David Haywood’s MAME(tm) WIP

If you thought this was Stern’s Moon War you wouldn’t be too wrong

That’s MoonWar, as it’s been emulated in MAME for several years now, and if that was all I was going to tell you then this would be a pretty boring update wouldn’t it?

There are a few things about MoonWar that never quite added up. Firstly, the original boards / roms are all marked as MW2, leading to several people buying them, thinking it was a sequel to the game in MAME, only to find out it was exactly the same game, with exactly the same titlescreen.

A few years ago another board marked MoonWar turned up, but this time it was a Frenzy board, Stern’s old hardware, not related in any way to the hardware on which the known version of MoonWar ran on. Sadly, the only thing populated on this board were the Speech roms, for the S14001A sound chip which Berzerk, and Frenzy used for speech. Sure enough, the roms contained speech clips which sounded like they could be from a game called ‘Moon War’, but there were no other roms, and the whole thing looked like it was probably just some one-off prototype that was lost forever.

This left as many questions as answers, because the Frenzy hardware is vastly inferior to the hardware that the known MoonWar game ran on and definitely wouldn’t have been capable of running a game resembling the known game. Frenzy was also released in the same year as the known MoonWar game, and only a year after Berzerk which didn’t exactly leave a large timeframe for the development of two ‘MoonWar’ games, so what exactly was this mysterious board, and did Stern really make 2 MoonWar games?

Yesterday that question was finally answered. Team Europe & Volker Hahn dumped a Frenzy board which was missing it’s sound roms. That board turned out to be running MoonWar. The existing game in MAME really is a sequel, hence the MW2 markings. Stern probably weren’t happy with how limited this game on Frenzy hardware looked, so just aborted the project before giving it a wide release. By combining the old ’speech only’ and the new dump which was missing the speech roms we appear to have a complete set. As you can see from the screenshots below, it’s a significantly less advanced looking game than the previously known MoonWar (and it really was developed in the same year) but unlike the ’sequel’ / released game it’s full of Speech just like Berzerk was, it’s a shame they didn’t include any of that in the sequel!. There’s even a nice little Evil Otto reference in there.

It uses some kind of analog dial for rotation of the player ship, which I haven’t quite managed to hook up correctly yet (I can only rotate in one direction) Other than that it an be played. My only concern is if there is a mismatch between the program roms and the speech roms, because the speech sometimes talks about ‘Hyperflip’ and I haven’t worked out what it means yet. (although I have warped from one side of the screen to the other sometimes, so it might just mean that)

Another rare piece of history uncovered anyway, such things always bring a smile to my face especially when they just turn up out of the blue like this.

Here is an audio recording of it running in MAME, for those interested.

The same guys also dumped a very rare version of Berzerk with German speech. It’s a different code revision (appears to be based on the ‘new’ rules found in the parent set) Somehow the Robots sound even more intimidating when they speak in German! You can hear that here. It’s been a very good week!

“Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery”

A few days ago the Dumping Union acquired an interesting looking Korean arcade title called Mr. Dig. The game was released by Korean company ‘Sun’ (no, not the Java people) and runs on an arcade PCB using the Hyperstone CPU. This hardware was used for a number of Korean games and the CPU wasn’t really used for any arcade titles developed outside of Korea.

From the screenshots the game looked like some kind of copy of Namco’s Mr. Driller. Unlike most Korean games we knew that it couldn’t just be a bootleg of Mr. Driller with various hacks applied because it was running on completely different hardware; the original Mr. Driller runs on Playstation 1 based hardware, which is driven by a MIPs based CPU and is ‘3d’ hardware. The Hyperstone CPU definitely isn’t binary compatible with the PSX code, and the graphics hardware is completely different. Screenshots also showed a 2 player mode, which Mr. Driller doesn’t have.

Let me stress again, this game is not a bootleg, it contains no Namco code at all. I actually don’t even think it directly steals any art from the original game, it’s a reprogrammed game, the code has been rewritten from scratch, and the art, while clearly influenced by the original art appears to have been redrawn too.

