David Haywood's Homepage
MAME work and other stuff
December 16, 2014 Haze Categories: General News. 14 Comments on I still have a pulse

I’ll admit, it’s been rather dead here as of late, and I’ve not even got around to doing the writuep of interesting bits in the last release yet.

Rest assured I’ll cover things eventually, I’ve just been a little overwhelmed with other things, including trying to put together a yearly summary etc.

A couple of cool things have been going on, but mostly in the MESS territory with hap and Sean Riddle working on the emulation of a number of MCU based systems, including several non-video toys / components of toys (including a device that from what I understand of the commit comments came as part of a board game?) I’ve covered progress on some non-video systems here before, and that work follows in similar footsteps, requiring full decap work, and even new CPU cores to emulate the games. I’m not sure they have such a wide appeal as emulation of traditional systems and arcade games but personally I find it really interesting to see things like the classic 1970s Milton Bradley ‘Simon’ toy running in our emulator with the artwork system representing the lights.

I’m also currently working on something that probably isn’t going to have a massive amount of appeal, but has required me to write a new CPU core from scratch, also time consuming work. I’ll write more about that if / when it does something, because for now I’m still working on the disassembler (which is 95% complete) after which I’ll start implementing the opcodes and see where the code goes. I suspect it’s going to be an interesting journey because despite the apparently simplicity of the device involved the CPU actually runs at a relatively high clock and might force me to explore how our recompilers work after I’ve done the interpretor core if I’m going to get it running at a good speed.

One thing that did catch my attention was the recent progress on the ‘Gamate’ handheld, for a long time there had been no dumps available for the system, nor a bios rom, nor was it clear how the cartridges could be dumped. Recently that changed, and a submission that included work from PeT (I thought he’d retired from MESS development years ago) brought the system to a much better state, with a dump of the bios, a software list full of cartridge dumps, and playable emulation for a decent part of the dumped library. It’s an obscure handheld, and in all honesty most of the games aren’t actually very good, but I was very happy to see progress being made with the emulation, a lot of what we do these days is exploring curiosities, and that’s definitely one of them.

The progress etabeta has been making with some disk formats is more important than it would first seem too as it allows further testing and exploration of the software library for a number of Japanese systems using those file formats, often for copy protected disks.

So yes, I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I’m still working on things, but there really isn’t much visible progress to report in either side of the project that is likely to excite the majority, but if you look closely you’ll find a few things!

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I think that finally Gamate entry in ( https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/the-path-ahead-of-us/3/ ) could finally receive a (awsome) update. ROMs already dumped!
I can’t test the new gamate driver yet, but I’m (and I’m sure that a lot of people that follow MESS development will understand me) very excited with Gamate development!

I have a question about the arcade game “Tatakae! Big Fighter (Japan)” from the armedf.c driver:

Is its emulation still preliminary? Is there any kind of special protection on it that prevents it from being emulated?

I’m not sure which Mamedev works on that driver, which is why I asked here first.

Anyway, Haze, have a Happy Holidays.

yeah, Tatakae! Big Fighter (Japan) has an additional protection MCU that supplies important game data.

So far nobody has dumped the MCU, or extracted the data the game needs to work.

Can you develop UME to a pont where Killer Instinct Arcade will run full speed with sound on my android device (OnePlus One) ? It runs choppy with no sound, with RetroArch emulator.

That has little to do with UME development specifically.

There’s no ARM based backend for the recompilers in MAME, so emulation has to use the C based fallback which is much slower. Killer Instinct is one of the games that benefits heavily from the recompiler (the hardware is pretty much just a framebuffer driven by the CPU like Space Invaders).

Until a backend is written (and depending on the security model of the device – if it allows for dynamic generated code to be executed or not) it’s definitely not going to run at full speed. If one gets written then it might, depending on the real work performance of the CPU, mobile CPUs are often much weaker than desktop CPUs even at the same Mhz rating, it would probably be borderline)

As I’ve said tho, that’s all just work that needs to be done in the MAME codebase, and definitely not an area I’m familiar with. I’m a little surprised nobody has given it a shot yet, but maybe most see it as a lot of work for a very tiny payoff (pretty much everything that needs a recompiler is out of reach of such devices for other reasons)

It’s mostly payoff for work right now: tons of work, and your win is KI1 (KI2 would probably be a stretch even with a DRC) and 5-A-Side Soccer (the Konami game with a PowerPC driving a dumb framebuffer). We definitely want to bring mobile closer to the core, but it’s going to be a slow process. The new build system will be the first of many pieces to make that easier, and 64-bit Android devices starting to ship helps as well.

Haze! What about Mame? No good Mame News this 6 month
arcompact (nw) can it help with PGM2?
When good Mame News?

The ARCompact cpu core has nothing to do with PGM2, PGM2 needs a newer version of the ARM, and the internal ROMs (if it’s possible to extract them at all, it might be impossible if they’re properly secured)

In the last few months, even just by scrolling down the page here you can see progress on
Cute Fighters
Super Duck
Alien Invader
Race Drivin’ Panorama
Hammer Away
Raiden II / DX
New Zero Team / Zero Team 2000
Gundam Wing – Endless Duel
NMK004 sound & Hacha Mecha Fighter (which was previously not properly playable)
Elfin
Jump Jump
So Ho Sung (Su Ho Seong)
Go Stop
Music Ball
Center Court
Rolling Crush
Ken Sei Mogura

and that’s only going back to the middle of the year (~6 months). I’d say that was pretty good going considering how little there is actually left that we can realistically emulate, and I’ve been slack with my writeups of other progress, so a lot of work done by other devs hasn’t been promoted as well as I’d like it to be. There’s also been a lot of progress in the MESS half of the project, which is actually where the ARCompact core I’m working on is for..

Still have a pulse? You updated your site less than a month ago.

On a sort of development note, Eduardo Cruz has updated his site with lots more info on the Kabuki Z80 CPU used in some CPS games. He also mentions how he used mame in his project.
http://arcadehacker.blogspot.com

NMK004
Raiden II / DX / Zero Team
Hammer Away / Galaxy Force I
Race Drivin’ Panorama
Portable Space Invader

End of MAME !

what seems to be the simplest is the hardest

Happy holidays Haze !

Merry Christmas and a Happy new year 2015 to Haze and all the devs. are involved in MAME – git redump, MameWorld, Demul, Supermodel and many more.
I hope 2015 will give us so many surprises to everyone.
Peace on Earth.

Is time for a complete summary of all of achievements

And thanks for your excelent work!

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