David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

Sorry for the lack of updates here, I have little time to work on Mame right now.

Anyway 0.93 should be out soon enough, you can read the whatsnew.txt while you wait.

Please test, test, test and report (reporting is always important) anything you find broken / wrong compared to 0.92 / u2000 to MameTesters so that we can get any new bugs fixed as quickly as possible.

Decided to take a look at some of Guru’s recent dumps…

this is the result so far..

.. this may be updated as I expect another game to romswap into the same driver.

*edit* Ghost Hunter…

Ghost Hunter

Well … Nicola submitted an SPI update a couple of hours ago which fully decrypts the graphics in Raiden Fighters 2: 2000. He also stated that the remaining sprite encryption on the rest of the SPI titles is much harder.

Anyway, given the submission I really had little choice but to do an update so here it is, you can read the whatsnew.txt before downloading the update if you desire.

Oh, and here are some screenshots ;-)

Raiden Fighters 2: 2000

A huge thanks must go to Nicola for his tireless work on Mame.

If you want to contribute yourself I’ve been told that the guys over at the Mame Italia Forum are currently trying to gather a few donations to buy some PCBs to help with emulation. If you speak / read Italian and wish to help out then you may want to have a read of their forum.

Mike Coates has reported the following rather exciting progress with the Gaelco hardware using Encrypted Video RAM (Squash & Thunder Hoop) For the time being Squash is being looked at, but once this is done efforts will probably be made to do the same with Thunder Hoop.

For now this relies on a 1.5gb look-up table and crashes when you attempt to start a game, but hopefully over time the table can be reduced to a point where it can be used in MAME and the reasons for the crash can be traced.

Rom Check Screen

Attract Demo

Title Screen

Note, this WIP will *not* be included in the next update, there is much work to be done in reducing the tables down to a more suitable/correct algorithm first.

Also this is unrelated to the Dallas MCU protection found on some Gaelco games, games protected by the Dallas MCU will not become functional as a result of this work.

As you may have noticed 0.92 is out over at Mame.net As usual plenty of bugfixes, misc improvements, new working drivers, and WIP drivers that we’re either stuck with or haven’t looked at in great detail yet. The most interesting thing supported in this release for me is probably ‘Join Em’.

I don’t really anything more to say about the release myself.