A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Just to clarify (I'll be doing a bit of that in this thread, apologies in advance), DICE was never a version of MAME. It was its own separate project that tackled the issue with combined analog/digital netlist simulation prior to MAME doing so in recent years.

Yeah, I could've worded that better...I'd meant it as "similar to MAME" not associated with MAME.

No worries, just a minor point! About the only other clarification is that other than a small handful of Pong-like derivatives, most CPU-less games in the 70's *did* have ROMs, just not as we think of them today. You did allude to this later, though. :-)

At this point, MAME's netlist simulation tech is pretty bulletproof when dealing with circuits that are primarily digital logic, so theoretically, it would be trivial (but grind-y) to bring up any of these discrete games for which ROMs are dumped, given schematics. BUT -

- the main issue I found when going ham on some audio netlists, as well as Atari's "Tank", during my month-long summer vacation last year, is that the quality of most schematics in circulation tends toward the unreadable end of things.

Most of the scans that exist date back to the mid to late 90's, when disk space (and bandwidth) was at a premium, so they tend to be PDF'd versions of 1-bit scans, and they tended to be scanned with little (if any) quality control on the schematics themselves.

While things like the BOM (for manuals that included one), and the service-related text tends to come through just fine, schematics suffer from everything from "lost" traces, to unreadable part values, even to unreadable part types.

Anyway, regarding the sprite-related ROMs themselves, they tended to be 4-bit PROMs, limited to around 128 to 256 words of data, and given the pinout, were easy to mistake for a typical quad logic gate chip of the time.