While all the talk at the moment is about the leap in progress made with Raiden 2 / DX there are some other noteworthy arcade developments going on at the moment.
dgPix
System11 was in possession of a number of undumped dgPix titles, including 2 completely unemulated games.
The first of those is Elfin, a Puzzle Bobble-like game with an interesting mechanic whereby the puzzle rotates. Like most dgPix titles it includes flashes girls on the screen from time to time and has a zooming picture viewer every couple of rounds. The game isn’t especially polished, but is fairly interesting.
The other game is Jump Jump, and starting with the title you could write a book on the fatal design flaws this game has. In this game, called Jump Jump, you don’t actually have a Jump button, instead you must descend through the level, it’s a bit like the ‘Shaft’ section from the ‘Tower & Shaft’ game (N64 hardware, in MAME) but worse in every way.
The translation is very lazy, platforms are called ‘Footstools’ Worse, you can only actually use your weapon when on solid ground, despite the fact you spend most of the time in the game falling, some of the later stages barely have any safe locations to land!. Equally offensive is the speed the scrolling reaches, to the point where you really don’t even have time to get off the platforms. Some platforms recharge your anti-fall ‘cloud’ but require you to stand on them for a certain period of time to get that bonus, time the game doesn’t even permit! Later levels have platforms that are simply traps, preventing you from moving and killing you, land on one and you’re practically guaranteed death, and often you’ll respawn right above another one! There are also flags to collect, and unless you collect a certain number of them you won’t be granted access to to final levels (aptly called ‘Hell’) of course if you miss a flag you can’t jump back up and get it, because you can’t jump, and you don’t know when they’re going to appear so getting them all relies on a certain degree of luck, or knowledge of the levels.
Being a dgPix game it naturally has girls, each level has a number of Showtime platforms which change the background for a moment, the last one in any level also gives you the picture viewer.
There are also bonus levels, and believe it or not you can actually jump in the bonus levels, but even then it isn’t clear what you’re meant to do, it looks like you’re meant to collect crystals by jumping into them, but instead you’re actually meant to jump ON them for random bonuses, it’s one of the most pointless bonus levels I’ve ever seen.
System11 also dumped a new set for the ‘X-Files’ arcade game. This is a World set, and has less censorship than the Korean set previously dumped (actual nude images rather than bikini ones) In the other dgPix games you can select between Nude/Bikini in the service mode, but in X-Files you can’t. To keep things clean I’ve manually censored the new title screen below.
World (Nudes) version
Korean (Bikini) version
The game has nothing at all to do with the X-Files series (it’s a tile matching game, a fairly decent one with various extra features) and was sold by some manufacturers as ‘The Sex Files’ instead, I’m not sure if a version with that title screen exists or if that was just to avoid legal trouble with the marketing.
None of the games have sound because we lack CPU opcode level documentation on the sound CPU.
For all the games in this driver the game code is stored on flash roms, and to save the score data and settings they reprogram an area of the main program rom rather than using a separate eeprom device. It also looks like if you boot the games on real hardware with the security chip missing they’ll erase an important part of the flash rom, rendering the game useless, even if you then put the security chip back, nasty.
Thanks to system11 for dumping these, and Brian Troha for figuring out the protection patches needed.
Woo yeah tits! I wonder how big this game company is. They’re not afraid to steal Playboy pics and put them in their games.
In Korea, if it seems like a good idea at the time you do it. Worry about practicality, legality and profitability later. And that’s what makes Korea so awesome!
I see Grills!
Amazingly, while Jump Jump is a very bad game, Elfin is a very good one. It’s a game I actually wanted to play but was holding off until the dump was done.
Any chance of an UME build soon?
I’ve had some computer issues recently and am using an ancient Windows XP machine that won’t finish a compile for some reason.
I did want to try changing all the ROM loading to 2 fields (label & position) rather than a ‘filename’ before putting anything else out, but it looks like I’m not going to have time to try that.
Things are in flux at the moment with new compile tools being introduced.
Raiden 2 is in an ‘almost but not quite’ state, and I doubt that code is settled for now, so any build I put out might be out of date before I post it.
Likewise I don’t have an actual timeframe on trap15 releasing the nmk004 rom, so the same could happen there (and believe me the games sound a LOT better with the NMK004 emulated vs the old simulation, USAAF Mustang even has sound) but I’ve promised him I won’t post / submit that code until he’s 100% verified the rom and done his own update.
I was looking at Trap15’s blog the other day..
Wasn’t he also doing some work on Yamaha sound chips as well? Trying to find common features shared between them so as to get get a clear foundation of different models and what features they add over the base functions.
Overall when there is a new realese it’s going to be quite a milestone I got the impression Raiden 2 cast quite a shodow over the project and it’s nice that a large chunk of progress has been made in such a short time.
We can JumpJump to the hottest womens and suck the all the tits we need on The X Files :D
I could be wrong, but I don’t think trap was looking at the Yahama chips.
