What is the encoding of some old arcade chips?

Question

So I got a couple super old chips from what looked like an arcade. The game-board they game with is OK I think. The CRT monitor is wrecked, however the chips are still good.

I stuck them in my Chip reader and did a dump of them.Had a poke around to see if there was anything I could do with them, perhaps make an emulator ext. However I don't quite understand what it means. I'm not sure if there encoded, or if i'm trying to decode them with the wrong Character-set. I'm pretty sure these are the sting outputs of the game, I first thought, OK well there probably in another language. But google has no clue.

Tried UTF-8, EBCDIC, etc.

Whats posted is it in ASCII. Googled the model number of the board, no dice.

The chips where labeled U4-U8

Here is a snipit of the first chip:

00047600  73 20 6f 20 61 20 6f 63  20 68 20 6f 62 65 64 77  |s o a oc h obedw|
00047610  20 75 74 6e 74 20 6f 62  65 00 79 75 20 65 2c 72  | utnt obe.yu e,r|
00047620  63 69 65 6f 65 6d 72 20  61 64 20 6e 20 74 6e 2e  |cieoemr ad n tn.|
00047630  00 6f 63 20 68 20 70 69  20 75 74 6e 74 20 70 69  |.oc h pi utnt pi|
00047640  20 20 61 72 69 74 20 77  20 61 64 2c 00 65 63 20  |  arit w ad,.ec |
00047650  74 74 65 63 72 65 74 62  74 61 6f 6e 2e 20 6f 72  |ttecretbtaon. or|
00047660  2c 6e 20 6c 63 6a 63 73  00 6f 20 6f 62 65 64 77  |,n lcjcs.o obedw|
00047670  73 6f 20 70 69 20 61 64  2e 00 6c 79 72 77 6e 20  |so pi ad..lyrwn |
00047680  69 68 36 63 72 73 61 20  31 70 69 74 20 72 6c 73  |ih6crsa 1pit rls|
00047690  2e 00 65 6c 72 73 61 64  20 6e 31 20 72 6d 72 20  |..elrsad n1 rmr |
000476a0  6f 6e 73 6f 20 6e 36 63  72 73 0a 54 79 74 20 6f  |onso n6crs.Tyt o|
000476b0  62 65 77 6e 69 67 20 79  70 65 73 6e 20 6f 62 65  |bewnig ypesn obe|
000476c0  75 20 75 74 6e 0a 20 63  73 63 75 74 68 67 2c 61  |u utn. cscuthg,a|
000476d0  64 38 69 20 6c 61 73 61  70 73 2e 00 40 00 41 00  |d8i [email protected].|
000476e0  42 00 43 00 44 00 45 00  46 00 47 00 48 00 49 00  |B.C.D.E.F.G.H.I.|
000476f0  4a 00 4b 00 4c 00 50 00  51 00 52 00 53 00 54 00  |J.K.L.P.Q.R.S.T.|
00047700  55 00 56 00 57 00 4d 00  20 00 21 00 22 00 23 00  |U.V.W.M. .!.".#.|
00047710  24 00 25 00 26 00 27 00  28 00 29 00 2a 00 2b 00  |$.%.&.'.(.).*.+.|
00047720  2c 00 30 00 31 00 32 00  33 00 34 00 35 00 36 00  |,.0.1.2.3.4.5.6.|
00047730  37 00 2d 00 00 00 01 00  02 00 03 00 04 00 05 00  |7.-.............|
00047740  06 00 07 00 08 00 09 00  0a 00 0b 00 0c 00 10 00  |................|
00047750  11 00 12 00 13 00 14 00  15 00 16 00 17 00 0d 00  |................|

I figured a group of security people would probably have seen encoding or encryption like this before and might point me in the right direction.

Or hell, they might be encrypted, there was a label for "Security chip" on the board, however it was missing.

Any idea what encoding this is, or if its encrypted?

Dumps: https://mega.nz/#!W8UwiQBS!17g3GMBniRPBcqOuDXVGZZoYh1qOZAJzJIdh-rpk5kQ

@schroeder Ah, thanks. Didn't know there was a R.E. Exchange. — Steven Venham, May 13 '16 at 22:38
It might be useful to have a name and/or photo of the game machine/card. — Lie Ryan, May 14 '16 at 03:40
An easy explanation would be that your "extracted" data is busted. How confident are you in your "Chip reader"? Alternatively it's a lazy attempt to start up an ARG of sorts :D — Vitaly Osipov, May 14 '16 at 06:33
Hey @Steven_Venham , care to share the name/model of the Chip reader you used to dump these? — Npv23g, May 14 '16 at 10:58
"UTF-8" is highly unlikely, if this is 'super old'. (Which is what? 2010? 1985?). "EBCDIC" is, in fact, also quite unlikely. If this is from the time when bits and bytes mattered, then the text encoding may be specific for this one game – byte values directly map to an array of display characters. Your best bet would be to find screen shots displaying text, and then use that in a 'diff' kind of way to check if you can find bytes in the exact same order. Some old chips had interleaved data – even/odd bytes could reside on different ROMs. Anyway, this fragment is way too small to tell. — Jongware, May 14 '16 at 13:37
.. Are you free to post complete binary dumps on a publicly available server and include a link in your question? — Jongware, May 14 '16 at 13:38
@VitalyOsipov Very confident The one i riped there was 2 of, and both are exact copys. — Steven Venham, May 14 '16 at 17:30
@LieRyan Ill get a photo up later, but the cabinet was black and unmarked. Had a window above it, thats missing and no buttons either. — Steven Venham, May 14 '16 at 17:31

Jongware · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-15T00:44:21.087

These four files are 2 interleaved sets of ROMs for the arcade game "Pot-O-Gold", by Leisure Time Technology, dated "OCTOBER 1999".

This image shows your labelled chips, also bearing the abbreviation "POG": (located on http://newlifegames.net/nlg/index.php?topic=14784.0) plus an additional unlabeled one.

The first pair is U4 + U7; combining them shows a few texts and, at offset 0x37876, a 16x16 monochrome font. The font starts at space and continues well into accented characters, following Code Page 437, all the way up to the capital Ñ. After that comes an Ø, followed by some specialist (probably in-game) characters. A very similar 8x8 character set starts at 0x75FEA. This strongly suggests a modern PC was used to create the game, and in-game texts are basically encoded as Code Page 437.

About halfway into the combined file, there is a huge chunk of text for changing the settings; it starts around PROGRESSIVE CONFIG SHOULD BE DONE ON A MASTER MACHINE. Some of the texts are in Norwegian (?).

The second pair is U5 + U8. Combining them shows it starts with the names of the sub-games: DOUBLE-UP KENO, SUPER DOUBLE-UP, and so on. It also contains lots of detailed in-game help texts. The final half of the file is blank, consisting only of 0xFF bytes.

I did not find a good reference for what CPU drives this, and I don't recognize code (probably) as Z80, Intel, ARM, or MC680XX. I also cannot readily determine if word data is stored little or big endian.

The manual for this slot machine http://www.slotsdirect.com/potofgold/Pot_of_gold_CD/Good%20POG%20Manual.pdf has a reference to "34010 regs" on page 92, so the processor is probably a TMS34010. — Guntram Blohm, May 15 '16 at 03:17

What is the encoding of some old arcade chips?

1 Answers1