Shisensho (Mahjong)

• By: Tamtex
• Released: 1989
• Display: Horizontal (upright)
• Pinout: JAMMA
• DIP SWITCHESText Document
• CPU: ???
• Players: 2 (simultaneous / co-operative)
• Identifying Marks: EPROMS marked SIS, A-22- (yes, it looks incomplete), and A-27A. Solder-side of PCB has etched into it: NANAO M80-A-A
• This is a Mahjong style game. I saw the board while at a local VCVGC (Vancouver Classic Video Game Club) meet. The board was known to be non-functional, and they had no use for it. It was given to me in hopes I could get it running again. I had a careful look at the board, and spotted that two chips had been carefully de-soldered from the PCB. I immediately thought that someone may have used this board for parts to fix another game. The PCB had markings on it which gave me enough information to begin searching for replacement chips. One was marked "244", a standard 20-cent buffer chip. I had probably 30 of these floating around in my IC collection. The other missing IC was simply marked "64K SRAM". Looking elsewhere on the PCB, I found another (not removed) chip marked likewise on the PCB. The actual chip in this spot was marked TMM2063AP. Much searching on the internet with Yahoo, excite, and alta-vista provided absolutely no leads as to this chips' existance. I then tried searching NTE, Motrola, and a few other chip manufacturers' sites. Still no luck! I then tried www.google.com and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky". A company which specialises in selling old, no-longer in production chips pops up. Nearly every time I use that search engine, it surprises me! Ok, I knew the chip existed out there now, and could be purchased, but was still no closer to finding out the pin-out, or finding out whether it was 64K BITS, or 64K BYTES. Then I thought to try ORCAD's database (a great circuit layout/building program, been around for a long time). It had the chip, and I was able to confirm that the 2063's pin-out exactly matched another chip which I do have: the 5565. The packages had different physical dimentions, but fortunately the PCB supported both package styles! A little more soldering, and time to try the power. WOOHOO!! That's all that was wrong. The game appears to be PAL (as opposed to NTSC). I then had to sit down and figure out the dip switch settings myself (fortunately, there was a test mode which really helped figure things out).
• Screenshots