December 9th, 2009
CoolRiders, may seem like some awful Korean hack of Outrunners created by people on acid
(It has dancing Astronauts, Santa, a giant whale amongst other things in the high score table background if you don’t believe me)
(oh, and giant birds which just look like they’ve been copy and pasted from photographs, which pick you up at various points)
(but no naked chicks, sorry)
However, CoolRiders isn’t really a hack of Outrunners (in the traditional sense anyway), it’s a Sega game on a completely unique system. The H1 ’super-scalar’ system. Little is known about the system, and emulation progress have been very slow. Kale did however recently get it to show some background images, but we were unable to locate something even as ’simple’ as the text font.
Some of the roms (which we assumed were graphics, probably sprites) were also in a strange format, which we haven’t been able to decode yet. To work out for sure what they were we asked Guru to ‘break’ his PCB in various ways, by removing certain roms. There were 10 of these roms, so he took pictures, each time with 1 rom removed.
Rom 0 removed
Rom 1 removed
Rom 2 removed
Rom 3 removed
Rom 4 removed
Rom 5 removed
Rom 6 removed
Rom 7 removed
Rom 8 removed
Rom 9 removed
This tells us a few useful things.
1) The text is in those ROMs.
2) Those roms are in some way compressed
3) Sprites are tile-based
4) The data in those roms can also be used for the backgrounds as the bad tiles are drawn with perspective on the title screen.
Hopefully now that we know this, we’ll be able to decode those roms, and maybe get something more interesting on screen. I’m not overly optimistic of great progress as this stage as the system sits somewhere between System 32 and ST-V in Sega’s Lineup, and with only one game running on it and what appears to be a VERY strange video setup progress is likely to be long and slow.
Posted by Haze at December 9th, 2009 14:39
Comments
Nice work Haze,keep the good Mame work,2010 is coming soon…
and with the current level of double standards in the team, there will be no developers left making actual progress, just refactor refactor refactor.
Thank you for your answer,Haze,I hope Mame team can get a big revolution in 2010 and go on actual progress
Well it doesn’t help that I’m having to apologise to one of my contacts, who willingly spend $100 of his own money in buying, dumping, and selling a game just so that it could be added that his dump has been branded ‘fake’ and ‘not supportable’ just because it was from a bootleg.
There are plenty of other bootlegs in MAME. If they keep f**king with people who are spending their own money for things they’re not going to have many contributors left at all.
ok,Haze,I remebmer when Nicola or you leading the mame team and everything goes well,so I hope you can releading the Mame team…
Hell yes, there are plenty of bootlegs in mame. NTM mame now includes gambling games and PC hardware (80386, 80387 for example). I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m calling shenanigans on the BS.
It’s just a neogeo bootleg which has just begun being sold.. Relax a bit..
It’s as eligible as any other bootleg of a 1996 game tho. I was specifically trying to help out the DU by making sure they didn’t have to buy one off the ebay scammers by working with somebody else, who spent their own money getting it dumped and verified for the sole reason of making sure it could be supported.
Bad attitudes within the team are costing a lot of money, and alienating a lot of people, this is just another example. While I can’t defend Alex’s attitude after the whole mess with credit (he turned out to be just as bad as those on the team) it’s another example of where bad attitudes, double-standards, refusal to work with other people, and unclear decision making are ultimately costing the team.
It saddens me because one of the things I always tried to do was make such things less opaque, more open, and help + work with people who had valid contributions to make.
I’ll be surprised if 2010 ends with more than just 1 or 2 developers actually working on drivers due to people on the team becoming increasingly frustrated. Likewise I’ll be surprised if donations haven’t almost completely dropped off due to problems like this, where people who are trying to contribute are getting messed around.
In many senses this case could be seen as my fault; I said that if it was dumped and verified from a real cart there would be no problem. That happened, and in the past whenever that has happened, the bootleg has been added.
There is no hope whatsoever of finding the genuine prototype carts for these things now, so the bootlegs will have to suffice unless the current owners of the prototypes decide to work with the team. From this point onwards, you simply can’t trust anybody claiming to own a proto (unless they were known to own a proto before the bootlegs surfaced), because they’ve almost certainly been sold a bootleg as a proto in good faith, when infact it will just be the common bootleg. Exactly the same happened for Zintrick and Ghostlop; suddenly lots of people claim to own the protos, but their protos are just bootlegs. Sadly, this is just what happens, and one which is exagerated with the NeoGeo mainly because (unlike practically any other system) the owners of the real protos demand stupid amounts for them, with little proof offered, thus making the creation of bootlegs, or even completely fake sets / carts very very profitable. Ironically, if the games were dumped and widely available already there would be less money in it for the bootleggers, thus less incentive to produce bootelgs, and providing the owners of the real games could prove they had a genuine cart, their cart would still be of great value because it was an original prototype (which holds it’s value anyway) Now there are so many bootlegs sold as protos it’s impossible to trust anybody, and their cart value is much less.
MAME is meant to document arcade hardware, and history, even the dirty unpleasant parts that we all wish didn’t exist. In this case, it’s a sad situation that the only way most MVS users will be able to play the games on their MVS are via these bootlegs, but that’s now part of history, and something that should be documented in a project which portrays itself as a documentation project.
