And so it begins!

I've been kicking around the idea of making a MAME port for the IGT PE+ Poker machines for a long time. I know the hardware shares many similarities with arcade machines, and the MAME team has developed quite a few libraries for CPUs etc.

I personally own an IGT PE+ Poker Bar Top model show here.

My first step was to dump the roms in order to view the them in a binary format.

This was a fairly straight forward process using my trusty USB programmer. I ended up dumping 5 chips this way. The game program (pp0516) in my case, and the 4 CG chips for the character graphics (MRO, MRG, MRB, and MRX). The color prom (CAP 740) is a special little bugger that I could not dump by normal methods. I ended up resorting to putting it on a breadboard and reading the 256 bytes by hand with a bunch of LEDs. This took a while, but is accurate.

So now its time to look at the binaries and see what I can find.