Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Arcade Collecting => Merit/JVL Touchscreen => Topic started by: ice2921 on January 04, 2017, 10:11:02 pm
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Hello,
I just picked up a Megatouch XL Gold cabinet and had some issues booting. I got it knowing there were some issues, after resetting the riser card. I got it to boot past the no boot disk found error. Now it just hangs at the following screen. Any ideas?
(http://imgur.com/a/7UNzu)
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Tried to re seat the CDROM drive and now it says that there is no driver for it.
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What does the last lines on the screen say? I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, and my eyes are blurry.
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man this is the week for XL problems. Do you have any other sticks of ram you could try? seems to be hanging at himem
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I think the CD ROM drive is shot. It says there is no driver for it. Is there a replacement drive I can get?
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any ide cd drive
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OK I think I have one laying around I'll try that and report back.
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Swapped it out and now it stops at the following screen:
(https://imgur.com/gallery/7ZDk9)
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You do have the software CD in the CD drive correct?
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I do.
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I would verify your software CD is good. Can you put it in your PC and use a program like imgburn to create an image from disc. If it creates the image without error you can at least rule out a bad CD disc.
Reason is, I had similar issue like 10 years ago with my XL Gold. I no longer have it or the disc but i do recall it was the disc that was bad.
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Well I was able to put the disc into my computer and could see all the files.
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I could aswell. But when i tried to copy all the files over it failed to read at some point. The best and easiest way is to just download imgburn (freeware) and use the create image from disc button.
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I guess its a bad CD? Where can I get another one?
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There was a megatouch iso sharing ftp server over at klov but its been down for a month or so, i guess they are trying to find a new server.
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It seems like its hard to find them. Are you a member of that site? Looks like its invite only.
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I got the ISO will try it out and report back.
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No joy still the same error :(
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Try cleaning the ram slots and ram contacts. Also, try removing the CD drive, how far does it boot without it?
If it boots further without the drive, try replacing the drive.
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Did that and now I get the following:
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Ok, we got a different screen. Is this after unplugging the CD-ROM? Probably safe to plug it back in.
Added:
Odd, you have 0123456789 on your screen...do you have a keyboard connected?
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Yeah its after I plugged the CD-ROM drive in.
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Now the error is more consistent.See attached.
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Could I try using an I/O board from a MAXX series?
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The io board of an XL has a number of functional blocks.
It contains the sound chip, comparable to an older style isa soundblaster card.
It contains a rom disk which holds the rom dos the pc is booting from.
It contains a non volatile ram chip which is memory mapped in the upper region and used for the settings and the high scores.
It contains the interface to the security dongle. This used to be a square block and was later replaced by a spoon type dongle. (dallas ibutton)
It contains the interface to the coin acceptor and service/test buttons.
It has a number of dipswitches and some additional (unused) inputs and outputs.
I doubt that the maxx io is compatible.
Sometimes the finger edge contacts make bad contact causing all kind of strange behavour. Rubbing them with a pencil eraser might help. The raiser card can have the same issues as well.
Try to clean your game cd with product used to degrease glasses. It might become readable again (for a short period)
The gold edition software has a copy protection mechanism that detects if the program is started from harddisk instead of from cd. Some people managed to patch out that protection. You can read in some previous posts about all the problems getting it going from a harddisk or compact flash disk.
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So ive tried a few things here:
- Re-seated the I/O board
- cleaned the I/O board connectors
- re-seated and cleaned the memory modules
- re-seated the dallas and EPROM chips
It seems as though whenever I re-seat the U12 chip I get all the way to the " Unit 0 MASTER IRQ 14 I/O address 0x81RO" "789" or "DISC BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" messages.
I have also been trying to bypass the onboard boot by removing the JP1 jumper and installing freedos. Now it just sits at the following screen:
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What procedure did you follow to get freedos on that disk?
I have seen such issues because the megatouch mobo was interpreting the disk parameters different than expected.
You should set the system bios harddisk to LBA. Otherwise, it can't find freedos on your disk partition.
I also had problems with freedos and fat32 partitions. fat partitions worked fine.
Sorry, just noticed it is using LBA (on your boot screen)
This leaves my first question.
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Thanks the disk is formatted in fat32 I will try as just FAT.As far as procedures go I, was not following anything in particular. I know that at some point I will need copy my gold CD to one of the DOS partitions but I wanted to see if I could at least get it to boot to DOS first.
On a side note when I boot using the EPROM it always fails at various stages. After further research it does not seem as though the messageUnit 0 MASTER IRQ 14 I/O address 0x81RO" "789" is actually an error, the device is simply freezing there. Have you done a freeDOS boot on one of these things before?
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OK so I am getting someplace. I was able to get FREEDOS loaded, but now I have to figure out how to get the cd files on to the disk.
