David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

I’d never heard of this before..

hmm and on another tilemap…

Looks like rather strange hardware for Taito, but there are lots of card graphics in the roms, so I’m guessing it’s a complete game rather than the video for something else…

I’ve been looking at early Nichibutsu Mahjongs with Kale

The following (Night Gal, Night Bunny and Royal Night) ones are an evolution of the hardware used by Jangou.

The main difference is these have a ‘protection’ CPU. In this case it is used to reinterpret the blitter values written by the main CPU, and convert them to the actual format used by the blitter using lookup tables in the protection program ROM. This took a while to figure out, because at first it looked like the ROMs were bad, because the offsets written by the CPU didn’t match the offsets in the blitter data rom at all (It was writing ASCII strings, but the blitter rom characters weren’t in ASCII order)

I’ve been working on getting them to display something. The Protection CPU isn’t hooked up quite correctly yet.

There are other games using the blitter with this weird configuration too. Sexy Gal, Sweet Gal, and Night Gal Summer. These don’t boot yet.

I took a look at the Reel emulation in Jingle Bell which Luca recently added. It was quite simple, very similar to Golden Star etc. I actually wonder if Golden Star has the same functionality to control the area in which the reels are displayed. As things stand it’s hardcoded in the driver. Jingle Bell required it to be dynamic, controlled from a ’tilemap line enable’ ram area.

I’m trying to make some sense of all this.. so far I’m not really sure exactly who made the original version of these games..

First we have Golden Star, this has been in MAME for ages, working. It has Palette Ram, an OKI for sounds, and is apparently by IGS.

Then we have all these.. which are all variations on the same thing. (I’ll add more details later) I’ve moved several around, and added a couple to the drivers, some have Proms, some have encryption, none appear to have an OKI for sound (sticking with the AY chips) They have different memory maps, but are essentially the same thing. (More details later)