Programmable Logic Devices in MAME
One of the best uses of MAME is the identification of random video game parts. Thanks to the -romident feature, you can dump a ROM or PROM from a game and pretty quickly identify what game you have. If you've ever owned a giant pile of PCBs, you'll know it's not always easy to tell.
In theory, MAME should catalog all the programmable parts on an arcade PCB. This is useful not only because of the -romident feature, but also because if a part fails due to bit rot or corrosion or some other kind of damage (or is just missing), you can identify it, track down the data, and program yourself a new one. Up until now, we have only been really cataloging ROM-based devices, in spite of the fact that another class of device -- the Programmable Logic Device (PLD) -- is often found on PCBs, especially those dating from the mid-80's onward. PLDs are a class of device that includes PALs, GALs, and other related devices, which are programmable in much the same way that ROMs and EPROMs are.
One of the big reasons why we haven't been including PLDs is because they are generally not stored in raw binary format, like ROM data. Rather, they are stored in a format known as the JEDEC file format (.JED), which is basically a text file containing all the data, with lots of room for programmer-inserted comments and many optional fields.
This is not really a big problem in and of itself, except for the fact that every single programmer out there, when reading a PLD, will produce slightly different output. This in turn makes tools such as the -romident feature useless for such devices because -romident works by comparing the CRCs and SHA1s of the files, which would be different even for the same PLD read by different programmers.
The solution
At the creamy center of a .JED file is what is known as the "fuse map". This is the raw set of binary 1s and 0s that get programmed into the PLD. In fact, the rest of the .JED file beyond that is mostly filler: some checksums, default states for unspecified fuses, etc. The final fuse map is really the important data, along with the type of device that was used (was it a GAL16V8A or a PAL16L8?)
So the basic premise for logic devices in MAME works like this: the fuse map is stored in raw binary form, preceded by a single 32-bit (big-endian) value that specifies the total number of fuses. Each bit of the fuse map is packed into a byte from LSB to MSB. This, it turns out, is the exact format that is used for the internal fuse map checksum, so it is a natural arrangement. I decided not to try and encode the device type into the file because (a) there are way too many devices to be concerned with, and (b) many devices with similar but not identical names are equivalent. Rather, PLDs that are added to MAME should specify the device type in the filename. (Also keep in mind that if the device type were encoded into the file itself, then if person A reads a GAL16V8 and person B reads a GAL16V8A that contain identical data, they would not match.)
How do you get data in and out of this format? Since 0.105u4, the default build of MAME will build a new utility called jedutil, which can convert a .JED file into its binary form, and vice-versa. This means that you can find the binary form of a PLD, run jedutil on it, and extract a .JED which can be programmed into a real life PLD using any standard programmer.
So how does this help -romident? Well, if you read a PLD from a board and want to see if it matches anything we've cataloged, you can do one of two things. You can take the resulting .JED and run jedutil on it to convert it to binary form. Or, you can just point -romident to the .JED file directly, because code has been added to the romident feature that recognizes .JED files and automatically parses them into binary form on the fly.
The first experiments in using this will be the mid-80's and later Atari games. There are several other games out there that we already have good PAL/GAL dumps from as well. Hopefully we can produce an even more complete catalog of arcade game devices as a result.
