Namco ND-1

[Kannibal]

I don't know how many people are aware of the arrangement versions of the classic Namco games we have cores for already, but they were developed on the Namco ND-1 board. They have only been seen on one console compilation known as Namco Museum for PS2, GameCube and Xbox. I have not gotten rid of my PS2 copy mainly because I have never come across an arcade cabinet of any of the Namco Classic Collections. These would be a cool pair of compilations to have available on the MiSTer but I understand their appeal may be low and on top of that getting a board will be difficult.

[Gyruss]

I`ve got both Namco Classic collections 1 and 2 in my private collection, I did sent Jotego some great pcb`s in Spain like R-Type, Pacmania, Demons World, Hyper Olympics, Raiden 2 etc. but to sent these would be to much for me since these are very rare and also expensive.. but maybe someone else from this community is so kind to donate these...

[lamarax]

I`ve got both Namco Classic collections 1 and 2 in my private collection, I did sent Jotego some great pcb`s in Spain like R-Type, Pacmania, Demons World, Hyper Olympics, Raiden 2 etc. but to sent these would be to much for me since these are very rare and also expensive.. but maybe someone else from this community is so kind to donate these...

Gyruss you're a treasure. I bet many in the community haven't yet realized the importance of your contribution.

That said, I don't think physical boards are required to be at hand in each case, unless some of their chips need to be decapped. Jotego doesn't do that, he wants schematics.

So please keep your most precious boards; their sacrifice would be unavailing.

[Gyruss]

I`ve got both Namco Classic collections 1 and 2 in my private collection, I did sent Jotego some great pcb`s in Spain like R-Type, Pacmania, Demons World, Hyper Olympics, Raiden 2 etc. but to sent these would be to much for me since these are very rare and also expensive.. but maybe someone else from this community is so kind to donate these...

Gyruss you're a treasure. I bet many in the community haven't yet realized the importance of your contribution.

That said, I don't think physical boards are required to be at hand in each case, unless some of their chips need to be decapped. Jotego doesn't do that, he wants schematics.

So please keep your most precious boards; their sacrifice would be unavailing.

I did not knew this! so in other words there is not always hardware needed from a original the PCB`s I did sent to him? he did not told me that..

[Minpin]

@lamarax clearly you don't know what you are talking about.

[jotego]

Schematics are rarely available. I collect all I can find on the internet as PDF files. I also buy the ones I find on eBay. But, they are still uncommon. For most arcade games, if you want the schematics, you have to create them yourself using the actual PCB. You can see the schematics I made for Exed Exes from the PCB here. So PCBs are necessary for most games.

For games for which there are schematics available, PCBs are still needed to verify them. It happens quite often that the schematics do not match the final PCB version. I have seen wrong connections in the schematics of 1942, MX5000 and Konami's Kicker; to name a few.

Then, most original PCBs contain custom chips for which original schematics may not even provide pin names. So these chips are big black boxes. Having the PCB sometimes is enough to find out what they do in a faithful way. A successful story about this is the CPS-A chip in CPS hardware. I was able to correctly implement the complex DMA feature of this chip by taking direct measurements without decapping the chip.

Sometimes, we need to crack open a chip to extract its information by taking die shots. This means breaking the chip and potentially breaking the PCB. This is one of the reasons why I want PCB donations, not loans: because a loan limits how far we can go with it.

Gyrrus sent me a few expensive boards to work on. I am extracting schematics from them and we will see the first core based on Gyrrus' boards in a few months. Thanks, Gyrrus!

[lamarax]

I'm glad to stand corrected in my assumptions! I was just sad, because clearly Gyruss doesn't want to part with his most precious boards, and I feel for him.

He wholeheartedly wants to share his belongings, and I frankly believe he has already gone above and beyond :/

[Gyruss]

Schematics are rarely available. I collect all I can find on the internet as PDF files. I also buy the ones I find on eBay. But, they are still uncommon. For most arcade games, if you want the schematics, you have to create them yourself using the actual PCB. You can see the schematics I made for Exed Exes from the PCB here. So PCBs are necessary for most games.

For games for which there are schematics available, PCBs are still needed to verify them. It happens quite often that the schematics do not match the final PCB version. I have seen wrong connections in the schematics of 1942, MX5000 and Konami's Kicker; to name a few.

