War Gods PCB Hard drive replacement?

I am running across the same problem, i just ordered a 40 pin eprom reader for u41 which has the boot code in it for war gods, and it's on it's way, however i believe that the drive's serial # is embeded into the image within each hard drive, I assumed the boot process reads and compare the serial # of the drive with the # imbeded in the hd's image, so the boot rom made do me no good unless i can modify it to ignore the serial # within each drive. Can anyone out there confirm my suspicions.
 
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war god hd hack - need new chd to correct image problem.

OK, after many,many hours of testing, this is what i managed to find out, the serial # does not seem to matter with this game,

my original st9420ag drive bit the dust, i made an image of it using chdman, but not before it started to crap out, so i suspected that it has some errors.

i purchased another st9420ag from a ki machine that was converted over to compact flash, i extracted my old corrupted image into the new drive and then changed out the motherboard on the hard drive, i did this thinking that the hd image would check the boards serial #, and lo and behold, it booted and actually played, but then craped out, i did a scan of the files, and just as i suspected, some of the files from my original dump were corrupted.

So on to step 2, i downloaded the wargods,chd image ver 2800 from mame and put it on the new drive, now i was worried that it was not going to work becuase the serial # would differ, but when i tried it , it also worked and played, although with 1 small problem, i have a standard resolution monitor on my test machine, not a medium resolution as war gods requires, i found out that if i switch dip switch 1 on bank 2 to the on position, i can play it perfectly on a standard res monitor, at least with my old image, but this new image from the net does work but strangely, the test mode and boot up work fine and display properly, but when the game begins it strentches outside the screen, almost like it is trying to display medium res on a standard res monitor, so it beyond the boundaries of the screen, now the images are clear not distorted,this is mainly becuase of switch 1 on bank 2, but i need a newer chd of war gods to correct this image problem. If anyone has 1 you can send over please pm me.

Ok going back to the hd problem, so what it basically boils down to is you can use any seagate st9420ag with war gods you just got to extract a wargods image on to it, there is no serial protection on this system, i also tried it with several other drives including compact flash ones, everything failed except for the st9420ag's. Those worked reguardless of how which ones i used.

Rick.
 
Rick,
What is the part number on the U41 eprom? The mame rom shows a 128k file, instead of the normal 512 used on most of these games, so im curious as to what eprom htey are using?
 
War Gods hard drive problem

Hello!

I'm new here now on the forum as a result of a problem. A good friend of mine recently bought a PCB board of War Gods from ebay. He installed it on his cabinet and didn't work. He didn't receive any video feed. So he asked if I try it out, which I did. Since I have KI cabinet, I tried hooking the pcb board + hard drive into the cabinet. I booted up the whole inchalada and came to the pcb board test. Which all was marked as OK.

But here's the problem. When the PCB was searching for the HDD, it didn't pop up. I just got the message: HARD DISK NOT RESPONDING. Please turn off the game, etc.

So, does this mean the HDD is broken? I put my ear to the HDD, and I heard it spinning... If it is broken, is there a way to fix it...? Or are my friend and I completely screwed? :p

I checked if everything was hooked up correctly, and it was as far as I could recognize.

I really hope someone can help me out with this. My mate was really gutted when I told him it didn't work. As was I. But he's the one that paid 160 Euros for it... which is pretty stressful if only the PCB board works...

So, thanks in advance and hopefully someone knows what to do. :)


Cheers
Tom
 
Most of those games have an option within the system menu to diag or repair the drive.
Otherwise you can pretty much assume the drive is a full loss. You can try using the MAME CHD (google CHDMAN) and try creating a new drive. If that fails you can always have your "mate" just order a CF kit off of eBay.
 
Well, I just get a gray screen which states the diagnostics for the PCB. But when it comes to the HDD check it utterly fails. Is there another way into the system menu perhaps, by adjusting some of those switches on the board? Because each time i boot, I get the diagnostics.

And, forgive me for asking, (i'm a real noob when it comes to the more technical stuff). But what's a CF kit exactly?
 
The boardset does have a dipswitch setting that allows you to turn off diagnostics on boot which I assume you are saying what you currently see. However every midway cab I've worked on had a switch inside the coin door to actually get into the OP mode which is where you "should" see the option to check the drives health and possibly repair.

CF - compact flash
Here's a good read:
http://www.revisionx.com/kiproject/cf.html
 
Ah yeah, I remember now. It's the same thing as checking the settings with my KI game. Which was the Right most switch: I had, one black, one red, one red, one black.

