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View topic - Help Dumping Phantasy Star Fukkokuban - SMS/Genesis

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Help Dumping Phantasy Star Fukkokuban - SMS/Genesis
Post Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2013 11:25 pm
Hi, seems that there is no dump for Phantasy Star Fukkokuban for Sega Genesis. The reason seems to be the fact that this is the SMS game inside a Genesis cartridge, so there was no interest in dumping this game. But the rom is different.

I want to play this game on the real hardware, and I have a Phantasy Star Fukkokuban cartridge here, so I tried to change the mask rom with the retranslated game. I'm using a 27c040 eprom, that matchs almost exactly the mask rom. But I had no success.

Studing the circuit I could see that pins 2 (A16) and 30 (A17) are not connect. So this game seems to use a internal software mapping.
The original Sms Phantasy Star uses extenal mapping (with a 315-5235), so the roms are different.

I'm trying to dump the rom using a Eprom reader (a GQ-4x), and comparing the binary dumped, only the first 32K matchs with the original SMS japanese Rom. These first 32K matchs almost exactly, but there are several differences, probably due this mapping change.
The rest of the Rom dumped is different because I need a way to access the other banks.

Reading the doc SMSPinRom.txt (I cannot post links) I saw that I need to change pins 3 and 24, because when the rom uses internal mapping, pin 24 turns A15.
Dumping again now the first 48K matchs the original SMS japanese Rom.

So someone knows how these internal software mapping works? I want to dump this rom. Probably I'll need to dump a bank at a time, and glue them together in the end, but I need to know how I can select the banks.

Other question; someone knows how I could put the retranslated rom inside this cartridge? Because the retranslation rom expect a external map, so I don't know if it's possible.

I have the pcb pictures but I cannot post links here. There is a way to post pictures?

Thanks
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Post Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 1:25 am
The ROM has been dumped and is widely available.
CRC32: 07301f83 Phantasy Star [MD-Saturn] (JP)
My friend confirmed it from the Megadrive version as far as I remember.
For confirmation could you post your first 32KB dump? You should be able to post links and attachments after 3 posts.
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Post Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 2:44 am
Bock wrote
The ROM has been dumped and is widely available.
CRC32: 07301f83 Phantasy Star [MD-Saturn] (JP)
My friend confirmed it from the Megadrive version as far as I remember.
For confirmation could you post your first 32KB dump? You should be able to post links and attachments after 3 posts.


Hi, thank you, you are right, my dump matchs exactly the Saturn version!!!

The retranslation is based on the original japanese Rom, so there is a problem. On Sms mode the Genesis addresses only goes to A15, so I'd need a 315-5235 and rewrite the circuit, or find a translated rom with internal mapping (probably no way).

This game has a 315-5342, but I cannot find any information about this chip.
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Post Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2013 4:20 am
Internal mapping is not part of the ROM, it's extra logic in the chip. You will always need an external mapper.
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Post Posted: Sun May 17, 2020 8:42 pm
Maxim wrote
Internal mapping is not part of the ROM, it's extra logic in the chip. You will always need an external mapper.


I'm also interested in this project as well because I'm trying to do a retranslation for this exact version of the game I actually bought the game and took pictures of the PCB.

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Post Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 4:37 pm
Nice pictures! I also have this cartridge and am interested in somehow dumping the contents
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Post Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 10:41 pm
bsittler wrote
Nice pictures! I also have this cartridge and am interested in somehow dumping the contents


Here's the pinout of the 834011 mask ROM it uses:

http://techno-junk.org/txt/smsmap.txt

You can transplant the ROM from this PCB to any SMS cartridge that also uses an 834011 and dump it with a SMS Reader. Or wire something up custom too.

The PLD has also been dumped and is identical to the one in the Power Base Converter that adds a few bytes of startup code to set up the stack pointer.
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Post Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 10:50 pm
Thanks! I'm interested in reading it through the edge connector using a Tengu/Lythium reader. Where can I find out more about the PLD? I'm hoping there might be some series of accesses that could "unlock" the PLD to allow transparent access to the ROM+mapper behind it
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 6:11 am
bsittler wrote
Thanks! I'm interested in reading it through the edge connector using a Tengu/Lythium reader. Where can I find out more about the PLD? I'm hoping there might be some series of accesses that could "unlock" the PLD to allow transparent access to the ROM+mapper behind it


It's a shame, I did a write-up about the PLD and posted about it here (topic was "Power Base Converter Info" post #14084) but it seems it does not exist... are we losing old posts or something? I wonder if it exists in a forum backup...

Anyway the 834011 contains the ROM and the mapper and has no facility for transparent access so you really do have to program the mapper registers accordingly to read the data out. This is a very common configuration for most games and it's just some of the older ones that used a separate ROM and mapper chip.

The PLD has nothing to do with mapping thankfully, all it does is force this short sequence before letting the game run normally: (from memory, the actual sequence is slightly different but the intention is the same)

LD SP,$DFF0
RST 00H

This is because the SMS BIOS initializes the stack pointer normally which some games rely on, but the Genesis has no BIOS. This same chip is used in all variants of the Power Base Converter / Mega Adaptor to ensure compatibility.

