to see if these checksums match up with anything else in the MAME database, though highly unlikely as if they are damaged the numbers are going to be screwed up anyway. They are as follows:

u89 = 01FB0F2F
u105 = 020CF4EE

I'm thinking these roms might not even be from the same game, but the sound test did pass, and I don't know if that would have happened if the code wasn't there telling it to do so. I suppose I could try starting my board with empty sockets...

Edit- Running them in a newer version of MAME has the same result as using them in a working board - the test sound and nothing else. Trying the actual board it came with doesn't start with the good Revision 4 roms.

Edit 2- Upon closer inspection, u89 has a hole through the rom window. A large piece of plastic (larger than the hole) seems to be moving around inside, though the memory cell doesn't look damaged.

Edit 3- http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2HT83F2T Each was dumped twice in order to avoid read errors.

Edit 4- After further testing I'm even more convinced that these roms are from another game. I've discovered which rom holds what data on an MK board, and it is as follows:

u106 - Johnny Cage, Kano, and Raiden* graphics. *Raiden's is split between another rom.
u107 - Liu Kang, Sub-Zero, and Scorpions* graphics. *Same as above.
u108 - Sonya and misc. graphics (FIGHT!, etc.)
u109 - Character portraits, partial background graphics possibly spanning across a particular layer.

That is the end result of pulling each rom out of a working board one by one, and booting it up to see the results. The purpose of this was to see the impact these new roms had on an empty slot to determine if there was any consistency at all (e.g. replace u106 with u106 from this new board, if graphics show up as normal u106 is an MK rom). While there is data in these new roms, they do not match up with the original roms. It's possible they've been placed in the wrong spots as again, they're unlabelled. However replacing u109 in particular with the rom from the board that came this morning actually broke more graphics than what u109 should normally contain. How this happened considering it's not a program rom and shouldn't have access to those address values is beyond me at this point.

Edit 5- Hex editing the roms showed little in common with the mkla1 romset. Searching for CRC's with listxml showed no match in ANY of the roms in MAME's entire database. I have no clue what these roms are.

 

[TerryMasters]

Damn that sucks someone just swapped chips in there, that board looked promising.
Maybe you could compare the data you have with roms from the complete mame set.

I tried, they're not even the same rom type (256K vs 512K original)

But going through the entire MAME CRC database not one of these roms matches up with anything the emulator can play. Whatever this is is either off, or has never been dumped before. Unfortunately I don't know how to reverse engineer these things, nor do I know the C programming language to translate the hex into something meaningful. I've sent an e-mail to the MAME team hoping they can take a look at it.

I've been slowly testing the game roms one by one looking for any sign of recognizable data at all - for instance, swapping the rom that contains the FIGHT! graphic anticipating that whatever graphics may be in these new roms would display (at least something) in it's place, but so far it's just a garbled mess.

Edit- The manual for Mortal Kombat says the chips should be 27010's, a 128K chip. Well that just made things even more confusing.

 

[TerryMasters]

Warning: Try not to have a seizure. It was the only way my camera could record it:

These two faces are the only graphics data I've managed to get from any of the roms, that one being u108. Still searching for more 'klues'.

 

[Smitdogg]

Well the board arrived this morning, and unfortunately, I have reason to believe the roms are shot.

The windows on every single rom are uncovered, though usually not a problem, one of the program roms appears to have physical damage to it. It doesn't seem bad enough that it would give me the impression it wouldn't work, but it doesn't. I swapped the roms out with my good Revision 4, got a test sound with no visuals. I tried mixing the good roms with these roms, same problem. I even tried swapping them in the event these unlabelled roms got mixed up. Same thing.

Dumping the roms gave me two checksums so data is there, but what struck me as odd is that the chips are 256K roms - and according to the MAME set there isn't a single 256K chip amongst them. This could mean nothing, provided the actual program data doesn't take up the whole 256K space. But firing it up in MAME causes it to instantly crash.

I'd like to see if these checksums match up with anything else in the MAME database, though highly unlikely as if they are damaged the numbers are going to be screwed up anyway. They are as follows:

u89 = 01FB0F2F
u105 = 020CF4EE

I'm thinking these roms might not even be from the same game, but the sound test did pass, and I don't know if that would have happened if the code wasn't there telling it to do so. I suppose I could try starting my board with empty sockets...

Edit- Running them in a newer version of MAME has the same result as using them in a working board - the test sound and nothing else. Trying the actual board it came with doesn't start with the good Revision 4 roms.

Edit 2- Upon closer inspection, u89 has a hole through the rom window. A large piece of plastic (larger than the hole) seems to be moving around inside, though the memory cell doesn't look damaged.

Edit 3- http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2HT83F2T Each was dumped twice in order to avoid read errors.

Edit 4- After further testing I'm even more convinced that these roms are from another game. I've discovered which rom holds what data on an MK board, and it is as follows:

u106 - Johnny Cage, Kano, and Raiden* graphics. *Raiden's is split between another rom.
u107 - Liu Kang, Sub-Zero, and Scorpions* graphics. *Same as above.
u108 - Sonya and misc. graphics (FIGHT!, etc.)
u109 - Character portraits, partial background graphics possibly spanning across a particular layer.

That is the end result of pulling each rom out of a working board one by one, and booting it up to see the results. The purpose of this was to see the impact these new roms had on an empty slot to determine if there was any consistency at all (e.g. replace u106 with u106 from this new board, if graphics show up as normal u106 is an MK rom). While there is data in these new roms, they do not match up with the original roms. It's possible they've been placed in the wrong spots as again, they're unlabelled. However replacing u109 in particular with the rom from the board that came this morning actually broke more graphics than what u109 should normally contain. How this happened considering it's not a program rom and shouldn't have access to those address values is beyond me at this point.