Then, most original PCBs contain custom chips for which original schematics may not even provide pin names. So these chips are big black boxes. Having the PCB sometimes is enough to find out what they do in a faithful way. A successful story about this is the CPS-A chip in CPS hardware. I was able to correctly implement the complex DMA feature of this chip by taking direct measurements without decapping the chip.

Sometimes, we need to crack open a chip to extract its information by taking die shots. This means breaking the chip and potentially breaking the PCB. This is one of the reasons why I want PCB donations, not loans: because a loan limits how far we can go with it.

Gyrrus sent me a few expensive boards to work on. I am extracting schematics from them and we will see the first core based on Gyrrus' boards in a few months. Thanks, Gyrrus!

Well this post is from 30 September... so that is almost 4 months ago and still no sign of any of my boards I have sent you... I understand that it always takes more time then you expected but still a little disapointed to wait so long..

[Minpin]

@Gyrrus you must understand that it takes time. It's not just getting it and tomorrow there is a core. If it's that easy why don't you make the cores? You have a very short sighted mentality.

[LamerDeluxe]

@Gyrrus you must understand that it takes time. It's not just getting it and tomorrow there is a core. If it's that easy why don't you make the cores? You have a very short sighted mentality.

Did you actually read this thread?

[jotego]

Well this post is from 30 September... so that is almost 4 months ago and still no sign of any of my boards I have sent you... I understand that it always takes more time then you expected but still a little disapointed to wait so long..

Not at all! We've been working around your Hyper Olympic PCB for quite a while. All these Konami cores I have released are related to it. The Hyper Olympic core itself is quite close now. That will be the first direct one from your PCBs, but the other Konami cores (Mikie, Kicker, Yie Ar Kungfu, etc.) have been possible in part thanks to your contribution.

The second one from your lot will be Demon's World. We're extracting Twin Cobra schematics first because it's a related and earlier system. We should finish the schematics this week (about 85% done as of today). Demon's World will take a bit more work because of the Texas Instruments chip it uses, but we are moving things to get it done too.

For the other boards, we have not started yet.

Thanks again Gyrrus, and don't worry, they will all get done.

[Gyruss]

@Gyrrus you must understand that it takes time. It's not just getting it and tomorrow there is a core. If it's that easy why don't you make the cores? You have a very short sighted mentality.

Is that so? I did sent him some of my best boards from my private collection just to help the community, and that was in May 2021, jotego promised me that he would start to work on it in a couple of months, now it is 12 februari 2022 and still no sign of any of any of my boards, so how dare you to call me short sighted mentality!!

[MostroW]

@Gyruss just leave it be, his comment shows his own mentality better than anything else.

Also if you made some verbal agreements with Jotego i'd recommend reaching out to him on a personal level, like a direct message to him on this board or his twitter account.
I'm sure he will acknowledge you and tell you what is going on at the moment!

Jotego also said that your board contributions helped him getting other cores of the ground and i am sure that most people here appreciate your contribution to this project!

Take care!

[jca]

Jotego do an excellent job with arcade cores but embarks in too many projects. I think he was planning to do it after the Sega 16 system which has been taking a long time and still have 2 games with bugs while he is developing other single arcades and the NeoGeo Pocket. I suspect the problem lies with his patrons asking for specific cores and being patrons he obliges. May be he should tell them he also has some loaners and has to give them priority. May be someone should remind him on his Twitter account.

[dmckean]

Jotego do an excellent job with arcade cores but embarks in too many projects. I think he was planning to do it after the Sega 16 system which has been taking a long time and still have 2 games with bugs while he is developing other single arcades and the NeoGeo Pocket. I suspect the problem lies with his patrons asking for specific cores and being patrons he obliges. May be he should tell them he also has some loaners and has to give them priority. May be someone should remind him on his Twitter account.

jotego replied a few posts above and explained the entire situation. He knows.

@Gyruss It takes many months to write cores and jotego even hired an assistant this year because of his backlog. Please be patient so we can all enjoy the fruits of his effort.

[LamerDeluxe]

What's with the bashing of people graciously donating expensive hardware which every MiSTer user will benefit from eventually.

[gojira54]

Many thanks to gyruss, hard to give up hardware like that - much respect =]
Mister is built on community much more so than other comporable projects, the skill and time given up by talented people is amazing!!

[MostroW]

What's with the bashing of people graciously donating expensive hardware which every MiSTer user will benefit from eventually.

Too many people believing they can demand stuff from people who donate or do all the work.
The only input they have is "I want this" or "You need to do / solve this"

[LamerDeluxe]

What's with the bashing of people graciously donating expensive hardware which every MiSTer user will benefit from eventually.