It’s far from the outcome I would have liked to see, but closing your eyes and pretending something doesn’t exist won’t make it go away, and will just make it harder to document later once the bootlegs have been hacked, and more people have bought the bootlegs thinking they’re genuine, because they weren’t properly documented as a bootleg anywhere.
The key phrase I’ll use once again is ‘Document, not discriminate’ MAME should be built on facts, not personal preferences. If it was based on personal preferences I would have ripped out every fighting game starting with the original Street Fighter.
Do i take it these attitudes have cost The dumping union area of the Mameworld site?
As you say i’ll be surprised there will be any developers left at the rate. So who do we actually send money to now, i’ve been put off yet sending any donations after all the goings on but sending nothing isn’t going to help the project, so…… catch 22.
Well, in general people I’m trying to work with are getting increasingly fed up.
The Dumping Union stuff is the official way to donate / contribute, and Smitdogg is doing a good job of organizing that. (Although again we have an almost farcical situation where I’m having to be anonymously forwarded all the DU emails because somebody on that team doesn’t like me and basically only wants to cause trouble, and insists I don’t officially get to see the mails, and can’t reply, which again is only harming the project as it causes a delay in me being able to forward useful information to them)
Yeah, it’s probably MAME’s worst year in this regard. I haven’t seen this much bull since this year. Not saying there weren’t any bull the other years, though, but not as much. Is it an ego thing? Anyway that’s what I felt when I saw the childish war Guru and Alex were waging for example.
Trouble is the link seems to be mssing off the Mameworld site for the dumping union, for the love of god don’t say there’s been another falling out?
Honestly, I don’t know where the Dumping Union forum went. Drop Smitdogg a line on the forums if you want to contribute.
Anyway, yes, the rest of it seems to be all about egos. I’m having a hard enough time convincing somebody to submit a patch to change a comment in the CoolRiders driver which basically says it’s a step between st-v and model 2, which can’t be accurate because it predates st-v. Said developer is afraid that if they change the comment they’ll end up being kicked off the team due to hurting the ego of the dev who wrote it, so inaccurate information remains. Very productive…
That’s a lot of anger you’re carrying around there, Haze. I pity you.
Speaking of which, you seem to be getting way too butthurt over this Ironclad thing. As usual, you’re taking it as the entire world being against poor, poor David Haywood. You flatter yourself, picturing the MAME team plotting in back alleys in hushed whispers amongst themselves. You write ten paragraphs railing against the world for being so cruel, when your own self-centrism blinds you to the reality that this Ironclad crap has nothing to do with you, or emupolitics, or Person A trying to screw Person B, no matter how much you want to portray it as such, and no matter how much your piss-lapping group of sycophants who take your word as gospel would like to believe it just because you said it.
The reality of the situation is that until the new Ironclad dump can be proven as not coming from Virtual Console, it will stay out, because Nintendo are the most ireful company in the entire industry when it comes to emulation, and we’d all like to keep from getting a legal Thor’s Hammer shoved sideways up our respective asses by some Nintendo lawyer trying to make a name for himself around the water cooler.
Pretty anti-climactic, the real reason, isn’t it?
The Ironclad came from a bootleg cart dumped by a contact who wishes to remain anonymous. They’re $100 down on it, and I basically promised them that if they dumped a real cart, it would be supported. I was quite aware that the rip taken directly from the Wii release wouldn’t be supported for the very reasons you state, which is why I specifically asked for it to be dumped from a cart. If you’re that worried about Nintendo I suggest you strip out ALL the games they’re rereleasing on the Wii VC with immediate effect, because in the majority of cases the roms are bit for bit identical, just as the Ironclad dumped from the cart turned out to be. I have nothing to gain from this, I’ve been able to play the exact same game in it’s NeoGeoCD form for over 10 years; people with the proto cart, or in the test locations have been playing it since 13 years ago. I just want to see the bootleg properly documented as a bootleg, and the $100 of cash spent in verifying as such not wasted. There seemed to be no problem within the team adding Marvel Vs Capcom 2 just a month after the XBLA release, and that’s the exact same game too, so exactly what set of standards are people trying to contribute meant to follow, because I can’t make sense of them, nevermind people who simply want to put their money down, and buy something to help. I bet MVC2 and the other NeoGeo Wii VC games aren’t all going to be ripped out for the next update.
So yes, it’s easy to get annoyed about it, because something completely straightforward is turned into bullshit by emu-politics. The main problem with Mamedev these days is that there is simply no implied trust. I’ve been around long enough to be trusted in my decisions, but still, I make perfectly rational ones, and a bunch of emu-politics bullshit occurs.
I love how you and others want to discredit my contacts just because they don’t want to work directly with the team. Likewise think it’s ok to demand I be kicked off the list for reverting your broken code which was of no value, rom dumps which have been lost forever, or code comments which could bring the legal wrath of Nintendo right down on the project (their encryption keys are a tad more sensitive than a 1996 NeoGeo proto). All logical decisions, all for some reason now ‘wrong’ in a completely illogical MAME development team. So yes, I’m angry at what the development team has become, it’s slowly but surely turned to complete and utter shit since I handed it over, and for a project I’ve done my best to improve, and ultimately been treated like shit for simply trying to do that, it naturally annoys me.
