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Topics - davidstech

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1
Other dumps / RS-70 648 in 1 "Monkey King 3B" based
« on: July 02, 2020, 03:41:29 PM »
Almost a year after buying it (thanks to taizou's tweet), I finally got round to dumping the RS-70 with its mysterious "Monkey King 3B" SoC.

Unsurprisingly the SoC is ARM based and the games run in emulators. The NES emulator appears iNES based, and the Genesis emulator seems like the custom atgames one.

The games (and emulators and menu) are gzip compressed inside the flash, so they are easy to extract using binwalk or similar, if there is anything interesting in there.
 
Download: http://davidstech.net/games/multis/RS-70%20648-in-1%20(Monkey%20King%203B,%20S29GL512P).7z

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Other dumps / PCP 8728 788 in 1 (Unknown Generalplus/unSP chipset)
« on: August 04, 2019, 03:23:21 PM »
Found this dump I made a while ago, it's probably not going to be emulatable any time soon (there might be some kind of mask ROM BIOS too), it's from a 788 in 1 console similar to this. Looking inside the string "SPF2ALP" appears many times which is a hallmark of a Generalplus/Sunplus system (it's from their sound converter tool), and the code inside seems to be for their unSP arch. I think this is running off one of the newer Generalplus microcontrollers but I'm not certain.

You can find some intact WAV files (with metadata) inside, as a little curiosity.

Download

3
Famicom/NES / VTxx BIN to NES 2.0 Converter
« on: February 02, 2018, 03:00:28 PM »
I know a few people have wanted a BIN to NES converter, so I've finally got round to making a Python script for this. It allows mapper and submapper to be specified, defaulting to 256/0.

Script: https://gist.github.com/daveshah1/39faa3f85d492cba38ecf45e272f72de

Let me know if you have any issues with this.

4
Other dumps / Systema TV Boy II Dump
« on: January 25, 2018, 10:52:51 AM »
Something a bit different for a change. The TV Boy II, and its other variants, was a clone of the Atari 2600 with 126 built in games, widely distributed in Europe during the 90's. I've dumped it and also added support to MAME, which will hopefully be included in their next release.

ROM image here: http://davidstech.net/games/multis/tvboyii.zip

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Famicom/NES dumps / VTxx Dumping Thread
« on: January 23, 2018, 11:53:11 AM »
Hopefully over the next few weeks, I'll be dumping various VTxx based systems and I thought it would be good to keep them together in a thread.

First of all the 200 in 1 Thumbs Up Retro TV Games, with 200 VT03 delights:
http://davidstech.net/games/multis/200%20in%201%20Retro%20TV%20Game%20(VT03).7z

This runs in NewRisingSun2's Nintendulator, EmuVT and I will also add this to MAME.

6
Famicom/NES dumps / Help Emulating a Famiclone dump (gamezone 118 in 1)
« on: January 16, 2018, 04:12:23 PM »
I'm hoping this may be more obvious to people who've done more NES stuff, but I'm having trouble emulating the dump I've made of a gamezone 118 in 1 plug and play famiclone.

It's an older plug and play in the scheme of things (probably bought it a good few years ago second hand, the latest date on the PCB is 2003) - so it's not OneBus based as I was hoping. Inside it has two ROM chips, a 16MBit one that I think is for PRG and and the other 8Mbit one is for CHR. I've dumped both of them but I can't find an obvious fit in terms of existing mappers, but I don't want to spend ages reverse engineering if it turns out there's a working mapper already for this type of hardware. The PCB with the NOAC and ROMs on is marked "BELLESON" which could be Macro Winners (who I think use "BS" sometimes?)

Both ROM images are here, hopefully this isn't a bad dump:

http://davidstech.net/games/multis/gamezone%20Plug%20and%20Play%20118%20in%201.7z


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Famicom/NES dumps / 300-in-1 SY-889 Handheld Dump (VTxx)
« on: January 12, 2018, 10:55:07 AM »
This is a dump of one of the new low-res handhelds that are NES-based. I'm not sure if there's anything that interesting in this, but it was an easy dump so why not? This is definitely using one of the newer VTxx chipsets as it runs of SQI flash rather than parallel ROM/flash that earlier VTxx chips use. It runs in EmuVT using the VT09 settings, but with some graphical corruption.

http://davidstech.net/games/multis/300-in-1%20NES-based%20handheld%20(SY-889,%20W25Q64%20serial%20flash).7z

Attachments:

8
Famicom/NES / Work in Progress: new VT168 emulator
« on: December 18, 2017, 06:00:29 AM »
Just a heads up on a project I'm working on,Following on from my MiWi2 dumps, which couldn't run in EmuVT because of a bizarre scrambling scheme, I decided it was time to write a new emulator for the later, less NES-based, VT devices starting with the VT168.

The next step after the VT168 is working would be to start adding support for even newer devices, particularly the VT368/VT369. I'm curious whether there are any ROMs suspected to be for these systems floating around, post here or PM me if you have any so I can start looking at reverse engineering those.