Too many people believing they can demand stuff from people who donate or do all the work.
The only input they have is "I want this" or "You need to do / solve this"

Yeah, there's a lot of demanding from people who aren't contributing anything. We are really spoiled with the amazing support there is for MiSTer, compared to a lot of other platforms.

[MostroW]

most of us forgot what common decency and manners are

[Kannibal]

I apologize for starting a troublesome thread.

[killersquirel]

I apologize for starting a troublesome thread.

You have done nothing wrong. Personally I also would love to see these cores come to fruition.

[CaptainMuskrat]

Would love to see classics like Pac Man Arrangement on the MiSTer. It's the definitive version of the game IMO.

[tcdev]

I wrote the original MAME driver for this hardware (note I didn't implement the rotation used in Galaga Arrangement - is it even there now?) I own the Vol 1 PCB and had the SMT graphics ROMs removed temporarily so they could be dumped. Someone else dumped the Vol 2 ROMs.

The graphics processor is the Yamaha YGV-608 - a multi-layer scrolling tilemap and sprite engine. I also obtained this manual from Yamaha in order to write the MAME driver. I have since scanned it and made it available to MAMEDEV many many years ago.

I have written a bunch of (admittedly simpler) cores also many years ago before MiSTer existed. A few of them have been ported by others to MiSTer since (and a few notably haven't, like Juno First). My approach was not to require the schematics, but rather based on a functional description that could be gleaned from the MAME source. You could argue not 100% accurate, but at least something playable until someone does an implementation based directly off the schematics. In the case of the Namco-ND1 hardware, there's not a lot to it aside from the 68K and the YGV-608 anyway, so hard to get it wrong I guess.

I haven't done any FPGA implementations of retro stuff for probably 10 years now as my job has moved more towards software in recent years. However I've recently been working on FPGAs again and was considering tackling another, more complex core on MiSTer. Being familiar with the hardware, Namco ND-1 might be a good project to start on and also cut my teeth on the MiSTer framework. My other thought was Xybots, likely based on the existing Gauntlet MiSTer core?!?

[dcubed]

I wrote the original MAME driver for this hardware (note I didn't implement the rotation used in Galaga Arrangement - is it even there now?) I own the Vol 1 PCB and had the SMT graphics ROMs removed temporarily so they could be dumped. Someone else dumped the Vol 2 ROMs.

The graphics processor is the Yamaha YGV-608 - a multi-layer scrolling tilemap and sprite engine. I also obtained this manual from Yamaha in order to write the MAME driver. I have since scanned it and made it available to MAMEDEV many many years ago.

I have written a bunch of (admittedly simpler) cores also many years ago before MiSTer existed. A few of them have been ported by others to MiSTer since (and a few notably haven't, like Juno First). My approach was not to require the schematics, but rather based on a functional description that could be gleaned from the MAME source. You could argue not 100% accurate, but at least something playable until someone does an implementation based directly off the schematics. In the case of the Namco-ND1 hardware, there's not a lot to it aside from the 68K and the YGV-608 anyway, so hard to get it wrong I guess.

I haven't done any FPGA implementations of retro stuff for probably 10 years now as my job has moved more towards software in recent years. However I've recently been working on FPGAs again and was considering tackling another, more complex core on MiSTer. Being familiar with the hardware, Namco ND-1 might be a good project to start on and also cut my teeth on the MiSTer framework. My other thought was Xybots, likely based on the existing Gauntlet MiSTer core?!?

Namco ND-1 would be badass! Would love to be able to play PAC-Man Arrangement on a real arcade cabinet via MiSTercade!

[PistolsAtDawn]

I wrote the original MAME driver for this hardware (note I didn't implement the rotation used in Galaga Arrangement - is it even there now?) I own the Vol 1 PCB and had the SMT graphics ROMs removed temporarily so they could be dumped. Someone else dumped the Vol 2 ROMs.

The graphics processor is the Yamaha YGV-608 - a multi-layer scrolling tilemap and sprite engine. I also obtained this manual from Yamaha in order to write the MAME driver. I have since scanned it and made it available to MAMEDEV many many years ago.

