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Seibu SPI region changer -SPI REVIVE-

trap15

trap15

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Proud to release "SPI REVIVE", a patch for adding a region select menu to Seibu SPI games. This allows you to change the region on your SPI motherboard. This fixes those dreadful "CHECKSUM ERROR" and "HARDWARE ERROR" messages, most notably. There's a bunch of neat stuff I found while working on this, so I'll write a technical blog post at some point, but this is already useful I think. For now it supports Raiden Fighters (Japan) and Raiden Fighters 2 (Japan), I'll probably add more over time as it's not too hard to add new software to it.

https://bitbucket.org/trap15/spi_revive/
 
Pretty damn cool! I could see this being quite useful if you have a motherboard of one region and cartridges of various regions.
 
So I've got an Australian Raiden Fighters and a Hong Kong (I think) Raiden Fighters 2 I'd love to convert them both to US region.
 
twistedsymphony said:
I realize the carts are easy to convert, but I was under the impression that converting the main board was more challenging.
Click to expand...
Swap japanese SPI REVIVE roms to your carts, change the region of the motherboards to US and then put US roms on the carts.

Is that not how this works?
 
nem said:
twistedsymphony said:
I realize the carts are easy to convert, but I was under the impression that converting the main board was more challenging.
Click to expand...
Swap japanese SPI REVIVE roms to your carts, change the region of the motherboards to US and then put US roms on the carts.

Is that not how this works?
Click to expand...
That would work, but I think @twistedsymphony is asking @trap15 to add support for his games/regions natively to the region changer.
 
nem said:
Swap japanese SPI REVIVE roms to your carts, change the region of the motherboards to US and then put US roms on the carts.

Is that not how this works?
Click to expand...
IS that how this works? because I have no problem doing that if thats the case. I was under the impression that it would only work if you were starting with a JP mobo and was simply a region selector when launching the game.
 
Nice work. Is there a method for changing regions of the single boards?
 
No idea if it works on single boards (and frankly I don't want to try, I'm not in a position to fix it if I break its flash).

The dance nem described should work.
 
Funny story. I spent the better part of two hours trying to get my flash corrupted SPI motherboard revived. I dumped my RF2J prog roms, patched them, wrote them to new eproms and put the roms on my board. It showed a checkerboard pattern for a second and then nothing. So I swapped the JP121 jumper to the other position. Same thing. Maybe thinking I had put the jumper the wrong way when I put the board into storage, I then tried it in a different orientation. Same result in both positions.

OK, so I guess I messed up the roms? Dumped my original roms again. Patched them again. Wrote them to another set of new eproms. Tried again. Same thing. I then pulled my working SPI motherboard and then tried the board on that. No change.

Ugh, so maybe the cart is dead? Pulled a Raiden Fighters 1 board, patched the roms and tried that. It boots to a region change screen! (*)

I then put the original roms back on the RF2 cart and tried it on my JPN SPI motherboard. It works just fine.

And the problem?

It's an undumped set X/

I'll dump the rest of the roms in the RF2J and send them to mame later this week.

(*) Going back to this, I succesfully updated the flash to United States. Unfortunately every time I try to flash my US Viper Phase 1 cart to it the counter gets stuck on 547. I let it sit and then turning it on again it boots to a checksum error. Bah.

There's also mistake in the Mame documentation. For the smaller board SXX2D, there is no jumper for game change. You just swap in a different game and let it flash. The jumper (JP121) is for mono / stereo switching. I attached a scan of the japanese manual taken from @yosais blog (link) and translated the key points.
 

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  • seibu_spi_jumper_settings.jpg
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I finally got around to using this and just wanted to say thank you. it worked beautifully.

I used the JP Raiden Fighters ROMs from MAME and patched them, programmed to some fresh EPROMs and installed on my Australian cart and used that to reflash my Australian V1 mobo to USA region, then I was able to use that same cart to reflash my Korean V2 mobo to USA as well. This allowed me to use some USA region carts I had with no mobo to play them. Now I just have to flash the matching Cart roms to put all my carts to USA region as well.
 
So I finally have a Seibu SPI board (Raiden Fighters). Interestingly enough, it is a Japanese version which allows me to try both:
  1. trap15's SPI Revive/Region Select patch, and
  2. rtw's cart region patch mod
I think that will take it one step further than what @twistedsymphony did in his last post and what @nem tried to do with his Viper Phase 1.

Before I do this for Raiden Fighters, any in-game differences besides just text between the two regions?
 
The region question has always been unclear.

One way to determine changes would be to record a run in MAME, then hack the headers of the .inp file and use the .inp with a different region and see if it desyncs.
 
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