Sunday, January 17, 2010

Analyse.. don't Destroy (a Casio PV-1000)

I'm not a console collector nut, I'm a audio chip collector nut. There are countless game consoles and computers out there that I dont care much about because they all contain the same chips. (AY-3-8910 is nice, but you can only have so many of them).

What I'm looking to acquire at this point are the most obscure ones which contain custom/unique sound generating chips. You've heard about the CASIO PV-1000 before?



Don't worry, only the most die hard console collectors did. And they would die for it too. There are very very few such consoles out there and I got mine a bit by chance, and it was an impulse buy.

At 300$ (ebay), you just can't afford to ruin it can you? (I'm not a movie producer). And I look forward to its resell value once im done with it. Thats where the challenge comes in... how do I take a device that comes with just a NTSC-J RF adapter and get good enough audio results with it? (the RF channels on North american and Japan dont match... dont try)

The closest I got to getting a picture/sound from the default unit as is was to use a ANALOG/DIGITAL USB TV tuner, which had by chance a NTSC-J mode:




Not that bad, but, the audio was horrendous, and really not usable for my tests. However I've hacked nearly all my consoles in order to have separate composite video/audio from RCA jacks, so on top of some test equipement, i've got a few hunches on how to solve this cleanly.

the RF box is tied to the main motherboard in a very clean way:

A few minutes with my multimeter, from top to bottom:
1)9VDC (current for the amplifiers in the RF sections i assume)
2)GND
3)Composite Video Out.. YAY!
4)GND (same as 2)
5)Audio Out...  w00t!

Connecting Aligator jumpers to truncated ends of a RCA and to the pins 3,4 and 5 did provide me with a temporary solution, but surely isnt very practical for a longer term analysis.


Oups, where did the RF box go? (in a safe place in case I resell it and the buyer really is after lots of  pain and suffering).



Much better.
 From the outside:


Enjoy the OK quality outputs:

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2 comments:

  1. Hi David,

    I'm the guy who sold you the Bally Astrocade
    a few months ago, hope that you have fun with it. But i'm asking you if you have data on the D65010G031 (video & audio chip). Is it a TMS9918 with a palette of 8 colors and a AY-3-8910 ? Because i'm trying to built an adaptor to play Casio PV-1000 games on the Colecovision. Thanks in advanced for any infos! :)

    --- Sly DC ---

    ReplyDelete

  2. Hi, and thanks for the MPT03 and the O2 as well :)
    (you are in the credits of chipsounds's manual)

    The PV-1000's D65010G031 is really a different beast than a Colecovision, so i doubt there is any chance there.

    Wilbert Pol has done the Video Emulation, while i did the audio emulation for MESS's PV-1000 driver here:

    http://git.redump.net/cgit.cgi/mess/tree/src/mess/drivers/pv1000.c

    While i dont know if there is any similarity between the TMS9918 and the D65010G031 on the video side, i can assure you that the audio side is neither a AY-3-8910 nor a SN76489, but something much more simplistic. Three registers/channels of square wavs at 6bit resolution. (compared to the 10bits of the SN and its noise channel)

    Kind Regards!

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