Edit 5- Hex editing the roms showed little in common with the mkla1 romset. Searching for CRC's with listxml showed no match in ANY of the roms in MAME's entire database. I have no clue what these roms are.

This game is Total Carnage. Put the roms in a folder unzipped and then use the latest mame.exe and run:

mame -romident foldername >x.txt

Open the text file and it will show you the matches. You can also use romcmp.exe to check for errors.

romcmp foldername

Although sometimes its complaints aren't valid, like when you get bad address warnings on proms. Your U113 dump is bad. Try sanding the legs and reading it again. If it still comes out the same you should replace it. Your U89 rom is most likely a bad dump. Try burning the image from MAME into another chip and replace it and see if it works. That or try sandpapering the legs and read it again and see if it matches MAME. It looks like you have LA1. Your U105 rom matches MAME's and all the others except for the U113 which is almost definitely a bad dump.

You guys can send me dumps to add to MAME instead of trying the MAME submission page, just let me know who all to include in the credits. I can give people my e-mail address in private messages.

 

[TerryMasters]

Score! Thank you so much Smitdogg, you are the man. I must have screwed up somewhere... I also used Clrmamepro to try and match the CRC's but nothing came up for me there either, so I'm not sure what happened. But I was really worried this might be something and didn't want it to go unpreserved. Thanks again dude

Edit- Actually I have a quick question for you. I accidentally fried u107. I went to put it in the working board when I noticed a pin was bent, and got so focused trying to straighten it out that I ended up putting it in backwards. Not gonna lie, it was cool to see Mortal Kombat turn into 8-bit Kombat for a few seconds, but in any event. I don't think I have another 256K chip to replace this. Would burning a 512 work? Or do you have to match the sizes?

 

[Smitdogg]

Score! Thank you so much Smitdogg, you are the man. I must have screwed up somewhere... I also used Clrmamepro to try and match the CRC's but nothing came up for me there either, so I'm not sure what happened. But I was really worried this might be something and didn't want it to go unpreserved. Thanks again dude

Edit- Actually I have a quick question for you. I accidentally fried u107. I went to put it in the working board when I noticed a pin was bent, and got so focused trying to straighten it out that I ended up putting it in backwards. Not gonna lie, it was cool to see Mortal Kombat turn into 8-bit Kombat for a few seconds, but in any event. I don't think I have another 256K chip to replace this. Would burning a 512 work? Or do you have to match the sizes?

It depends on the pinouts of the chip types, but you can try this, take the image from MAME and put it in a folder under C:, open a command prompt and type

copy/b romname +romname newromname

Then burn the newly made file into the chip and try it. You can try to compare pinouts if you search the web for their datasheets or for romref.txt. I have a ton of spare roms too, I can burn you replacements of most types for free if you pay for shipping.

 

[Dark_Rob]

ZOMG you guys have this stuff on lock. I dont pretend to understand any of this but if I ever have any problems with MAME Im gonna be asking you two for help.

 

[YourMKArcadeSource]

Yeah, send the stuff directly to Smitdogg. He's who I sent all the Turbo Ninja stuff to and got it all figured out perfectly!

 

[Smitdogg]

Early 90's Midway boards running around 53 fps notoriously have problems with supergun setups. I have 2 RGB converters here and the same types of things happen on High Impact, Mortal Kombat, etc. with both of them. If I run them into my PC it comes out in black and white and if I run them into my tv they come out in color but the screen constantly floats up so it's worthless. I have friends with supergun setups where the same thing happens on them. There is a "sync-cleaner board" that costs around $10 made by people like JRok but he seems to only want to sell them bundled with RGB converters. That or he's just really busy. Anyway they supposedly fix this problem. If you find a way to buy them let me know, I need one, and he never got back to me about a request for one. I use an RGB converter similar to that but it just outputs 640x480 only.

I can dump the roms for you if you want but they could be just bad. Could be because of the exposure, could be they just went bad. MK boards are failing a lot these days. You could just send me the roms and not the whole board to save on shipping but take a Sharpie to the chips labeling their board placement first for the ones that don't have stickers. You'd actually be pretty lucky if the only thing wrong with it was the roms. That's the easiest repair there is.

When you swapped the roms into the other board, you just swapped the 2 main program ones, correct?

 

[Smitdogg]

If they really are just partially erased by UV light then I can put them in my eprom eraser for a few minutes to totally blank them and then reprogram them with the correct images, but if the chips have gone bad then they can't be reprogrammed and just need to be thrown out and replaced. Any of them that are 27C010 I could replace for free, I have like 100+ spares of them. Other types would probably cost like $2-$3 each, maybe 2 for $5. Also though, you might want to just send the board, though you would have to pay for return shipping. Because I have a broken MK here and most of its pals are working, so I could try swapping those out 1 by 1 on your board too, if fixing the roms doesn't get it running. Those go bad like mad and unfortunately we don't even have them backed up yet (extremely difficult to dump, in fact I don't even know if every one of their chip type has even been figured out at all yet, protected pals require custom hardware to dump). Up to you though. I'll send you my address.

 

[xDisciplex]

Just means it is a clone board (Rev. 3.0) not an original Midway PCB board.

 

[bulldawg]

What's up with this board? Says "Not Original".
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150521254775&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

I actually had that same clone board and sent to the mame team and they said it was no different than the original rev. 3.0, but it was one of the better made clones.