Restoring my Grail - Nintendo Upright R-Type

[myPinballs]

One of my next quests is to work out how to save my high scores on my pcb when i power off my machine. I can't believe irem never had a battery backup for the ram on the board?

Does anyone know which rams on the pcb are responsible for storing the high score data?

 

[Brettster]

R type is my fav shooter
loving this thread and its looking awesome

 

[jase38]

Looks great, awesome work.

Where did you get hold of the marquee tubes if you don't mind doing me asking?

I need one for my Donkey Kong.

I can sell you one if you like. I bought a few. I'll drop you a pm

That would be awesome and massively appreciated, thanks man!

 

[myPinballs]

Just received some parts from This Old Game in the USA.

Comparison of new marquee and old

Installed. Colours are perfect match for my original side art. Really nice quality parts.

 

[Mr20to5]

Very nice indeed.

 

[big10p]

Nice! Makes all the difference with that new marquee.

 

[griffo83x]

Love it , my dream cab right there

 

[Nintendo Arcade]

Great game in a Nintendo Cab

Looking great Jim

 

[Flinnster]

Totally amazing! Any chance of a nice high res scan before you apply the CP (and one of the marquee too?)
I need to do a custom job to fit my Dino King marquee art area

(and possibly a custom CP too)

Flinnster2018-01-11 17:03:18

 

[myPinballs]

Great game in a Nintendo Cab

Looking great Jim

Cheers mate. I want to redo all the control panel parts, t-moulding and metal trim next, plus rebuild the coin door.

On the control panel i'm thinking new buttons, overlay, service the joystick, new bolts, possibly new mi-croswitches to.

Then i've got to decide on the cab itself. There are some corners and edges with alitle bit of damage so would like to repair all those. The side decals are pretty good so will probably leave them as is , though 1 does have a tear and damage on it. They are still vibrant colours though and not faded.

Also on the tech front i want to work out how to get the game to save high scores as its really annoying loosing your top scores at power off. The board doesn't seem to have anyway of storing them, no battery backup, so got to work this out and replace the correct ram chips with modern nvram or similar

 

[Flinnster]

The op who sold me my PCB reckoned that one of the names on the high score table was one of the guys who used to work for him. With no battery on the board I called 'bs' on that one

 

[Bods]

Yes, very nice indeed

That really shows had bad the Marquee's get over the years.

I'm lucky in owning original pcb to play it as well

 

[muddymusic]

Totally amazing! Any chance of a nice high res scan before you apply the CP

I've got the cpo scanned, drop me a pm with your email address I'll send it over. A good scan of the marquee would be nice though, mine is f*cked

 

[t-m]

Looking good! love this game

 

[slave01]

SLICKNESS!

 

[myPinballs]

Totally amazing! Any chance of a nice high res scan before you apply the CP

I've got the cpo scanned, drop me a pm with your email address I'll send it over. A good scan of the marquee would be nice though, mine is f*cked

Happy to help you out with this. I don't have a scanner right now, but will see if i can sort something out. I wish i'd bought a few of these at once to, saving on the postage and import duties, but i wasn't sure how good the quality was going to be. Now i've seen them, they are top notch!

myPinballs2018-01-12 12:03:13

 

[myPinballs]

Going to be looking at ways to sort out some kind of high score save option as my next priority. I refuse to believe it can't be done!! Wish they'd added a battery backup in the first place though!

 

[myPinballs]

Well, i did some experiments with hacking the roms and mame today. I can now edit the text on the main attract screen and change the high score names and values, so i can burn custom roms with any sets of default scores on.

Think i will create a small program so i can create new roms more easily and insert replacement name and scores into the existing list

Its the first step in working out the best way to have scores saved at power off

Couldn't resist a small change of 'JIMTENDO' on the main screen for testing!!

Also whilst looking through the hex, i worked out the max score for the game is

9,999,900

and the max number of initials for a players name is 7 !

myPinballs2018-01-12 18:36:21

 

[Flinnster]

7 is a wierd number of highscore digits isn't it!
(c)3987

Much respect for hacking at it. Highscore kit would be pretty cool

 

[John Bennett]

One of my next quests is to work out how to save my high scores on my pcb when i power off my machine. I can't believe irem never had a battery backup for the ram on the board?

Does anyone know which rams on the pcb are responsible for storing the high score data?

I'm far from an expert, but I think the work RAM is the two 64kBit SRAMS at 1F and 3F (one the lower 8, the other the upper 8 bits).
I've no idea how highscore mods work, but I can't think how it'd work if you keep the entire work RAM alive. A reboot would make the program go through the blanking operation to put it back to defaults, so you'd have to mod the program code to avoid wiping it. RAM tests would muck on with it too.
Maybe you could add an NVRAM device to the bus (modifying PALs and tapping into traces), then hack the ROM to point to this for high score data...
Just all seems rather unobvious to my untrained eye