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MAME work and other stuff
October 25, 2015 Haze Categories: General News. 17 Comments on Microwaved Hedgehog

Chaos Emeralds, Microwaves, same difference right?

Anyway, ShouTime and the Dumping Union (with a whole list of people donating) purchased the PCB for another novelty Sonic item, this time SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, a popcorn dispenser machine with a video display. It runs on the Sega C2 board (Genesis type hardware)

Interestingly it has a region dipswitch for Export, USA or Japan which makes me wonder if did actually leave Japan at some point in limited numbers.

It’s hard to really class this as ‘working’ because the mechanical side of the Popcorn machine isn’t emulated, but the code does run so you can see how the machine would operate.

There’s a small graphical glitch next to Sonic near the end of the video, I’m not sure why that happens, or if it happens on the PCB; all roms pass in service mode.

Here is a video of it running (dipswitch set to ‘Export’ so English text)


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The graphical glitch mentioned above was due to a bad / inverted sensor input, with it flipped the glitch is gone so I’ve recorded videos of it running as USA / Japan region without the glitch.


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17 Comments

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Awesome! Many thanks to all those involved in the dumping and emulation of this.

A local game store here (Grimsby, UK) had one of these back in the day. Must have been around 1993 given what games I remember buying from there. So it did leave Japan to some extent.

Also, could swear I remember the attract mode having a much more native English speaker sounding “Sonic Popcorn Shop!” audio sample. Could be a false memory since we’re talking 22 years ago, but I can still hear it pretty vividly. Maybe another board exists?

yes matey these came to the UK

had the circuit board gathering dirt in my garage for a decade now – picked it out the skip when the sweet shop had a refurb thinking I could restore it, got a mate to check the EPRs on his willem and its a match for what got added. good job.

Bournemouth area if anybody remembers it

cant place the name of the sweet shop

Robotnik is so pingas.
Thanks for the dump.

I demand you emulate the popcorn mechanism!

Seriously though good job :)

Gary> can you confirm that everything is the same? the one in MAME is a ‘rev B’ so there is a B on the end of the rom labels (although from what you’ve said I guess your friend verified them by dumping them?) I also wonder about the sound rom due to the guy above you saying he remembers different sounds.

Oh my god, that error screen: https://youtu.be/_zQbiibG3vg?t=3m30s :O

Haze have a look.
Even Sega Bits don´t resist to post this.
http://segabits.com/blog/2015/10/26/segasonic-popcorn-shop-dumped-coming-to-mame/

https://sega.jp/business/news/0807/

So apparently, there are also Anpanman (based on the popular Japanese manga/anime series) and Disney (Mickey and Donald) versions of the popcorn machine (man, Anpanman’s face is on everything in Japan). Called “Soreike! Anpanman Popcorn Koujou” (roughly “Let’s Go! Anpanman Popcorn Factory”) and “Mickey & Donald Popcorn Factory” respectively. Unless if I’m mistaken, they contain the same “spinning lever” gimmick as well.

What can we do to get ahold of those ROMs as well? Please consider looking into it.

(the Anpanman machine actually seems to have a few more successors as well, also with the lever gimmick, but they seem to be on more relatively modern hardware than Sega C2)

They don’t really ‘just show up’ that often, there are a number of other kiddie rides like the Waku Waku Patrol Car with different themes too, usually expensive when they show up due to being part of a complete cabinet.

All you can really hope is that the boards fall into the right hands, or the news about this being emulated gets to somebody who already has them but didn’t realise they were valid emulation targets (a lot of people still see MAME as being a project about games and only games, as for the first 10+ years we excluded anything that wasn’t, we’re hoping the recent strides including integration of all the console / computer stuff from MESS will help people realise that we’re willing to emulate literally anything we can emulate)

The downside is that some will see it as an opportunity to try and inflate prices instead, this one certainly wasn’t cheap.

Also some of the ones themed around less popular characters might already be long gone, Sonic has more staying power than most.

Newer ones could be on anything from ST-V to Naomi or even Sega System SP (which is similar to Naomi and was clearly used for a lot of medal type games)

Yeah, fair enough. Though Anpanman is like super-popular by Japanese children all over the nation. His anime is still running even today. Like I said before, his face is practically on everything you can find in Japan. He has so much cartoon star power. Sonic doesn’t even have as much popularity in Japan as he does in the West (might explain how hard-to-find the rare Sonic arcade games are). And as for Disney’s popularity, well, that goes without saying, even when talking about in Japan alone. Though I cannot be able to find much pictures or videos on the Disney cabinet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo2dQrMwKWw This video of the first Anpanman popcorn machine is dated as late as 2014, so there is a chance that maybe a lone first-generation アンパンマンポップコーンこうじょう cabinet can still be found and nabbed. Granted, some of those cabinets might have been replaced with newer second and third generation machines in Japanese arcades just to be newer, but there might still be a slight chance.

In other words, finding an Anpanman-themed cabinet might be *marginally* easier than finding a Sonic cabinet because of how relatively common the former is in Japan. There are just so many videos and results of those specific popcorn machines, even the newer ones.

Haze wrote:
“We’re willing to emulate literally anything we can emulate.”

Does that include the things emulated by HBMAME? What other exceptions are there?

ok, things that actually existed and were used on hardware etc. half of HBMame has never even been near a PCB – a significant amount of it is known to not even work on a PCB and requires things like the 68k bus exceptions to be disabled ;-)

also we don’t want a situation where people cheat, and make a lame hack, put it on one PCB and expect us to emulate it.

of course when something like that does end up on a significant number of PCBs, and we start to see it sold, then yes, as you see, 0.167 does actually include Bubble Bobble Lost Cave, the DK Pauline hack, and the Cave hacks, because we’ve seen then used / sold to a point where they become important to document. I imagine the Outrun Enhanced sets will make the jump at some point too.

the MESS part of the project has always been more open to modern games on old systems / ‘homebrew’ too, so again finding a balance is important, what I’m actually seeing is that to do things right we’re going to have to put in a lot more work than some other emulators, some of the new A2600 releases for example use a 70Mhz ARM inside the cartridge that monitors the entire bus and feeds the A2600’s main CPU opcodes in realtime so that it can simulate the behavior of any other mapper on the fly. The other emulators cheat and emulate it as if it were a regular mapper able to execute some custom ARM snippets (which is fast and relatively easy to do) but MAME will have to emulate the entire ARM at all times, feeding instructions one by one just like the hardware does, which is VERY slow, and so insanely tricky to set up properly I’m not sure what approach to take!

I’ve stated before a desire to include ‘test software’ that has been developed specifically to verify hardware behavior as it can help guard against regressions that might otherwise only appear late in a game, also things like completely original developments that have been tested on real hardware (like the recent Taito L stuff) should probably be considered, somebody changing the name of Mario to squiggly penis man and putting it on a cartridge less so.

I wasn’t really talking about HBMame anyway tho, just devices in general, be it a microwave, vending machine, bread maker, exercise machine, phone, PDA, or even a set of christmas lights that plays a tune, if there’s a chance we can emulate it, and are supplied with all the details / data we need to do so, then it’s viable.

I guess the only real rule is that it has to be something real, not somebody trying to fuck with us, apply common sense etc.

Thanks for a great response Haze and a little more insight into what happens.
What would be really nice to see then would be airplane cockpit hardware, space hardware, radar and such! One can always dream.

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