With that in mind, look at the screenshots below to see just how far ‘Sun’ went in order to try and imitate the look and feel of the original ‘Mr. Driller’ game when they produced their own version ‘Mr. Dig’ (note, the Mr. Driller screenshots are scaled for easier comparison, the original runs at a higher resolution than Mr. Dig)

I’ve also included some screenshots at the end which demonstrate the unique features that ‘Sun’ added which aren’t present in the original game. These include Bombs (which explode a few seconds after you touch them and are hazardous as a result) and ‘EXTRA’ letters to collect. In addition there is the aforementioned 2 player mode. You’re not prompted to start a 2 player game, but one can be started by pressing the 2nd player start button during the mode select screen. The winner appears to be the player who can survive the longest, or, I assume, get the the bottom first. You can’t simply wait around to avoid dying either as the game will kill you if you don’t move for a while.

I’d like to thank the Dumping Union for getting this PCB, I know it wasn’t the cheapest game but it’s a fascinating insight into Korean development, showing what was going on during a transitional period in the industry as they were moving from producing mostly bootlegs using hacked code from popular games with new graphics / sounds) to actually writing their own code; in this case writing their own code, but learning by imitating others. Cheesy as it might appear I think it’s an important part of history :-)

New stuff only in Mr. Dig

With the redumped ROMs from Japump / Dumping Union, and a few tweaks the the driver Versus Net Soccer is looking a lot better.

There are still some 1 frame sprite glitches (like the other GX Type 4 games), and a problem with the background layer not wrapping properly (see the crowd, Rushing Heroes suffers from the same issue), bad sound (the sound rom is still bad), and the only the left screen working properly, but it’s basically fully playable for the first time, as can be seen below.

R.Belmont recently made a post about upcoming changes in MAME 0.136u1. The 0.136u1 update of MAME will be a major update for several reasons, not only will it be the first ever version to be compiled as C++ code (although the vast majority of the project is still written in C) it will also be the first version where the cross-platform SDLMame becomes an official target alongside the standard windows compile.

That’s not the only unification that’s going on at the moment however. As followers of this site may have noticed, I’ve always prefered the MAME style ’software lists’ over the open-ended approach taken by MESS with regards to loading software hence the creation of side-projects such as HazeMD and TinyCDI which serve to document both the hardware AND the software released on a platform. Changes are underway in MESS right not to bring that concept to MESS alongside the existing open-ended loading (for homebrew etc.)

This will bring MESS much closer inline with MAME’s level of documentation and policies, properly documenting what software was available for each system. The MAME / MESS database format provides a more comprehensive way to document cartridges than the existing databases which are available, and will allow proper cart dumps, with proper rom naming to be supported just as easily as in MESS. It will also inherit the parent/clone relationship system from MAME, and have fields for Manufacturer, and Year information, just as can be found in MAME.

Hopefully with changes like this MESS can become the ultimate database for Console informaiton, much as MAME has become for Arcade systems. The current databases are limited, and despite their intentions are unable to properly document some details about the cartdiges (such as the actual ROM labels, # of roms, sizes etc.) so assuming MESS can get some traction in this area it is more than capable of becoming a far better reference than those already out there. This is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time because while the existing console ROM formats are great if you just want to play games in any given emulator they fail to actual document things the way MAME does. As the games become older starts to become more of a priority, and isn’t something you can rely on the various rereleases on modern platforms because those are simply about playing the games, so it’s important for other people to document it. There are other advantages to the MESS / MAME database too, for example, the development team make no claims of ownership over the database, once exported from the executable you’re free (and even encouraged) to use / import the information for use in your own emulator, so that things can be consistently and correctly supported.

This should also lead to it being possible to create sites like The fantastic MAWS from the MESS database, and also easier set-name based bugtracking and regression testing as is used on Mametesters. It’s a large undertaking, but as long as people can get behind the idea, and support it then it could be of great benefit to everybody who cares about the history of Computer / Console software, and the emulation of these systems.

This could well be the start of a unified database system for Computers / Consoles, and the first step in the Console emulation scene growing up to be something that’s more than just about ‘playing the games’. Here’s hoping.

Olivier managed to pass the first protection check in this. I swapped the data rom loading, and we have a title screen. I think the rom naming is incorrect, and it’s possible some of the sprite roms are too small too, investigating. *edit* I’m 99.9% sure that the roms are too small. The sprite roms contain nothing but player gfx and heads, but are used for a lot more in the game.