Release 0.10 is now public. This will run most of the MiWi2 and InterAct games, but has serious graphical problems in a couple still (mostly the "3D" perspective racing games).

Windows binary download http://davidstech.net/games/openvtx_0.10.zip

Source on GitHub (Windows or Linux) https://github.com/daveshah1/openvtx

MiWi2 ROMs to try out are in the dumping thread. InterAct ROMs are also posted in this thread.

9
Other Pirates / Demystifying the 1.8in Handhelds
« on: December 15, 2017, 11:06:15 AM »
Further to my dump a couple of days ago of one of the as-of-yet totally undetermined 1.8in handhelds, I decided to dump another slightly older one, a 106 in 1 I bought from Taobao a few years ago, model number "8533" and PCB date 2013-10-18. You can find the ROM dump here:

http://davidstech.net/games/multis/106%20in%201%201.8in%20DigitalPocket%20Handheld%208533.7z

This time, there are at least some strings in the ROM. At 0x2129 there are the names of all the games, separated by 0xFF. Elsewhere there is other in-game text and also a reference to a hardware test and a checksum.

More interesting there is what is very clearly valid 6502 machine code at various locations in the ROM, the first example I noticed was at offset 0x40436 immediately after the text NS-TOWER and its 0xFF "terminator". This does seem to narrow down the possibilities for what it could be, and also suggests the possibility that it's architecture is somehow derived from the NES. However, I can't immediately find any particularly NES-esque code like writes to the PPU register space. Hence I think it also possible for it to be GameKing derived, as that also had a 6502 based processor.

I can't find obvious assembly in last week's 116in1 ROM dump but given the lack of strings in that dump I think it may be scrambled in some way, which I will investigate further.

I'm going to try and do a bit more research and experimentation, maybe one day we'll have some kind of emulator for these devices.
Well, that was easy, I don't even know why they bothered. The 116in1 dump I last week made was scrambled with the world's best encryption system - XORing with 0xE4... Now strings and assembly are visible and it looks structurally similar to the 106in1, also the name "tony" appears early on - if Tony is reading this, please reply :).

Here's a descrambled version of last week's dump:

http://davidstech.net/games/multis/116%20in%201%201.8in%20Retro%20Pocket%20Games%20(descrambled).7z


A bit more investigation and it appears the code is for the 65C02, not the plain 6502. I can't find anything that points to a particular platform; my best guess now is some generic 65C02 based microcontroller that either has enough RAM that the bootloader copies code from the external SPI flash to RAM, or that supports directly running code off SPI flash.

The LCD display appears to be a generic "microprocessor parallel" type interface so the processor wouldn't necessarily need to have a PPU or display interface if that was done in software. It also seems that the processor might have a speaker driver built in which would narrow the search further.

10
Other Pirates / Waixing's latest Wii clones and APK downloads
« on: December 10, 2017, 07:16:57 AM »
So it seems Waixing/Subor have released a "next generation" Wii knock-off platform that is widely seen across Taobao, continuing from their previous Sunplus SPG293 platform. This time they seem to be running Android with some kind of quad core ARM processor. Models seem to include the ET-71 with camera, Wii-like ET-66 and even the VR Headset (!) ET-79. All of them ship with Wii-style controllers which I think have a proper accelerometer, they certainly look higher quality than the usual knock-off controllers. What's interesting about these is they are actually more powerful than the original Wii, by some margin.

While looking around I found a massive repository of APKs on Waixing's site, at http://www.waixing.com/apk/. The first thing I looked for was a NES emulator, although I found two (and a load of ROMs in the nes subfolder) at http://www.waixing.com/apk/gamenet/app/%E6%A8%A1%E6%8B%9F%E5%99%A8/, I don't think these are much more than NESoid so sadly won't support any WXN games. There are also a large number of presumably Waixing-developed motion games around, it's a very slow server as is often the case so I haven't actually fully downloaded any yet.

At the moment the consoles are about $75, if they drop in price at all I'll probably buy one to investigate a bit more. In the mean time depending on how strict they are about controllers and the platform it may be possible to run the APKs on other Android devices or an Android emulator.

EDIT: I found some technical specifications. The ET-71 has a RK3188 quad-core 1.8GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of Flash. Unfortunately there are no detailed specs the VR headset, I think it's pretty new as it's not widely listed and doesn't even appear on Waixing's website.
Looking through that folder of NES ROMs a bit more thoroughly, I don't think there's anything truly undumped but there are one or two more obscure ones, i.e. 外星战士2 ("Alien Warrior 2") by Waixing (http://www.waixing.com/apk/gamenet/app/%E6%A8%A1%E6%8B%9F%E5%99%A8/nes/%E5%A4%96%E6%98%9F%E6%88%98%E5%A3%AB2.nes).

I suspect there may be more of interest, I'm bulk downloading the folder now the download speed's picked up.

