David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

Aaron has released the ‘u3′ source update for Mame 0.98, this includes the Deco 156 progress made so far.

Shortly after the release of u3 I made some further improvements to the 156 emulation, removing a kludge (allowing the Eeproms to work) and fixing the music.

This update can be downloaded here. Please note I won’t supply binaries, so don’t ask.

General:
Added Sprites
Eeprom settings don’t work on any game
No Sound

Magical Drop / Magical Drop Plus / Chain Reaction:

This is highly unstable and prone to crashing, I’m not too sure if its due to protection or CPU bugs, none of the other games behave this badly. Gameplay is also very sluggish

Osman / Cannon Dancer:
Still doesn’t boot without going into the debugger. Has problems with Sprite colours (16-bit ram on 32-bit bus maybe?) and tile banking. Also tilemaps don’t seem large enough at the moment.

Party Time:
Seems quite playable, some tile bank problems

Charlie Ninja:
Tilemaps aren’t big enough, sprites are a bad dump, some scrolling problems on title screen.. (I’m sure it was ok before)

Joe And Mac Returns:
Playable, although I can set it to either a very fast speed, or a very sluggish speed depending on Vblank, I’m not sure which is correct… Completed a few levels and it didn’t crash so it seems ok.

Found a way to get Osman to boot via the debugger…

and it appears we can fix the Joe & Mac Returns Tile Rom by using bits from each of the bad dumps

None of these will be playable until the protection has been worked out however.

Bad News: the 156 games seem to be protected..
Good News: some progress anyway, and the Osman board isn’t going to kill me, always good to know :-)

I moved from Magical Drop to Joe and Mac Returns…

These are the first shots from that

note that the tile roms on both sets are bad dumps, hence the corruption in the screenshots. The platforms are wrong in shot 3 due to missing tile banking. Sprites haven’t been added. A Hack is needed to bypass a protection (or eeprom?) check on startup.

*edit* fixed the banking*edit*