Can System 1 boards be converted?

djw90

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I have a few roadblasters machines.. Just orderesd a Road Runner kit for one of them..

I have only see a Road Blassters PCB up close.. Can the boards be converted to play other system 1 games, Indy, marble Madness, ect?

Can a rom swap be done, or are daughter pcbs totally different?
 
I think Road Blasters with a certain Slapstik protection chip (it has 101 or 110 in it I think) can be ROM-swapped to Marble Madness, although I'll be damned if I can find the EPROM placement anywhere, and the main board has to have the LETA chip to drive the trackball and not all of them do. If anyone has a map of where you need to place the MM EPROMs let me know, I've got a spare set and would love to try it one of these days.
 
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Great link.. Has anyone tried Road Blasters to Marble Madness??


They were designed to prevent operators from burning new EPROMs and "upgrading" their PCBs to a new game without buying the necessary kits from Atari. For example, the five System 1 games each used a different slapstic, so that you couldn't take, say, a Marble Madness machine, burn new EPROMs, and convert it into an Indiana Jones.
That said, however, there are two pairs of the slapstics that appear to be functionally identical, despite the fact that they have different part numbers:
137412-103 (Marble Madness) appears to be functionally identical to 137412-110 (Road Blasters & APB)
137412-106 (Gauntlet II) appears to be functionally identical to 137412-109 (Championship Sprint & Road Blasters)
 
Most Road Blasters can't be converted to the other games, because of the Eprom sizes. Road Blasters used a later version of the board that used bigger Eproms.

The other 4 games use basically the same board.

I've only seen one Road Blasters that was compatible with the smaller Eproms that the other 4 games use. It had every single Eprom slot used.

In order to change games between MM, IJ, RR, PP, you have to:
1. Burn (or find) the new Eproms
2. Burn (or find) the 2 Proms
3. Use the correct Slapstic

I made my Peter Packrat board from an Indiana Jones.
 
Yes. RB can be converted to MM. In theory.
There are certain revisions that will work with certail slapsticks.
I recall Arcadenut on here had it close to working...

I did not look any further once I purchased a working MM pcb.
Try to PM him and see what happened.
 
Yes. RB can be converted to MM. In theory.
There are certain revisions that will work with certail slapsticks.
I recall Arcadenut on here had it close to working...

I did not look any further once I purchased a working MM pcb.
Try to PM him and see what happened.

I will send him a PM..

So the daughter cards are the same.. The Slapstic is the issue.. I see that some slapstic numbers do match others..

So can the Slapstic be reverse engineered? If so who on KLOV has the know how to pull it off?? If this is possible it would open the door for alot of options..
 
So can the Slapstic be reverse engineered?
I'm pretty sure the reverse engineering has been done, but nobody has reproduced them. I started a CPLD implementation a few years ago when I thought mine was bad on my Marble Madness... but it turned out to be one of the EPROMs had failed. So I dropped that project.

It may be possible to hack a the ROMs to use a different slapstic (i.e. Marble Madness with Indiana Jones slapstic)... I think they all do the same thing, but take a different sequence to do it. I never really looked deeply into it though.

DogP
 
Someone hacked the Gauntlet/Gauntlet II ROMs so they'll work without a Slapstik and just a couple of jumpers in it's place, so I image the same can be done with MM and the rest of the games.
 
Someone hacked the Gauntlet/Gauntlet II ROMs so they'll work without a Slapstik and just a couple of jumpers in it's place, so I image the same can be done with MM and the rest of the games.
I actually looked into that... I don't think it's possible to do for the other games (at least without some major effort). IIRC Gauntlet just used it to bankswitch graphics to make it harder to bootleg (i.e. added no real functionality). The System 1 games actually use it for bankswitching the program. I think the most realistic ROM hack would be to make one game run on another game's slapstic.

If you look at the MAME source: http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/machine/slapstic.c.html , you can see that there's basically 2 types of slapstics. Parts -001 through -010 supported bitwise banking... -011 through -018 supported additive banking. But within each series, they basically just have different "codewords" to do the bankswitching. So, if you find all the places where Peter Packrat says its "codeword" and replace it with the Roadblasters "codeword", then you should be able to use a Roadblasters slapstic to run Peter Packrat.

The other thing I wonder about is the SLOOP (or SLOOPstic)... I've read about it, but never found any real info on them. Supposedly it's a GAL that provides similar functionality to the slapstic... but I don't know whether they're functionally equivalent, or (most likely) similar, but not compatible.

DogP
 
Not to hack the post but I just loaded up my Indy board in my system 1 cab and it was restarting and said "Bank Switch Error". Pulled the slapstic out and one of the legs was broken off.

Am I screwed?
 
Not to hack the post but I just loaded up my Indy board in my system 1 cab and it was restarting and said "Bank Switch Error". Pulled the slapstic out and one of the legs was broken off.

Am I screwed?

You can try to solder the leg back on, or solder a cap leg on it..
 
Depends on were it was broken. If right at the chip then you have nothing to loose,so take a x-acto knife and carefully chip away at the area were the leg comes out just enough to apply a bead of solder. then take a bad chip or anything were you can cut another leg off and solder it on.

Not to hack the post but I just loaded up my Indy board in my system 1 cab and it was restarting and said "Bank Switch Error". Pulled the slapstic out and one of the legs was broken off.

Am I screwed?
 
The hot setup would be a from scratch board that plugged into the main board, and played them all.
 
The hot setup would be a from scratch board that plugged into the main board, and played them all.

I'm not sure how useful that'd be though... would you have a frankenpanel with a steering wheel, trackballs, and joystick(s)? Do Indiana Jones, Peter Pack Rat, and Road Runner use the same type of joystick? I believe Road Runner is hall effect... not sure about the others.

DogP
 
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