Sega Naomi 2: any plan to support?

[zanac]

What about a bounty for support Naomi 2?

[flyinghead]

The main issue here is the lack of documentation about the Naomi 2 T+L Elan chip.

[barbudreadmon]

The bottleneck for naomi 2 support is that we can't find any documentation about its elan chip (its 3rd graphic processor), MAME doesn't support it, demul is closed-source, reverse engineering it is not an option.

[barbudreadmon]

If we could find a dieshot and someone well-versed in electronics, maybe it would be possible to figure something out, i'm wondering if the demul guys (@p1pkin ?) have some dieshot to share about this chip ?

[zanac]

but repository https://github.com/p1pkin/demul is not the right place to study it?

[barbudreadmon]

No, this is a really old snapshot of the code, afaik from way before naomi 2 got supported, demul is neither open-source not gpl. The repo is only used to track issues.

[p1pkin]

reverse engineering it is not an option

I'm honestly wondering why ?

have some dieshot to share about this chip ?

no, all the progress is result of pure software reverse engineering (neither of Demul team members had real Naomi 1 or 2)

[zanac]

why not to contribute or share info for flycast? Naomi 2 under Linux is a dream..... If just demul has a decent linux porting, wine is not an option ;)

reverse engineering it is not an option

I'm honestly wondering why ?

have some dieshot to share about this chip ?

no, all the progress is result of pure software reverse engineering (neither of Demul team members had real Naomi 1 or 2)

[p1pkin]

why not to contribute or share info for flycast?

why me do that ?
also, thats wrong with RE'ing it by yourself ? for example MAME emulate dozens (if not hundreds) of hardware platforms, which had no any documentation available. prehaps it is right time to do some real work and grab a bounty for it ? (not just leeching on someone's else work)

[barbudreadmon]

I'm honestly wondering why ?

@p1pkin Well, i was mainly thinking about hardware reverse engineering, so basically producing a dieshot and understanding the circuit, but we don't have the knowledge & tools to do that.

all the progress is result of pure software reverse engineering

So that's possible ? Isn't it a complex chip though ? Can you give us some hints about the method you applied ?

[flyinghead]

prehaps it is right time to do some real work and grab a bounty for it ? (not just leeching on someone's else work)

WTF?
closing in favor of #418