But hey, if you want to treat me like shit, just remember, the proejct would have fallen apart years ago without my work, and the extra contacts I worked hard to bring to the project and teach how it works. Those people currently aren’t being replaced, so, if devs like yourself, who have contributed practically nothing to the project thing you can run it instead, go right ahead, but quite honestly, you don’t have a clue, and by bitching just because I reverted some atrocious Moogly-code which was completely broken you’ve proved quite clearly that you don’t care about progress in the project, you refuse to trust my decision that it was too broken to work with and was getting in the way of real progress, and you simply care about yourself, and your own ego. I notice you still haven’t reverted your horrible hack in the Game Gear code either, even when asked to, and the shit-storm you kicked up over that was unbelievable and only demonstrated how little you actually know about the projects.
If you don’t believe me about the Dumping Union stuff, just ask Smitt, it’s not me being petty, and it’s entirely stupid because ultimately I’m the one adding the vasty majority of the things the DU dumps, I’ve also been behind the vast majority of the contibutions people have actually cared about (ie the ones that actually make progress in emulating things in MAME) even in the last year after being treated like complete shit by the team. Why? Not for fame, not for money, not so that I can treat people like shit, but because the project is more important than losers such as yourself, and a team with an ego bigger than their collective ability.
I just thought I’d make this point to highlight how breaking things on purpose can be useful for discovering how they work :-) Of course, the PCB has been put back together and all works fine again now. Guru also made a quick reference video (but the quality isn’t great) which is where the first 2 screenshots in this post came from.
I think the fact that all 4 devs I’ve asked to commit a change to remove an obviously incorrect line in a Guru(TM) readme have refused, because they’re afraid of the possible consequences speaks for itself. In the end eta has refactored my replacement comment, and left the incorrect one. The actions of yourself, Aaron, Guru, smf, and Yasu in being over-protective and unwilling to trust changes from other users has simply created a ‘Rule by Fear’ style of project management. IE people don’t want to make CORRECT changes for fear of reprimand. For that I offer you a whole hearted congratulations, I hope you’re proud of the direction you’ve helped take the ‘team’ in, because nobody else I’ve talked to is.
Maybe if you take a step back you’ll see just why this bugs me, and why this is such a bad thing in a project like MAME, because if this was the development environment when I first started contributing I probably wouldn’t have bothered at all.
Furthermore, based on the fact that I’ve been picking up the pieces from then, scraps nobody is interested in etc., and I’m still picking up the pieces now, I’m not convinced that anybody else would have stepped up to the role I’ve been doing, which is the _only_ reason I’m still around; I want to see things done correctly, not things lost and forgotten because nobody even bothered to take a simple look at them. If there wasn’t important history involved, I’d just say ‘fuck the lot of you’ and find some other project to work on much as Alex did, but I guess you’re stuck with me until I’m happy somebody else will fill the void and do things properly. Right now, even an experienced dev such as myself has a hard time just getting things done properly without a bunch of emu-politics bullshit cropping up, so heaven help anybody else trying. MAME as a documentation project is very much dead, and MAMEdev as any kind of coherent team, a laughable idea. I was the main person within the team working with people in teams and encouraging teamwork, making rapid progress by allowing every member of the team to work on drivers, helping them with things I was good at, letting them work on parts they enjoyed / were good and teaching them how the other parts worked. Now it’s just individuals, egos, and a broken team who are afraid to speak out, and afraid to make correct changes.
So, how about you show some teamwork, you pick up some pieces? You work out how to take some drivers that have been passed between Kale, Dox, Stephh, and countless others many times, and make your contribution to them? Little Robin? (dox has a PCB if tests are needed) Wheels & Fire? Magic the Gathering? MPU4? Brick Zone? Gunpey? Balloon & Balloon? Gals Panic 2? Model 2? Toaplan 2 sound CPU decryption? Various ’slightly different HW’ bootlegs? Beauty Block? Black Touch ‘96? Taito AIR? Tatakae! Big Fighter? F1 Super Blast? Tatsumi Video issues? Lucky Girl (Z180 hw)? P’s Attack? Sega Chihiro? Sexy Boom? Konami Overdrive? Pachifever? Hooking up the DJBoy / Heavy Unit MCUs dumped by the Deacpping project? They’re all cases where an extra pair of hands would help. I can’t create ALL the teams and finish everything, however I’m more than happy to help if people are actively working on them and progress can be made, as long as the people I’m working with don’t bitch if their changes are broken and get removed / corrected (I remind you, that’s not teamwork. Teamwork involves understanding when another member ot the team needs to do something like a revert).
Those are just the most obvious cases, there’s a huge list of other things (major graphical issues etc.) just crying out for an extra pair of eyes from the team to help with them, but next to no additional help forthcoming, I have a strange feeling I’ll end up doing them myself with my team anyway, as is the case with Seibu (working with Dox, Kale) and Space Lords (hopefully working with Charles)
There is no shortage of actual emulation tasks.
