Capcom's CPS-A-01 custom chip - anyone looked into making a replacement?

Solder

Member
Joined
Apr 29, 2007
Messages
862
Reaction score
7
Location
UK, United Kingdom
Capcom's CPS-A-01 custom chip - anyone looked into making a replacement?

As we know, the CPS-A-01 chip on CPS1 A boards has a high failure rate, rendering CPS1 A boards useless.

Besides taking the same part from another A board (a pointless exercise unless it's a parts board) the only other option is to rob the part from a CPS2 A board. However that part will also fail one day.

Has anyone looked into fabbing a replacement part? I realise that this likely won't be easy and unless a large number are produced won't be cheap either, but it seems like the only option. As the chip is emulated I guess all of the details of its inner workings are fully documented, it's then a case of getting it fabbed.

One potential fly in the ointment is Capcom getting funny about copyright infringement, but there are other replacement parts out there for variious boards so surely they are unlikely to make a fuss?
 
As the chip is emulated I guess all of the details of its inner workings are fully documented, it's then a case of getting it fabbed.

Doesn't work like that! Just because the chip is understood at a functional emulation level, doesn't necessarily mean you can go straight to a bunch of transistors. What it does on a per cycle clock level matters when interfaced with the rest of the board. How it interfaces with the tilemap RAM on the main board, the ROMs on the B board and outputs a signal into the priority mixer taking into account h-blank, v-blank, h-pixel clock isn't easy to figure out.
 
That....
And not many of us can put the typical $50K upfront setup fees for getting custom IC's made...
 
I would like to attempt to create replacements for both the CPS-A and CPS-B gate arrays but I've got a whole bunch of other projects to finish first. Maybe mid/late next year perhaps...
 
Some time ago I came across a Pang! 3 bootleg with what seems to be a remarked/rebadged CPS-A-01 (and maybe also the CPS-B-21), I send picture to Eduardo Cruz, you can see them here:

http://arcadehacker.blogspot.it/2015/04/capcom-cps1-part-1.html

Someone think bootlegers did reverse-engineering of ot but IMHO I think they simply took the original part and remarked it as "COMCO PSC0-A-01".
Anyway, even if somebody will manage to do reverse-engineering of it I think the big obstacle is its package, it would cost a lot of money to get them manufactured as PQFP!
 
Ah yes, I remember reading about the COMCO part.

I guess there's no such thing as a suitably sized PQFP "adapter" which could take a more conventional and easier to fab chip and which is then soldered to the board A board? I doubt it, just spitballing here.
 
Depending on what is really inside the IC - using something like a CPLD or an FPGA and mounting on a SMD adapter would be immensely cheaper than having custom IC's fabricated. Even if it is a custom SMD adapter - it would be much more do-able.
 
Back
Top Bottom