SysCon
Overview
Syscon handles power, power-LEDs, tray loading (in conjunction with MechaCon, which actually controls the tray and the blue LED), front buttons and some thermal management.
It only exists on consoles up to the SCPH-390XX series (GH-022 board) (as well as system 246/256). After that, it's functionality was overtaken by the new Dragon-MechaCon.
On B/B'/C/C' chassis consoles, it's located on a daughter board (GD-011 for B-chassis, GD-012 for B'-chassis, GD-013 for C and C' chassis), together with RTC, EEPROM, clock battery and part of the voltage regulation circuitry.
Arcade SysCon
On Namco System 246 and System 256, the SysCon has some extra functionalities. The most notable extra functionality is the Arcade watchdog, wich is basically a 5 minute timer to shut down the system.
The Mechacon CMD for toggling the state of the blue Eject-LED was reused on these systems as the watchdog reset CMD.
Hardware
Syscon is always a Toshiba TMP87C807U.
It has a Mask-ROM of 8 Kilobytes (8 K x 8 bits) and a RAM of 256 Bytes (256 x 8 bits).
Pictured above is a SysCon with firmware 2C64 on a GH-015 board.
Firmware revisions
- 1G78 (GH-001, GH-003) (A/A+ chassis)
- 1V33 (GD-011, GD-012) (B/B' chassis)
- 1V86 (?) (Namco System 246/256 in all? variants)
- 2A69 (GD-013, GH-008, GH-010, GH-012, GH-013, GH-014, GH-016) (AB/C/C'/D/D' chassis)
- 2C64 (GH-015, GH-017, GH-018, GH-019, GH-022) (F/G chassis)