Re: [stella] Dumping ROM images

Subject: Re: [stella] Dumping ROM images
From: "Eckhard Stolberg" <Eckhard_Stolberg@xxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 08:13:37 -0500
> It will work with bank switch games at least for the 'simple' bank 
> switching
> schemes.   As I said in my original message, and you alluded to below, I
> dumped an 8K game.  I did not mention that I had some LEDs hooked to the
> data lines so I could literally see what data was being accessed in the 
> ROM
> and I had a pot for the timing resistor on the 555.  I would set the pot 
> to
> a high resistance so it was clocking at a verrrry slow speed.  Sometimes 
> the
> ROM would power up in bank one and sometimes in bank two.  I read each 
> bank
> out separately and then made a quess as to which one was bank one and
> concatenanted the second file to the first.  I believe the data after the
> hot spots in the ROM was the same for both banks, even if it wasn't you
> could manually edit the few remaining bytes if need be.  Thinking about it
> the vectors after the hot spot would have to be the same, at least for the
> start up address, if the ROM was to power up consistently.  As I said
> originally this was a very simple method that required a fair amount of
> knowlege as to the nature of the ROMs and their data structure.  It was 
> not
> a plug and chug.

OK, this would allow you to read the major part of both banks.
But you still would have a problem with reading the system vectors
for the first bank, because if you read all addresses from $1000
to $1fff, you are always accessing $1ff9 before you are are reading
the system vectors from $1ffa to $1fff. Therefore the cart logic
would always switch to the second bank before you can read these
addresses. If you could start the reading at $1ffa and have the
addresses wrap around to $1000 at $1fff, your method might work.

Most games actually have different system vectors in both banks.
They only have a initializing routine in one bank. In the other
bank they only have a small routine that will switch into the first
bank and jump to the real initializing routine there.

Of course you could disassemble the code for the first bank in an
8K game with F8 bankswitching, and try to find the entrance point
for the system vectors. But apparanetly someone didn't do that
for the two games you mentioned. ;-) And if a game used the
unneeded IRQ and BRK vectors for small data tables, you would have
a hard time guessing the correct values.

I don't know if these two ROMs were the ones you dumped, but
several people did send these two binaries to us because they
didn't work with older versions of z26. We found out that they
didn't work because the system vectors in the first bank (we
started all bankswitched games in the first bank) were the same
as the ones in the second bank, which pointed to bad routines
in the first bank. We figured it might be better to special case
these two games with their own bankswitching, because it's
difficult to replace games that are already in circulation, and
there might be other games with the same problem. But so far
Moonsweeper and Sir Lancelot were the only games that people
complained about because of this. ;-)


Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg 


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