Raiden 2 (and the other COP games) have slowly been improving for years, each year somebody would chip away at a bit, and eventually we’ve reached the point we’re at now. I don’t know at what point it will actually end up marked as working, but I still feel it will be a while before it can be considered completely ‘done’ (you only need to look at things like Seibu Cup Soccer and Zero Team to see that the understanding of the COP as a whole is still only partial)
It was a little disappointing to read a post on MW saying that with R2 done the work of MAME is complete, because in reality it’s far from complete, however my gut feeling is that the version we mark it as working is going to be a version a lot of people who have been holding out update to, and then will never update again from, which I feel is unfortunate, but I hope we manage to make it a good one.
I haven’t checked in with the MAME scene or its talented decoders that preserve our games for future generations in quite a while.
I’ll be darned… Raiden 2 / DX is playable at long last… 14 long and agonizing years of struggling to decipher the most stubborn DRM in gaming history, and it’s finally cracking….
My childhood game played at a local Supermarket, resurfacing for gaming historians to look back and say.. “Wow, that was an adrenaline pumping flight.”
This means a lot to me, because I pumped
many a quarter into the swan song of the classic SHMUP…
Seriously, I can’t thank all of you guys enough for continuing to pull through, even when it seems impossible to find a way in…. We wouldn’t have even heard of these obscure Korean / Asian originals without donators to the cause!
This bodes well for the preservation of video games, and I really hope you aren’t discouraged from giving your pursuit of archiving every ROM in existence.
Future generations need your help to understand what made the past so special.
Thank you once again…….. and happy hunting!
Alotta talk of Raiden 2 Being playable is that really
the case though..??? dont the games mess up due
to protection issues with the boss fights
“I don’t know at what point it will actually end up marked as working, but I still feel it will be a while before it can be considered completely ‘done’”
-Haze
Playable, yes.
Working, not quite.
You can complete all the stages of Raiden II. There are still some graphics glitches, but the gameplay seems solid.
yeah, my concern is mostly due to the maths involved.
a lot of enemy movements (including paths, directions they face, collisions etc.) is done through the COP, unless you’re 100% sure that your behavior and values returned match the real board then we could easily have patterns that are slightly different from the PCB, bullets being fired at not quite the same angles, enemies not quite ending up where they should be.
While it’s subtle, it would change the dynamics of the game a bit, so ideally we’d have the major ops verified to be returning exactly the same values in the emulation as on the PCB, including fetching from the COP data rom for operations that do that (in R2 that would be the boss leg movements)
It’s true, most people won’t notice, I’ve had to read posts only this week saying that MAME 0.60 or whatever is perfectly fine for Rainbow Islands and Bubble Bobble because as long as the game looks OK and appears to play OK to your average player then it’s fine.
From my point of view, when we know there are so many gameplay influencing variables involved we should probably make sure as many of them are hardware accurate as possible before declaring it as working.
However, for most people, I guess you could say, yes, it works with imperfect graphics, and once they’re fixed it would be perfectly acceptable as a port, and I’m sure dotemu will end up using the simulation as a basis for whatever abomination they release next ;-)
Sometimes I think that it would be best to have an emulator that included both accurate and HLE cores and used whichever was best for the hardware it was running on.
Just a dream I guess.
as for the Raiden 2, if i lower the main clock from 32/2 (16mhz) to 1232000Mhz (12.320Mhz), there’s almost no glitches (sprite flickering)
also i just finished SD Gundam with no problem…
Thanks to All for the recent progress, it’s very good month for mame with the NMK stuff, seibu and dgpix.
Heated barrel seems to go a bit further in the new driver before giving the address error, managed to play a couple of levels i’d not seen before!
On another note, there’s a glitch on raiden 1 i found last night where one of the boss graphics stays on screen when it’s dead along with the bomb explosion graphic that killed it, i don’t see this on mame testers but it could of been under strange circumstances because it was a 2 player game, credit feeding and going mental with bombs.. i will try and reproduce this and send it to mame testers..
Thanks again!
Yeah, we just need dox or whoever had working trojan code on the board to get us dumps of the correct results so the math can get tightened down.
found Godzilla video on youtube…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1M8sxYgt9A
and check the priority…
I agree. For someone who wants to just ‘drop a quarter’ and play 1 or 2 games it is ‘good enough’. For someone who really likes the game and wants to learn the patterns it will be subtly broken as they advance versions and things are added/fixed/removed.
My wife for example is stuck at 131. Because something changed in ms pacman and none of her patterns work anymore.
“me”: mspacman has never worked 100% accurately with regard to ghosts in the tunnel. The culprit is in drivers/pacman.c pacman_read_nop
@happpp neato! Learned something today. Its almost like it is doing trying to do some sort of protection check. Like something should be inverted or tied off for mspacman or the mmu does something special.
To follow up with this, heated barrel’s level 1 boss no longer shoots back at you on the newest mame svn on r31970 it gave a better game (the boss has a go instead of sitting still). maybe this will provide another clue..
yes, there are some new issues with the 68k based games, that’s why I’ve said the COP is a complex beast many times, and why you can’t really trust the emulation of any game using it yet, including R2