You must seek out the Korn.

There was a thread on here a month or so ago touting a ROM burner for $120 or so.

No. The code on your ROM is straight up binary, i.e. just a bunch of 1's and 0's. I suppose with the proper software you could decompile it, but it would be stripped of all its comments and white space, making it very hard to understand what is going on.

Well to my knowledge there is nothing at all illegal about you patching YOUR OWN roms for personal use. You cannot distribute patched roms but I believe you can do anything you want with your own roms. As for the original code, you can get that from several sources and it is freely distributed. I assume you're talking about Fish Tales since that's your only listed game. You can download the unaltered roms from IPDB.org

http://ipdb.org/search.pl?any=fish+tales&search=Search+Database&searchtype=quick

As for the WPC Patch, there are plenty of people around that will gladly email it to you i'm sure.

Maybe I am wrong, but I thought that certain new versions of Home Use rooms for certain machine already have the patch, and it doesn't fix the issue 100% on some machines. For example, I thought that the TZ rom (can't remember the latest version #) had the patch, but TZ still ghosts in places. Essentially, it is a hardware issue. No?

I've burned a couple ghost fix roms for a friend and one for myself. I went from very little ghosting on my STTNG to none. My friend also said he had great results. Here is the programmer I use with good results.
http://www.mcumall.com/comersus/store/comersus_viewItem.asp?idProduct=4219

If you really know you're stuff, there are tools out there to decompile the original hex code for most any Williams machine. (It's stored in binary, but reads in hexidecimal for the most part). Decompiling the sounds and DMD animations is essentially impossible, but the alphanumeric text, DMD text, game rules and a lot of stuff can be done. It's a LOT of work though, depending on how deep you want to go, and you need to know assembly language for the processor that you're dealing with.

Essentially, it's one of those things where the people who can do it already know how, and the people who aren't familiar with it would need to devote a couple hundred hours to the project. I'm about 75% done with the rules set for Black Knight, but totally burned myself out on that project. I will get back to it eventually, but it will be a while. There's maybe a half dozen people out there who have devoted any significant energy to that kind of brute-force decompiling work, most people that have updated the code had access to some kind of developmental tool, which greatly simplifies things.

The TZ home ROM, version 9.4H, adds the anti-ghosting patch and provisions for the third magnet. It eliminates the coin settings, however. It can only be set to free play. Also, like you said, it didn't totally eliminate the ghosting on my TZ, but it did reduce it to the point that it doesn't bother me anymore. I'm not aware of any other commercially available non-ghosting ROMs on the market. Seems like you have to "know a guy who knows a guy" to get one.

Just need to know someone with a rom burner. Download the TZ 9.2 rom from http://ipdb.org/search.pl?any=twilight+zone&search=Search+Database&searchtype=quick#2684 , apply the "WPC / WPC95 Lamp Matrix Driver Rom patcher" and put it in your machine. Like GoneFishin stated, I don't think it will eliminate ghosting but reduces it to levels that you wont notice. I haven't done this to my STTNG yet because I haven't switched to LEDs yes but I hear the results are amazing.

The patch worked for my IJ but not my Vette. I will see if it does anything for my BOP. I have to get the ROM burned.

Hello everyone! I just found this forum and I am very glad to know of it. I am very interested in changing the ROM for my ST:TNG pinball machine in one hex value, and that is the number of seconds given for the ASTEROID THREAT mission. Can anyone give any advice on how to accomplish this? I'll look into PINMAME debug and load in the ROM code and search it for the hex value for decimal 30, and perhaps by process of elimination i can find the location.

The Asteroid Threat mission is literally impossible in 30 seconds! But I will say after playing the machine perhaps 600 or so times over the last 4 years, I did complete the asteroid threat 3 times, but it really is impossible. Those were freak attacks where everything went perfectly and i got supremely lucky. I have my machine titled very steeply and my 3rd flipper for the steep ramp is weak, so you have to hit the delta ramp perfectly to even have a chance to get up it, and also, you must hit the sipnner to loop around to feed the upper flipper with a super fast shot and time it perfectly to get up the ramp.

So we must have more seconds to complete the mission! Heck, even without a timer, you'll probably lose the ball trying to win that particular mission!!!

Any ideas anyone? Also, what does eveyone mean by "ghosting"? I have not anything in particular before hearing this mentioned.

Thank you everyone!!! Best regards from Craig in NJ

The roms can all be downloaded from ipdb.org. And yes, you could put your rom into the programmer, dump it, patch it, and program it. The rom data does not need to be decompiled to patch and the rom files on ipdb are in the same format as those dumped directly.

Coming back on this, as I'd like to understand better the technical aspect behind (I have an afterglow, so ghosting is not a problem): what exactly does this no ghost do in terms of signal output ? Also, does it affect any "fade" effect ?

Thanks

I was able to "patch" my TZ by taking out a bunch of the insert LEDs the previous owner installed and replacing with 555s and 44s. Worked like a charm!

https://www.cometpinball.com/pages/the-art-of-pinball-leds

Thanks, I know the details of LED and what ghosting is.
I'm just curious on exactly what this ROM patch does to overcome this ghosting problem, and whether there would be side effects. I'm pretty sure there is at least one in the case of ledocd, since if my understanding is correct it completely turns off the 18V rails on the insert matrix, and ledocd draws power from the 18V columns.

The effect is no more ghosting. I have them in my getaway. If you need anything more than that I am not sure

The author of the wpc patch tool goes in depth explaining what causes the ghosting.

Overall, it switches from one column to the next, turning off the previous column at the same time it turns on the next, but the operation is happening faster than transistor switches, causing a temporary signal on the previous column when it shouldn't. Williams eventually adjusted the code in later games. It wasn't really apparent with bulbs. The fix also helps your electronics because these glitches caused spikes that added unnecessary stress to the transistors. Look it up :

https://emmytech.com/arcade/led_ghost_busting/

Roamin thanks that's exactly the info I was looking for

Cheers