David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

There is already a game in MAME called ‘Jumping Pop’, that one is a Korean hack of Tumble Pop by ESD, so when a user going by the name of ‘Wavesolder’ on the mameworld.info forums posted that he had a *different* game called Jumping Pop, this one by NICs it sparked my interest.

From his initial screenshot it looked like they were using a Taito font in the game, and from the 2nd screenshot he then sent me it became quite clear that this game was based on Taito’s Plump Pop. Like most of these Korean hacks/bootlegs they’ve changed all the graphics, all the sounds, rewritten parts to work with different hardware, but still used the original game code as a basis of it all.

I spent a while hooking it up in MAME, and while there are still a few things that aren’t perfect (mainly colours, it uses Palette RAM instead of PROMs and I think I’ve got the decode wrong) I thought these side-by-side shots would be interesting.

Left: Taito’s Plump Pop – Right: NICS’ Jumping Pop

Pretty clear isn’t it?

Big thanks to Wavesolder / Robin Cooper for finding this one. I’ll try and resolve the remaining issues, but they’re proving to be rather annoying so far.

Well, there haven’t been any updates here in a while, that’s not to say I haven’t been contributing, I just haven’t had much to write about.

Work has been occupying most of my time the past few months, highly enjoyable, but it doesn’t really leave much time for MAME.

As far as MAME is concerned I’ve decided to dust off the Seibu protection stuff Kale was working on and take a look at that. It’s a complex beast to say the least, and quite whether I’ll be able to emulate it or not I don’t know.

Based on what’s already been documented there appear to be multiple parts to the protection. A bunch of registers, Some maths operations, DMA operations, a ‘Macro’ table it uploads and can trigger which can perform other sequenced, complex protection operations on a per game basis, and an external rom ‘COPX-01′ or ‘COPX-02′ which is probably used for lookups on some of the maths operations. It looks like the protection device is integrated into the system controller and can access anything on the board. This is of course all undocumented, and figuring it out from guesswork alone isn’t easy. I’m currently pondering over the possibility of running some test code on the boards but the interaction with the protection devices (uploading of tables etc.) is vast, complex, and very subtle in places so it’s hard to know what to test, especially as it’s hard to know where in ram to look for results.

There is also a later revision of the MCU using external rom ‘COPX-03′ which is used on the V33 based “New Zero Team” and “New Raiden 2″, however, this MCU seems to be a completely different beast, unrelated to the previous generation. In those cases the games upload a much larger amount of data to the MCU device, maybe the entire program, but it looks to be encrypted.

I’m not making any promises that there will be any progress on any of thsee games, but rest assured, they are being looked at, they haven’t been forgotten, they’re just *hard*, really hard, especially the non-68k based ones which have additional banking issues to worry about.

Other than that, I’m really enjoying Frank Turner’s new album ‘Love Ire & Song’ and David Ford’s ‘Songs for the Road’ I’ll let you do your own research on them, but I’d highly recommend either.