I tried it just now. Pressing the right most black switch. But sadly didn't work. It skipped the PCB diagnostics and and went straight to HDD search, and that brought me back to the same thing "HARD DISK NOT RESPONDING". So, I can conclude the HDD's had it.

As for the Compact Flash. Now that you mention it, I came across that on Ebay once. Some guy that does it.

I guess I can rule out the method of copying the hard drive onto a flash drive...

I've never done this before. So, I really hope it works :)
 
I wonder if SpinRite would work on these old drives and salvage their data...
 
I'm going to check that out once I get home tonight. But is it possible to connect these sort of HDD's to a more recent mainboard on my PC? What socket do I use, if possible...?
 
They are IDE drives.

You'd have to have a computer with an IDE controller and have the Spinrite software (which hasn't been popular for about 15 years).
 
I'm going to check that out once I get home tonight. But is it possible to connect these sort of HDD's to a more recent mainboard on my PC? What socket do I use, if possible...?

Nowadays IDE drives are referenced as PATA. Your games hard drive may or may not support the PATA feature which is ok. IDE uses 40 pin while PATA uses 80 pin.
I mention this because I'll assume your PC has a PATA CDROM installed. PATA cbales always have a blue connector on one end. You'll want to unplug the CDROM cable from your system board and use a standard 40 pin IDE cable. I've seen a lot of hit and miss issues when attempting to use an 80 pin PATA cable with a standard IDE drive. Use the cable from your arcade ;)

Best data recovery software I've ever used is Stellar Phoenix. But my gut feeling is if you can't get chdman to work - you're hosed and I wouldn;t even bother with trying data recovery.
 
Dude, your serioulsy getting some strange advice here. (Im surprised at what ive read already)
There are no CF kits for War Gods, you must use the same brand and model number drive as a replacement (Seagate .......)

The harddrive is a laptop style harddrive, so you will need a 44 pin adapter to IDE to be able to connect it to your computer. From what Ive read, your drive is most likely toast. But just to test it, you can connect it to your computer and image it with CHDMAN , but it will probably just crash.
Your best bet is to look on ebay for another laptop drive that is the same model and part number. Then use CHDMAN to image the drive with the wargods chd file.
 
On second thought, you would have better luck if you took the harddrive out of your Killer Instinct and imaged it to be War Gods and then bought the CF kit for KI to replace the harddrive in your KI.
 
Dude, your serioulsy getting some strange advice here. (Im surprised at what ive read already)
There are no CF kits for War Gods, you must use the same brand and model number drive as a replacement (Seagate .......)

The harddrive is a laptop style harddrive, so you will need a 44 pin adapter to IDE to be able to connect it to your computer. From what Ive read, your drive is most likely toast. But just to test it, you can connect it to your computer and image it with CHDMAN , but it will probably just crash.
Your best bet is to look on ebay for another laptop drive that is the same model and part number. Then use CHDMAN to image the drive with the wargods chd file.

Is this 1000% confirmed that it "has" to be a Seagate? Or is there no requirement and a configuration is simply being over looked?
Does it require certain size of drive, does it need to be PATA, or requires an ATA, or either of the listed drives with the cable select jumper on, or off, or no jumpers or cable select used in conjuntion with the drive set as master?
There's a lot of variables - in all fairness I think someone should at least test each of the variables and get an accurate answer. I don't know exactly how these work. Does the firmware have the hardware ID hooked in it? Does the firmware only work with certain drives because it HAS to match settings for Cylinder, heads sectors and LBA? If so that's easy enough to fake. Sorry again more variables.

BTW - I guess my previous info was some what incorrect. I simply meant to buy the CF hardware and make your own with CHDMAN. I knew what I meant lol ;)
 
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WarGods uses the same type of drive as KI2 and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey. Seagate made special drives for Midway that had leading zeros in the serial number. In KI2 the logic checks the IDE info of the drive (at bootup and before starting a fight) and if it doesn't find "00" at the start of the serial number it will reboot the game. This code was bypassed and implemented in a hacked version of the KI2 boot rom which is why you can use any IDE drive or a IDE/CF drive with it. I was going to do the same for WarGods and WG3DH but never got around to it. Until somebody does you have to use an original Seagate drive.

Also, there are 2 versions of the WarGods hard drive. One is mid-resolution only (the one in MAME). The other has extra files and can be switched between low and mid resolution.
 
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