David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

There isn’t much going on worth writing about at the moment. It’s World Cup time, I’m trying to learn a thing or two about Windows / DX programming outside of MAME, and MAME is incredibly broken right now thanks to Aaron so I can’t really do much with the current ‘u’ versions anyway ;-)

All I’ve really had time to do is add a few non-working ’skeleton’ drivers for some games / systems. Most of these appear to be protected, some may have code hidden away in Epoxy blocks and all in all stand little chance of working unless somebody else picks up one of the boards and does some extensive work with the actual hardware.

Adding NON-WORKING sets isn’t much fun as for the most part you know there won’t be any end results unless somebody else picks things up, it is however a job that needs doing. While the games don’t work I feel it is important to document what we do know about the systems, even if that simply boils down to “it has these roms on the board, a custom CPU, a giant epoxy block, battery backed ram, and all the boards we’ve found have been dead” Not the most positive of situations but it happens more often than I’d like it to.

If anybody has experience in emulating MSX hardware they might be interested in trying to emulate HEC’s Super Free Kick which appears to contain a modified version of the MSX(2?) bios in the roms with all the strings blanked out, however, it also contains a large epoxy block which may house some of the game code. (We don’t know, somebody needs to try and emulate it to find out)

Likewise Sang Ho Soft’s Puzzle Star (and Sexy Boom) may also be based on reproduction MSX hardware, but again they are probably protected. The PCB has a battery backed ATT3030 FGPA chip labaled ‘Warning ! No Touch’ Once the battery is dead the PCB dies too, and most of the PCBs we’ve seen have been dead. The problem is we don’t know what to do with it, we don’t know if that chip simply controls their video hardware, or runs the main game. Until progress is made with the emulation this worrying situation remains. It might not even be based on MSX hardware, even that remains a guess for now. Dox has expressed an interest at looking at this further so I wish him the best of luck in figuring it out, and for now I’ll keep hoping that we don’t need anything extra from the PCBs.

Anyway, I’ve been adding basic Rom loading for this kind of thing. I just hope that somebody out there decides to pick up these (and other) NON-WORKING drivers before it’s too late and we discover we need data from the PCBs we can no longer obtain.

If you’re only interested in playing games then you won’t see many immediate results out of me adding these NON-WORKING sets, but you have to remember MAME’s role is as a documentation project, and every stage of documentation is just as important.