I haven't checked if the Phantasy Star actually *needs* this, if it initializes the stack pointer or not. But I can see the value in Sega designing a PCB that could support any SMS game, not just Phantasy Star, so they added the PLD anyway with the assumption other games could have been re-released on the Genesis in this way.

If there is a need to re-dump this game let me know, I have it and can look into reading it out (not soon though).
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 6:40 am
I’m not sure what happened to that forum topic, we do not delete anything except spam. There is a different post under that ID which seems unlikely (IDs are not reused).
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 8:16 am
Phantasy Star probably sets its own stack pointer.
That is the only conclusion I can get from this:
https://www.raphnet.net/electronique/markIII_to_smd/index_en.php#1
and
https://www.raphnet.net/electronique/sms_to_smd/index_en.php#1

Ps. He spells it Fantasy Star instead of Phantasy Star.
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 11:12 am
Quote
It's a shame, I did a write-up about the PLD and posted about it here (topic was "Power Base Converter Info" post #14084) but it seems it does not exist... are we losing old posts or something? I wonder if it exists in a forum backup...


on Google I could find a link to thread 14084 ( https://www.smspower.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14084 ) which this board say it doesn't exist.

so something is wrong. See the image:
disappeared topic.png (47.41 KB)
Google could find that!
disappeared topic.png

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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 2:32 pm
I won't tell you how hard it was to operate the wayback machine from my phone, but it appears that the topic got nuked sometime between april 2019 and november 2019.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190403192608/http://www.smspower.org/forums/14084-PowerBaseConverterInfo (exists on 2019-04-03)

https://web.archive.org/web/20191102160533/http://www.smspower.org:80/forums/14084-PowerBaseConverterInfo (doesn't exist on 2019-11-02)
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 2:33 pm
yeah, I was doing the same work. Here's the original thread:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190209124636/http://www.smspower.org/forums/14084-...

edit: latest is this one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190403192608/http://www.smspower.org/forums/14084-...

Maxim: you could check in the database if we've lost the record in the topic table but we've still got the posts...
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 2:52 pm
You know, I shouldn't even be here, but I logged in to reply to a private message, so I noticed this topic by pure chance, and since nobody thought about using the wayback machine and the latest post was 3 hours old, I took the time to do that with my phone. Just for my post to become useless in 54 seconds. Way to go, me.

I now feel silly for trying to be helpful, I should stop doing that.
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Post Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 3:10 pm
your post wasn't useless at all, mine would be in case!
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Post Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 6:52 am
Charles MacDonald wrote
bsittler wrote
Thanks! I'm interested in reading it through the edge connector using a Tengu/Lythium reader. Where can I find out more about the PLD? I'm hoping there might be some series of accesses that could "unlock" the PLD to allow transparent access to the ROM+mapper behind it


It's a shame, I did a write-up about the PLD and posted about it here (topic was "Power Base Converter Info" post #14084) but it seems it does not exist... are we losing old posts or something? I wonder if it exists in a forum backup...

Anyway the 834011 contains the ROM and the mapper and has no facility for transparent access so you really do have to program the mapper registers accordingly to read the data out. This is a very common configuration for most games and it's just some of the older ones that used a separate ROM and mapper chip.

The PLD has nothing to do with mapping thankfully, all it does is force this short sequence before letting the game run normally: (from memory, the actual sequence is slightly different but the intention is the same)

LD SP,$DFF0
RST 00H

This is because the SMS BIOS initializes the stack pointer normally which some games rely on, but the Genesis has no BIOS. This same chip is used in all variants of the Power Base Converter / Mega Adaptor to ensure compatibility.

I haven't checked if the Phantasy Star actually *needs* this, if it initializes the stack pointer or not. But I can see the value in Sega designing a PCB that could support any SMS game, not just Phantasy Star, so they added the PLD anyway with the assumption other games could have been re-released on the Genesis in this way.

If there is a need to re-dump this game let me know, I have it and can look into reading it out (not soon though).


Fantastic right up and I did notice that the same chip that's inside the power base converter is directly built into this cartridge my real question is can we develop a flash cart that would act in the same manner and allow more SMS games to directly run on a Genesis making it easier to do fan translations and other prevalent work.
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Post Posted: Mon May 25, 2020 7:07 am
It is only necessary for games that need the stack pointer to be initialised by the BIOS. It’s relatively easy to modify games instead.
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Post Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 12:46 am
Is there a list of games that use the above board? Eg. Actual sms game released in a genesis cart
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Post Posted: Wed May 27, 2020 6:46 am
1. Phantasy Star

That’s all.
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Post Posted: Fri Dec 30, 2022 6:32 pm
There are also a bunch of Korean Super Aladdin Boy releases using the same technique (SMS game in MD shell with PCB wired for SMS mode.) Pigu Wang 7, for example, but many others too
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