David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

I’ve continued working on Deroon Dero Dero since Nuapete’s protection work, improving the sprites (still missing zoom, and some priority / layer stuff) and adding preliminary support for the other layers.

It appears that (at least) one of the Deroon sprite roms currently recognised by MAME is a bad dump however, which is causing some missing graphics. The game itself is a nice original variation on the classic ‘Puyo Puyo’ theme.

(missing graphics on shot below due to bad rom)

The improvements also helped Angel Eyes, although Background layer scrolling (which is more important for this game) might be tied to an unemulated part of the protection, as I don’t seem to have valid scroll values to work with.

Some guy by the name of ‘nuapete’ very kindly simulated the protection on the Tecmo System hardware. This platform has 2 games, Deroon Dero Dero (Tecmo Stackers) and Angel Eyes.

The protection was the main holdup, so I’ve started working on the graphic emulation. Here are the first results of trying to add the non-tile based sprites.

(and Angel Eyes)

Well, I guess the first question people are asking is “How is the Seibu work going?”

The short answer is, “It isn’t”

The long answer is, Dox has attempted to run some tests on his Raiden 2 PCB in order to help us understand the protection device better. While there haven’t been any problems running the code, and it has revealed a few interesting things about the COP chips and Video hardware on these Seibu games it hasn’t been forthcoming with helpful results when testing features of the protection. I’ve been working on improving Denjin Makai recently, but that one hardly uses the protection (only for the score calculation between rounds and some timer countdowns) so the improvements seen in that in the last couple of releases don’t reflect progress on the protection emulation.

In other news a friendly guy by the name of ‘Exodus’ turned up a couple of alt Flintstones Memory Match sets, and a game with almost identical gameplay that was produced for ChuckECheese. I’ve added them all to the ‘Double Cheese’ driver, and they appear to work fine, so big thanks to Exodus for finding these and dumping them so that support could be added.

Other than that, not much to report I’m afraid. It’s been a frustrating month for things I’ve been looking at, with many dead ends.