I recently bought a Yamaha RX5 drum machine and all of the waveform data cartridges for it. I bought the machine with the intention of making more cartridges, as I have some experience making cartridges for vintage game consoles like the NES, Famicom, SNES, and Commodore 64.

I saw that there is an open source project to make re-programmable cartridges using a Teensy++.

https://github.com/gligli/rx5usb

Great, I can use that as my chip burner. I’ve compiled the windows app, built the open source cartridge with an IC socket. I also had tried a zif socket, but had trouble burning chips when I did, so the cheap and dirty way will do for now.

I also redesigned the waveform data cartridge, but before I really knew how that worked, which brings us to the reason for this post. More on that in a second. My cartridge almost worked. The RX5 would see that I had a new cart inserted on boot, but didn’t actually load any of the sounds, all the slots were empty. So, I had to know why they didn’t work. Was the Teensy doing some translation of the rom I just burned? Well, yes, sort of. It turns out that if I had just opened one of the original cartridges, I would have seen that there are two eproms; one containing the actual waveform data and file name, etc., and another mask rom. The reason my cartridges aren’t fully working is that I’m missing the mask rom.

Back to the reason for this post. I have the .bin file for the mask rom. it’s attached.

http://www.th3rdwave.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/RX5cartMASK.zip