David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

If you look at the Mame 0.129 readme then you’ll see that I added a game called ‘Slot Carnival’ with Roberto Fresca.

The thing that struck me about the hardware was how close to the merit hardware, emulating in merit.c, everything was. (Infact the driver is a copy of most of that code, pending the modifications required to get it to fix the video and palette issues)

Looking through the ever shrinking pile of completely unemulated sets, I found one called marked ‘Lucky Wing’. Knowing that Slot Carnival was by Wing, I compared it to Slot Carnival, and with a few modifications (extra ROM space in memory map, larger RAM) found that it booted.

There is however very little indication that it’s called ‘Lucky Wing’, and despite being ‘Wing’ hardware, and using the same fonts and other graphics as ‘Slot Carnival’ It shows an ADP copyright, and is entirely in German.

The most interesting thing however is that it appears to be more like an alternate version of Merit’s Pitboss. Even more interesting is the fact that the colours are correct for the Pitboss based games, but the video, including the palette are broken for the Slots element, which is completely different to the Merit games, and appears closer to Slot Carnival.

So.. what is this? Something half-way between the two? Right now, I don’t know, it does seem however a lucky find to have stumbled across this set.

I’ve been working with Roberto Fresca on some drivers lately. One that came to our attention was the ‘Coinmaster’ one, due to a recent dump of a Poker game running on that hardware.

I was asked if I could take a look at the tile banking, and try to locate the palette, which was proving to be difficult to find. After some educated guesswork I ended up with the following

Turns out the game has a 1 bit per colour, 4 colours per tile palette stored with the tile data in ram, rather than a global palette which any tile can access.

There are still a few things to be figured out, such as if it has brightness control on the colours (which would allow more colours) and if the extra ram that Super Nudge 2 and the Poker game have expand the palette in any way.

Site relocated to here to be with Kale’s and Robiza’s MAME WIP sites.

This is a test.