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Other dumps / Mystery Dump: Unknown 1.8" Handheld
« on: December 09, 2017, 09:10:40 AM »
Posting this more for the sake of preservation and interest than any hope that this will be emulated any time soon...

This is a dump of the 32MBit serial flash ROM inside a unknown platform 1.8" handheld, the 116in1 "Retro Pocket Games" system widely sold in the UK (see Robert Dyas as an example).

I can't find any strings and I can't guarantee whether this actually has the code for the games, or just the sound and images.

Dump here: http://davidstech.net/games/multis/116%20in%201%201.8in%20Retro%20Pocket%20Games.7z

Photo of the PCB attached, not that it provides much of an insight.

Attachments:

12
Game Boy / Interesting new GBA multicarts from China
« on: December 08, 2017, 01:18:34 PM »
Not sure if anyone else is interested much in these, but while on Taobao I saw a nice collection of new GBA multicarts numbered AC001-AC008 and I've always liked GBA multicarts so I decided to buy them and see what they were like. The first interesting thing is how many games are on them - up to 723 in 1. Unlike previous efforts these numbers are genuine - there are no repeats on any of the carts as far as I know, although some games do appear on multiple of the different cartridges.




The games on them are a mixture of GBA games, many of them in Chinese translated either officially or unofficially and some hacked to bring them more up to date e.g. "Pokemon X and Y" - which I believe are Ruby/Sapphire based but with newer Pokemon; original Gameboy games running in Goomba and NES games running in PocketNES. There are a good number of bootlegs included among the NES games including Kart Fighter and Aladdin 4 along with the usual staples of Mario hacks etc. I don't think there's anything particularly special though.





The Taobao link for the entire collection is https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=547942028207 but you can also buy them individually which is probably more sensible if you're not a collector of these things.

Attachments:

13
Famicom/NES dumps / MiWi2 (VT168) Dumping Attempt
« on: September 28, 2017, 07:00:37 AM »
After something like 6 years (it's scary how time flies) I found the MiWi 2 cartridges lying about and wanted to get on with what I planned all those years ago or something and dumping them.

I've built a somewhat crude setup to do so, and am at least obtaining consistent dumps but unfortunately they won't run in EmuVT. Looking at the dumps a bit closer, the reset and interrupt vectors
appear in the right place for a OneBus ROM (0x7fffc for reset), and at least in the sports cartridge points to what starts off looking like valid code but then starts to go wrong. Strangely in the games cartridge it appears off by one.

Interestingly the code before the code pointed to the reset vector matches exactly what I found in a VT168 demo ROM. The string "WISE@DJJUNGLE.COM V1.0" appears 8 times (7 times plus the menu likely) in the sports ROM and 9 times in the games ROM, which again also appears in the VT168 demo ROM so may be included automatically by one of the VRTech tools rather than a credit per se - Wise Wang of Djjungle is also credited in EmuVT.

Also the string "BY S.MATSUOKA & S.IWATA" appears in the games ROM which I believe will be from one of the original NES games they ripped.

I do want to build a better dumping setup which I will hopefully have done in a couple of weeks which should rule out any possibility of bad dumps once and for all; but the strings and consistent results mean I think
that is fairly unlikely. It does appear that the VT168 has a small built in boot ROM so maybe they're doing some trickery in that.

The ROMs at present are linked below if anyone with wants to have a look - I would be interest to hear from anyone with more Famicom or OneBus dumping experience.

Sports: http://davidstech.net/games/miwi2/MiWi%202%20Sports%207%20in%201%20(VT168).7z
Games: http://davidstech.net/games/miwi2/MiWi%202%2016%20Arcade%20Games%20+%20Drum%20Master%20(VT168).7z

I've also ordered a few bits from Taobao as this has somewhat reminded me of my interest in pirate and obscure games...

14
Game Boy / Pokemon Black, White and Heart Gold - for GBA
« on: May 06, 2012, 12:59:15 PM »
I was browsing taobao and I found two unusual GBA games:

1. Pokemon Black and White Collection
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=10885108216

2. Pokemon HeartGold
http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=12322478379

As far as I know, neither of these games are dumped. They are probably just hacks of existing Pokemon games, but I thought someone might know something more about them, and whether they were worth buying (I might get some other stuff from taobao at the same time)

15
Game Boy dumps / GBA Multicart Dumps (290-in-1 and 68-in1)
« on: May 05, 2012, 02:33:15 PM »
I was bored so decided to build a link cable for my GBA (see this article), and write a simple dumping program.

These are the two multi-carts that I were able to dump - mainly the usual PocketNES/VisualNES stuff, but it might be interesting for someone.
I also have a 128-in-1, but the ROM appears unplayable - but it may be because that cartridge has connection issues.

Anyway, here are the links:

68 in 1: http://davidstech.net/games/multis/GBA%2068in1.7z
290 in 1: http://davidstech.net/games/multis/GBA%20290%20in%201.7z

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