I have written a bunch of (admittedly simpler) cores also many years ago before MiSTer existed. A few of them have been ported by others to MiSTer since (and a few notably haven't, like Juno First). My approach was not to require the schematics, but rather based on a functional description that could be gleaned from the MAME source. You could argue not 100% accurate, but at least something playable until someone does an implementation based directly off the schematics. In the case of the Namco-ND1 hardware, there's not a lot to it aside from the 68K and the YGV-608 anyway, so hard to get it wrong I guess.

I haven't done any FPGA implementations of retro stuff for probably 10 years now as my job has moved more towards software in recent years. However I've recently been working on FPGAs again and was considering tackling another, more complex core on MiSTer. Being familiar with the hardware, Namco ND-1 might be a good project to start on and also cut my teeth on the MiSTer framework. My other thought was Xybots, likely based on the existing Gauntlet MiSTer core?!?

Thank you for your contributions to preservation! This is important to me, and I'm personally of the opinion that the experience being preserved is more important than nothing being preserved, but of course the more accurate we can get, the better.

[Kannibal]

I wrote the original MAME driver for this hardware (note I didn't implement the rotation used in Galaga Arrangement - is it even there now?) I own the Vol 1 PCB and had the SMT graphics ROMs removed temporarily so they could be dumped. Someone else dumped the Vol 2 ROMs.

The graphics processor is the Yamaha YGV-608 - a multi-layer scrolling tilemap and sprite engine. I also obtained this manual from Yamaha in order to write the MAME driver. I have since scanned it and made it available to MAMEDEV many many years ago.

I have written a bunch of (admittedly simpler) cores also many years ago before MiSTer existed. A few of them have been ported by others to MiSTer since (and a few notably haven't, like Juno First). My approach was not to require the schematics, but rather based on a functional description that could be gleaned from the MAME source. You could argue not 100% accurate, but at least something playable until someone does an implementation based directly off the schematics. In the case of the Namco-ND1 hardware, there's not a lot to it aside from the 68K and the YGV-608 anyway, so hard to get it wrong I guess.

I haven't done any FPGA implementations of retro stuff for probably 10 years now as my job has moved more towards software in recent years. However I've recently been working on FPGAs again and was considering tackling another, more complex core on MiSTer. Being familiar with the hardware, Namco ND-1 might be a good project to start on and also cut my teeth on the MiSTer framework. My other thought was Xybots, likely based on the existing Gauntlet MiSTer core?!?

I am so glad I made this thread and look forward to your further contributions towards preserving these specific Namco games which; to my knowledge, don't get enough exposure.

[Thedad]

I wrote the original MAME driver for this hardware (note I didn't implement the rotation used in Galaga Arrangement - is it even there now?) I own the Vol 1 PCB and had the SMT graphics ROMs removed temporarily so they could be dumped. Someone else dumped the Vol 2 ROMs.

The graphics processor is the Yamaha YGV-608 - a multi-layer scrolling tilemap and sprite engine. I also obtained this manual from Yamaha in order to write the MAME driver. I have since scanned it and made it available to MAMEDEV many many years ago.

I have written a bunch of (admittedly simpler) cores also many years ago before MiSTer existed. A few of them have been ported by others to MiSTer since (and a few notably haven't, like Juno First). My approach was not to require the schematics, but rather based on a functional description that could be gleaned from the MAME source. You could argue not 100% accurate, but at least something playable until someone does an implementation based directly off the schematics. In the case of the Namco-ND1 hardware, there's not a lot to it aside from the 68K and the YGV-608 anyway, so hard to get it wrong I guess.

I haven't done any FPGA implementations of retro stuff for probably 10 years now as my job has moved more towards software in recent years. However I've recently been working on FPGAs again and was considering tackling another, more complex core on MiSTer. Being familiar with the hardware, Namco ND-1 might be a good project to start on and also cut my teeth on the MiSTer framework. My other thought was Xybots, likely based on the existing Gauntlet MiSTer core?!?

Firstly, thanks for your contribution to arcade preservation; great work!

Secondly, Xybots would be amazing. I absolutely love that game.

[tcdev]

I've started work on emulating Namco Classics, or more precisely, Namco ND1. I'm starting with the YGV608 in Verilator. The datasheet and application manual for the YGV608 have a block diagram of the chip and there's quite a bit of technical information in the application manual so I think it'll be possible to do a fairly accurate implementation from them.

It's going to take me a while as I come up to speed on the MiSTer framework (having never done a core on MiSTer before), the Verilator set-up for MiSTer and Verilator itself, and also writing in Verilog as opposed to VHDL. But looking forward to the challenge!

[HerrBerzerk]

Great news!