I wanted to drop a post in here, and say THANKS to the good people here work worked out the Timekeeper issue. THIS thread was the most credible and useful one I found on the Internet when my Silent Scope died six months back. I had to do a lot of this work posted here, and some other fun things, to make it all work - but again, the basis for what to do was here. For the benefit of anyone else struggling with a Timekeeper IC, I have two things:
* What I did to get it to work
* What I have for anyone else that gets stuck!
In short...
- The -11p hardware boot failure issue in the Konami Hornet CPU is in fact the failed Timekeeper chip
- The chip has an internal LiOn battery in it, servicing the internal wafer, keeping it "alive." The battery's voltage does not pin-out, so you cannot measure it, nor can you put an external 3.3v to it and make it work
- The battery is buried in the resin - I ventured in one to dig it out and get to the points where it services the waver with voltage. This is a tricky process - you need to know where the battery lives ahead of time, and you need to work slowly, because you can damage the wafer, or destroy the physical integrity of the chip - and it won't tolerate being plugged and unplugged from a socket
- Even a "bad" Timekeeper can be brought back to life (more on this, in a minute) when the battery inside it is replaced! The wafer doesn't usually fail - just the battery
- If you try to buy a "new" Timekeeper, you're going to see 1999 era date codes - bad news, even for NOS. Since the battery is servicing the wafer, it is ALWAYS under load, and therefore dying. That means even a "new" chip has a dying or dead battery in it. I sourced several replacements for mine, and all but one were bad. You'll know it's bad when all you see are blocks of '00' and 'FF' over and over on read and write cycles - this means the chip is "dead"
- You need the "right" kind of programmer to make this work. Many $50 USB programmers won't handle this class of chip. As others posted, this chip also works like a Dallas 1225Y, so you need to be sure your programmer can WRITE (not just read/test) this class of SRAM. I found the MCUMall GQ-4X "true USB" rig does the trick, and can be purchased for $100
- You'll need to short pins 28 to 26 to read or write this chip properly!
- You'll need the right file to write to your chip - for Silent Scope (first run), I used the "SS1830UAA.dat" file as a binary program input file, which I got from a MAME archive. "UA" in the name means US. "EA" in the code apparently means Europe, so be careful which file you select
- Once the chip is back in the game, you'll know it works when the CPU and both video boards pass their checks - the screen will go into a deep color static pattern, twice, and then drop you at a screen where you'll need to execute at least three or four setup tests before you can get to game mode. If the screen doesn't flash like this, you'll be back to the original block scramble boot screen, which means you're in a loop, which means your chip didn't work
- Apparently, one should never set the correct date and time in the Bookeeping menu - this causes the game to password protect the setup menu, thus locking you out! I do not know the password to unlock this, and while I suspect the reprogramming of the Timekeeper will alleviate this, I am not sure - I can't recall if I read it here or elsewhere
So, what do you do if you find yourself here? Contact me! I came up with my own way to get the Timekeeper working, bulletproofed, for anyone with this kind of issue!
If you have a Timekeeper SRAM, or any other similar format chip with a failed battery inside of it, I can help!
Please see - the Dragonfish Reserviced Timekeeper in the B/S/T section here -
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,143303.0.html!