I've recently come into posession of a Crazy Taxi sitdown cabinet. It was rather cheap so of course there are a few issues here and there. The game boots and runs fine (played a few runs) save for some sticky shifting that can be swapped out. However, when I popped into the ROM test menu, it claimed that IC13 was bad. I'm assuming this chip holds graphics/sound as I couldn't detect any error while playing the game and all peripherals checked out in the menus.
I went on a googling bender last night and came up with pinouts and datasheets for the maskroms in the cartridge and it appears that the MX29LV640D flashrom shares the same SOP44 pinout as the maskroms on the board with one exception: WE replaces BYTE enable. From reading the numbers on the ROM test, I assume the numbers under BYTE and WORD are checksums calculated when testing the chip under byte and word access mode? If this is the case, I would assume that a flash part that doesn't support byte mode would not be a drop-in replacement? Is my guess as to what this chip contains correct? If so, I don't mind as it plays fine and will keep my eyes open for a different cart in the future.
Has anyone else attempted to burn a flashrom/eeprom with a good image from MAME and replace a faulty chip in a cartridge?
Replacing Faulty IC in Crazy Taxi?
It does work and for the short term I am quite happy with it. However, I am a perfectionist and I'd rather have a clean bill of health from my system diagnostic menu.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I can probably buy a bad cart off of somebody who's game isn't usable and swap IC13 to get a good boardset if I really wanted to.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that I can probably buy a bad cart off of somebody who's game isn't usable and swap IC13 to get a good boardset if I really wanted to.