souzilla
New member
I thought I would start a thread for people to follow the status of this kit.
I have not looked at Commando in a while, but just finished going through the board.
I started with the free play mod that I did a while ago. The rom mod always has the game on free play. I am going to modify this to use the 4 coins for 1 play dip setting to turn free play on and off.
When they made this game they encrypted only the op codes which makes it difficult to have all the game code on one eprom on the HSS kit. Normally this is done similar to how mame does it. There is the completely encrypted rom and the completely unencrypted rom and the kit would bank switch when M1 is low or high (depending on how the kit was made).
One other things that makes the kit difficult is most of the z80's are not socketed so for a daughter board you would need to desolder the 40 pin z80 and put a socket there. Also, if you have a pcb with a ttl version of the custom chip that does the encryption a daughter board will not fit on the board. For these reasons I am thinking that it might be easier for this kit to just be two eproms and an nvram chip. This way you only have to socket the 28 pin ram and you can use the HSS kit even with the TTL custom chip.
The problem is I need to program this carefully since the op codes need to be encrypted for each line of code and can be time consuming.
I know some people pre-paid for the kit and were expecting a daughter board, I am curious to see what people's thoughts are. If the kit is not a daughter board but two eproms and an nvram (and socket of course) would you re-consider your pre-payments?
I could probably turn this around in a couple of weeks if people like this approach.
I have not looked at Commando in a while, but just finished going through the board.
I started with the free play mod that I did a while ago. The rom mod always has the game on free play. I am going to modify this to use the 4 coins for 1 play dip setting to turn free play on and off.
When they made this game they encrypted only the op codes which makes it difficult to have all the game code on one eprom on the HSS kit. Normally this is done similar to how mame does it. There is the completely encrypted rom and the completely unencrypted rom and the kit would bank switch when M1 is low or high (depending on how the kit was made).
One other things that makes the kit difficult is most of the z80's are not socketed so for a daughter board you would need to desolder the 40 pin z80 and put a socket there. Also, if you have a pcb with a ttl version of the custom chip that does the encryption a daughter board will not fit on the board. For these reasons I am thinking that it might be easier for this kit to just be two eproms and an nvram chip. This way you only have to socket the 28 pin ram and you can use the HSS kit even with the TTL custom chip.
The problem is I need to program this carefully since the op codes need to be encrypted for each line of code and can be time consuming.
I know some people pre-paid for the kit and were expecting a daughter board, I am curious to see what people's thoughts are. If the kit is not a daughter board but two eproms and an nvram (and socket of course) would you re-consider your pre-payments?
I could probably turn this around in a couple of weeks if people like this approach.
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