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It's possible to use a harddrive. I use a compact flash card with a cf2ide adapter.
From the Merit pc point of view, it's identical to a harddrive.
I once started a tutorial for someone who PM'ed me here with the same question.
He suddenly disappeared, so I never finished and posted the stuff.
First, you will need to copy the cd contents in a folder on your pc.
It's just a regular copy of all the stuff, no need to create an iso.
I used freedos on the compact flash card and booted from there. It gave me more options to experiment with the system.
The Merit XL original boots from a flash disk on it's io card. You can disable that with a jumper on the io board.
Removing JP1 normally does the trick.
Drive letter D was a small ramdisk
Drive letter F was the cdrom drive. I used the freedos subst or assign command to point the folder with the contents of the cd rom to that drive letter. I am sure I can dig up more details if needed.
Can you tell me what you did here? Especially with the assign command. I need to somehow get the device to boot to the f drive.
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I posted a link with an image to DaddyLongLegs once.
It contains all you need.
Just can't remember if I used a private message or posted it public.
Can't seem to find back my private messages. (Maybe because it's monday morning)
The gold uses a detection to figure out if you are running from cd or harddisk. It looks like a simple patch to remove that from the game exe.
I'll see if I can find the link again.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/9w93x1vbjzaq959/megaxl_1g.zip (http://www.mediafire.com/download/9w93x1vbjzaq959/megaxl_1g.zip)
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Forgive my ignorance, but how do I use that file?
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ok figured out how to copy the image but I need to figure out how to create partitions, as it seems that its only one this partition. I boot it up and its looking for the F: partition.
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First of all you need to unzip it.
Next, you need to transfer the resulting .img file to your cf or harddisk. I use winhex for that.
It works best on xp as windows 7 and higher sometimes refuse to access an external usb enclosure on a low level sector based method.
In linux, you can use dd to transfer an image to a disk.
You can also locate the tool they use to image sd cards for the raspberry pi. That one should work as well.
Make sure you don't image your windows drive, or it will brick your pc.
The resulting harddisk or compact flash disk should be bootable in your megatouch. It will also boot freedos.
You can examine the config.sys and autoexec.bat to see how the directory structure is set up and you can copy your megatouch files to the provided folder.
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First of all you need to unzip it.
Next, you need to transfer the resulting .img file to your cf or harddisk. I use winhex for that.
It works best on xp as windows 7 and higher sometimes refuse to access an external usb enclosure on a low level sector based method.
In linux, you can use dd to transfer an image to a disk.
You can also locate the tool they use to image sd cards for the raspberry pi. That one should work as well.
Make sure you don't image your windows drive, or it will brick your pc.
The resulting harddisk or compact flash disk should be bootable in your megatouch. It will also boot freedos.
You can examine the config.sys and autoexec.bat to see how the directory structure is set up and you can copy your megatouch files to the provided folder.
Thanks I figured out the image thing now its on to setting up the f partition I tried to boot to just the vanilla image and it was looking for a file on the f drive. I think it was f:\delall
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return to dos and check it out. The f drive letter should exist, but the megacdll.exe file it's looking 4 isn't there.
Check the autoexec.bat file to figure out what folder will become your f drive. (It's c:\megat or something like that..)
Copy the contents of your cd disk to that folder.
Check the post about fakecd. It should work to get rid of the error message about the cd being copied.
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If I remember well, delall was a .bat file that was in the root of my cd.
Some versions of megatouch use a different exe to start (megacdll.exe)
Sometimes, that file is not in the root but in a subfolder of your cd (could be the bin folder)
Some small tweaks to the autoexec.bat file should fix those differences.
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I copied the file to the c:\mega folder and now I get the following:
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Ok so in my case the megacdll.exe is located on \EXEC folder on the CD. So I modified the LAUNCHIT.BAT from:
:runit
d:
f:\delall
copy f:\megacdll.exe d:\
copy f:\thefiles.dat d:\
megacdll
if not exist d:\escape goto runit
to:
:runit
d:
f:\delall
copy f:\EXEC\megacdll.exe d:\
copy f:\thefiles.dat d:\
megacdll
if not exist d:\escape goto runit
I still get the failed to open file mefacdll. Also seems as though the language is different I tried modifying the FDCONFIG.SYS and removed !SET lang=NL but it still looks like it trying to alter the language.
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you might temporary remark the last line so that it brings you back to dos if it's not working.
so once in dos, do a dir d: and see if your stuff is there.
there might be a keyb be somewhere in the autoexec.bat.
Change that for your correct keyboard layout.
Not sure if freedos itself was in dutch as well. Thought I used the english version.
In worst case, you could always copy the files you need from it and work with your own freedos version.
