David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

This needs 2 graphic roms redumping (various character poses, and almost the entire character sets for ‘Geisya’ and ‘Sumo’ are missing) and the sound banking hooking up (and possibly the sound roms verifying) but otherwise it seems playable.

This again was a lot of work to get running. Dox had to extrac another 20 tables from the PCB, which I then had to type and use to decode the data. Each character uses 2 tables, one which gives pointers to the tiles needed by that character, and another (I believe) relating to the moveset for the character.

Anyway, that’s all done, and the game works. Now hopefully Andreas can find a relationship between the decryption tables and the MCU data rom, which would help significantly clean up the implementation.

This game also shows that the B.Rap Boys and Blood Warriors collisions systems should be the same, even if they currently each require their own implementations in MAME. Work to be done there!

We’ve managed to extract some more tables from Shogun. This allows the first two characters to show. For some unknown reason it still hangs after the fade tho.

Ok.. that was a silly bug. The attract mode works for these 2 characters. Just need to get the data for the others then.

Guru redumped the 4 Mask roms from his B.Rap Boys PCB.

This fixes all of the missing graphics.

Collisions are still broken (you can attack what’s to your right now, but any attack to the left by either yourself of an enemy kills anything on the screen) The collision hit system looks similar to Kaneko Superr Nova, but doesn’t work. The game uses ‘3d’ collisions, so it’s possible this codepath was never tested in suprnova or is different. All the Suprnova games are pure 2d, not 2.5d. Dox is looking into it.

(a mix of B.Rap boys and B.Rap Special shots)

I fixed a few issues with the graphic emulation (some remain), figured out the correct rom loading, and confirmed that at least 4 of the graphic ROMs currently dumped are half size (which is why there are a lot of missing graphics)

Sadly the maths unit doesn’t seem to be the same as Blood Warrior, so additional work will be needed there.

I also need to work out properly how it resets the protection device so that it doesn’t crash after a few levels.

For some reason test mode doesn’t work.

We’ve also asked Andreas if he can look for a relationship between the extracted decryption keys and the table in the MCU rom, which, if he can find one, will help with Shogun.

B.Rap Boys

B.Rap Boys Special

Dox managed to figure out an important detail about the protection and the way the writeback logic works. As a result B.Rap Boys now boots and gets into gameplay.

The bad news is that all the sprite roms appear to be half size (lots of missing / bad graphics)

It also seems to use some flip modes our video doesn’t support yet (looking into it)

There is also likely some ‘maths’ protection, as the game currently has no collisions. I’m hoping this turns out to be the same as Blood Warrior etc.

Otherwise, it boots and runs attract mode, at least for a while :-)

I’ll look at some of the remaining emulation issues tomorrow. Dox has told Guru to double check the graphic roms.