Comments for David Haywood's MAME(tm) WIP

Comment on Digging Home the Point by Huggybaby

Huggybaby — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:01:30 +0000

That’s good stuff. I was in Korea in the early 80’s and most of the games at that time were monochrome ripoffs with colored plastic on the screen.

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Haze

Haze — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:32:02 +0000

As I said, Reip doesn’t have the time these days. He isn’t an ‘active’ developer.

Comment on Returning to the Moon by jark

jark — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:23:19 +0000

Haze,I also think Reip can help for the V25+ CPUs

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Haze

Haze — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:22:08 +0000

I doubt Reip has time, and it’s a task which would require a LOT of time.

Comment on Returning to the Moon by phys32

phys32 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:00:15 +0000

Did you try to ask to Reip ?

I remember in the past, he has done a very good job on decrypting unknown opcodes for the V30 CPU used in Match It 2 (Tamtex, 93). Finally, he succeeds to fully emulate this game.

May be he can help for the V25+ CPUs as well.

Best regards

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Haze

Haze — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:20:39 +0000

Which one?

Vimana, Fire Shark (aka Same Same Same), Teki Paki & Ghox all use a CPU with an internal ROM. Those can’t be emulated unless the ROMs are dumped. The ROMs aren’t likely to be dumped unless things start happening with the decapping project.

Dogyuun, Knuckle Bash, FixEight, Grind Stormer (aka V-Five) & Batsugun all use encrypted cpus, which uses a 256-byte encryption lookup table to remap opcodes. It would be possible for somebody with a good understand of the CPU & code to make progress with these, but I’ve taken them as far as I can.

Note, even for the 2nd case this isn’t an encryption that the likes of Andreas or Nicola can deal with. The algorithm is already known, it’s simply a 256-byte lookup table as stated.

So in conclusion, there is nothing more I can do for Toaplan myself. Half the games require a hardware attack, the rest require careful understanding and hand-decryption of the sound code. I don’t know any developers who could help, I’ve already asked the most likely ones.

Comment on Returning to the Moon by jark

jark — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:00:01 +0000

Haze,thank you for your answer,I have another question that if there is possible to emulate toaplan sound cpu?

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Haze

Haze — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:31:56 +0000

Well, there isn’t always much interesting to post. Fixing minor issues, and making new versions of gambling games work doesn’t really motivate me to write an update (and I can only imagine that any such update would be just as dull to read)

As I said, it’s been a good week, with a couple of interesting things turning up.

I just fixed the question reading in some German Funworld quiz game for Roberto (but the graphics are ugly because some of the roms are bad) I’ll let Roberto post an update about that if he feels like it because it’s primarily his driver. While doing that I also looked at the encryption on some of the sets in the driver, but again those are just rather dull clones of existing gambling games, and I wasn’t able to decrypt them anyway.

I did make a minor update to the HNG64 driver in 0.137, but the effect it creates is so subtle it’s impossible to really show it, and I didn’t manage to solve the problem of getting the floor to work properly in Fatal Fury / Buriki One which seems to use the per-line scrolling / rotation effect in a different mode which still doesn’t make sense.

The more interesting updates get posted ;-)

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Huggybaby

Huggybaby — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:48:50 +0000

Thanks for the interesting news Haze. I wish you’d post more often. This might be my favorite blog (if that’s what you call it).

Comment on Returning to the Moon by Pizuz

Pizuz — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:57:18 +0000

DER FEIND DARF NICHT ENTKOMMEN!!!

Nice find, for sure.