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Im confused I thought the files needed to be in the F: location. I know for sure there is nothing in the D: I had to create from within freedos after boot.
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F was the cd rom drive. It is now the c:\mega(t) folder that was redirected with the subst command
D is a small ramdisk. It's purpose is likely to speedup game startup. It's created as ramdisk in freedos as well.
So after your freedos boots, you should have the f drive letter with the contents of your cdrom and
the d drive letter with the megacdll.exe and thefiles.dat (copied over from the f drive letter.
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Can I just manually copy those file s over within freedos?
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xcopy f: *.* /s
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Dont I just need to copy two files to the d partition and not the whole f partition?
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To the d, yes, but this should be done every time at bootup.
You need to copy the cdrom files once to your c:\merit (f drive in freedos)
You need to disconnect the cd rom drive. It's no longer used / needed
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right I already copied the files from the CD ROM to the F: drive and my CDROM drive has been disconnected. The problem seems to be copying those two files to the D drive
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So, the obvious...
if you type dir f: does that drive letter exist and do you see all your files?
if you type dir d: does that drive letter exist?
if you try to copy the file manually, does that work?
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Ok new error message.
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That's the famous copy protection message.
They show it because they detected that the software is no longer running from a cdrom but from a harddisk.
You will need to either have your exe patched or you will need to try something like fakecd.
The details are in the post with daddylonglegs.
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You were able to get it without doing any of that stuff? By the way im getting invalid key warning now.
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Yes, I didn't had to bypass that cd protection, but my software version is not the gold but an older revision.
They only put that check in with the later versions.
Daddylonglegs figured it out the hard way but had someone patched the exe for him.
If you didn't change anything in the software, you might have a problem with your io card so that the dongle isn't read correctly.
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Yes, I didn't had to bypass that cd protection, but my software version is not the gold but an older revision.
They only put that check in with the later versions.
Daddylonglegs figured it out the hard way but had someone patched the exe for him.
If you didn't change anything in the software, you might have a problem with your io card so that the dongle isn't read correctly.
Alright then I guess all of this was for nothing then. :(
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Alright then I guess all of this was for nothing then.
That's a little short trough the corner.
You could try to fix your io card. often the problems are oxidated finger contacts. Rubbing the gold plated contacts with a pencil eraser sometimes helps. (Do it with the riser card as well.) Contact 60 spray might help. Inserting and removing the boards a couple of times could help as well.
Using the system with a harddisk or compact flash disk works much better and faster than using it with a cdrom.
It's definitly not a waste of time to do that conversion.
That harddisk message is fixable.
On some other posts, you might read someone managed to patch the exe so that the security dongle is no longer needed, but,
if your io board isn't working well, you will have sound problems and problems with the test and calibrate button. It won't save it's high scores and lose it's settings due to the nvram not being read correctly...
Pretty much any functionallity of the io board can become a problem.
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I think that part of it is my I/O board but I need to see if someone has one. im guessing if I get a new one all I need to do is move my dallas/security key over?
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That's correct.
However, to run your Gold software from a harddisk, you will need to look into using fakecd or have your exe patched.
I am sure some people on the forum here can help you with that.
It has also been discussed that sometimes buying a maxx or force mobo (can't remember which it was) with it's io card is a cheaper solution than buying an xl io card. It's not a simple plug and play swap, so I don't think you are ready for that.
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edit: This doesn't work - you need an official merit drive
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echo hello > c:\12345678.xyz
attrib +h +r c:\12345678.xyz
This will take care of the shock mount error message. sounds crazy but try it.
Thanks I got past that part problem is I have the invalid key message now.
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That's correct.
However, to run your Gold software from a harddisk, you will need to look into using fakecd or have your exe patched.
I am sure some people on the forum here can help you with that.
It has also been discussed that sometimes buying a maxx or force mobo (can't remember which it was) with it's io card is a cheaper solution than buying an xl io card. It's not a simple plug and play swap, so I don't think you are ready for that.
My question was regarding buying an original XL I/O board. If I buy one what will I need to do to get it to work. Couldn't I just use my existing dallas key?
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unless your key battery died
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echo hello > c:\12345678.xyz
attrib +h +r c:\12345678.xyz
This will take care of the shock mount error message. sounds crazy but try it.
Sure will! where I store my key for my patch lol kills two birds with one stone.
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Thank you all that helped! I now have it fully working, using either the native CD-ROM or a hard drive. For me it turned out to be a bad I/O board, I was still able to use my existing security key. I am grateful for forums like this and the people that are willing to share their knowledge. :)
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Thank you all that helped! I now have it fully working, using either the native CD-ROM or a hard drive. For me it turned out to be a bad I/O board, I was still able to use my existing security key. I am grateful for forums like this and the people that are willing to share their knowledge. :)
Happy to help. Enjoy platinum:-d