San Francisco Rush 2049 (Arcade)/Upgrading

Overview

To upgrade San Francisco Rush 2049 to Tournament Edition or Special Edition, the bare minimum upgrade kit consists of the following parts:

• Security PIC (PIC16C57/PIC16F57-I/P or equivalent PIC) Digikey link
• Boot ROM (27C4001/27C040/27C401 or equivalent EPROM, originals are 100ns, slower may not work)
• IDE Hard drive or CF card with IDE adapter (the SE image in MAME is almost 20GB, but the original HDD is smaller, so as small as 4GB will work)
  • SATA devices with an IDE adapter will not work, nor will IDE DOMs.
  • 

    One of the few CF cards found to work
    The Vegas hardware is very picky about what CF cards will work.

This data can be found elsewhere on the Internet. There are plenty of websites out there that host up-to-date versions of romsets from MAME, so they will not be provided here.

There are more components included with the official kits, but these 3 parts are the minimum required for the game to work.

The BRAM database will be wiped if a new version of the game is installed, so game settings, date and time, and play statistics should be recorded before upgrading.

Writing the security PIC

A universal programmer such as the TL866A can program both the security PIC and boot ROM. Other programmer support will vary, especially for the PIC. The GQ-4X and GQ-4X4 can write the boot ROM, but not the PIC.

Programming is mostly straightfoward, however there are some things to keep in mind:

• 

  PIC16F57 config bits from the datasheet
  FOSC0 will need to be set to 01 (XT oscillator) in the programmer settings, otherwise the game will not work. Depending on the programmer, this may just be setting the oscillator type to XT as opposed to setting bits.
• The USER ID0-3 may need to be shortened to only 4 digits, as having more may cause verification to fail. "0FFF" is a tested value that works for all of the IDs.
• Programming the Special Edition security data may require an extra step of deleting the extraneous 7 bytes from the buffer. Otherwise, the device might not program correctly.

If the game doesn't boot, erase the device and recheck the configuration.

Make sure to not install the chips in backwards. They can survive a short amount of time reversed, but they will quickly get hot and die!

Writing the boot ROM

This is much more straightforward, the U27 boot ROM just has to be programmed like any other EPROM. If it fails verification, then it should be erased in a UV EPROM eraser for 15-20 minutes and attempted again. If it keeps failing, try another chip.

Writing the hard drive/CF card

The CHD image cannot be written to a hard drive as-is; it must be decompressed first. The chdman tool included with MAME can do this.

The proper command to run is chdman extractraw -i sf2049se.chd -o sf2049se.raw, where sf2049se.chd is the input file path to your CHD, and sf2049se.raw is the output file path for the new decompressed image.