David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

Not strictly MAME work but I thought I’d take a crack at emulating the NeoCD system (probably for MESS) using the MAME NeoGeo driver and some information from ElSemi as the basis of the work.

So far I’ve hooked up some basic code to allow it to write the C data on the fly and boot the BIOS.

My current files, for personal backup as much as anything else.
updated..

The MAME Italia Forum guys reported A Bug in World Cup Volley ‘95 causing it to hang after each match, I’ve fixed that and also fixed some sprite problems which occured during the game.

Some sound problems were Reported in Night Slashers, I’ve attempted to improve this but I’m not a very good judge of sound.

I also fixed the prioriies in BackFire! and decided it seems to work well enough to mark it as working (player 1 joystick inputs work if you follow the how to play instructions). Note that BackFire set 2 defaults to wheel control which is unemulated. You can set it to joystick in test mode.

Lastly Razoola cleaned up the NG sets as they were quite a mess in 103u2 to say the least.

I’m not interested in hearing about the NG driver, but if you have any feedback over the Data East based games I’ve been working on (World Cup Volley ‘95 and Backfire!) then I’d be interested in hearing bug reports etc. If the games lockup later in the game, or have severe graphical problems somewhere I want to know. Also does Night Slashers sound correct with this change?

File can be found here here.

Again based on Bryan’s work I’ve split BackFire! from the generic 156 driver and put it in it’s own file. The game is fairly different to the other Deco156 based games in that it supports 2 monitors. Both Monitors are now displayed, although colour problems remain. The game remains unplayable as it needs further work on the maths co-processor.

*edit* fixed the colour problems, but priority issues remain*edit*

I decided to take a look at some more of the things Bryan submitted. I’m currently looking to hook up both screens in BackFire (it’s meant to be a 2 screen game) and seeing if I can make any progress with the Co-Processor.

Dox found what appears to be a bug in the ARM core, a workaround allows World Cup Volleyball to boot, and a few fixes to the Co-Processor gets proper working credits and timers. The game is quite playable, although seems too easy, maybe due to other copro bugs.

DON’T expect this to be in the next u update, the workaround hasn’t been fully tested, nor have the copro changes but this should give you some idea of what it looks like.

So.. it seems Afega’s games aren’t so original either… Luca recently added support for Twin Action, but it wasn’t working; it reset when you hit the fire button and the player sprite was invisible. That behavior reminded me a lot of a previous game I’d look at, US AAF Mustang, actually the whole game did right down to the parallax scrolling sprites for the ground. Sure enough comparing the Afega and NMK16 drivers revealed that Afega had copied most of the NMK hardware and that Twin Action was nothing but a bootleg of US AAF Mustang. By using the same protection patches as used for Mustang (with some slight adjustmenets to compensate for code being moved about), Twin Action started working.

Here are some Comparisons:

Ok, the title screens are different enough

The mini rocket launcher is replaced by a green rocket launching blob.

The big rocket launcher is replaced by a robot thing.

The boss plane is replaced by a skull plane..

Level complete messages…

Out with the boats, in with the submarines..

I know, lets replace a plane with a giant gun..

Missiles….

Launched from a Submarine type thing…..

.. and for level 3 they didn’t even change the background…

…even the enemy attack patterns appear to be the same; and to think they said the Korean cloning was fake.