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 Hann 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!

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

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.

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.

It also had a fairly trivial protection, which Kale figured out. That’s the last of the (currently dumped) gambling games running in subsino.c. For the next MAME update Super Moto is greatly improved, and the other titles now appear to be functional.

Inputs still don’t work, and I think some graphics are missing, but it’s better than it doing nothing ;-) It’s just a boring card / casino game with Sharks instead of Card graphics tho.

*edit* Worked abit more on these, decrypting the other sets, and Kale seeing if he could understand the protection. Shark Party seems to work, but there are still severe problems with the other games.

Victor 5 (apparently, the title shown is G E A? & colour proms weren’t duimped, using those from Victor 21)

Victor 21

And in other news. Thanks goes to MameDEV for costing me another contact.

On a more sincere note, I would actually like to thank the anonymous contributor who paid for an IronClad cart out of his own money for the work he’s done in the past, helping with several pirate dumps in HazeMD, as well as a few other submissions in the past. Your help will be missed, I’m sorry you feel you’ve been messed around by the development team, you’re not the only one.

(It has dancing Astronauts, Santa, a giant whale amongst other things in the high score table background if you don’t believe me)

(oh, and giant birds which just look like they’ve been copy and pasted from photographs, which pick you up at various points)

(but no naked chicks, sorry)

However, CoolRiders isn’t really a hack of Outrunners (in the traditional sense anyway), it’s a Sega game on a completely unique system. The H1 ’super-scalar’ system. Little is known about the system, and emulation progress have been very slow. Kale did however recently get it to show some background images, but we were unable to locate something even as ’simple’ as the text font.

Some of the roms (which we assumed were graphics, probably sprites) were also in a strange format, which we haven’t been able to decode yet. To work out for sure what they were we asked Guru to ‘break’ his PCB in various ways, by removing certain roms. There were 10 of these roms, so he took pictures, each time with 1 rom removed.

Rom 0 removed

Rom 1 removed

Rom 2 removed

Rom 3 removed

Rom 4 removed

Rom 5 removed

Rom 6 removed

Rom 7 removed

Rom 8 removed

Rom 9 removed

This tells us a few useful things.
1) The text is in those ROMs.
2) Those roms are in some way compressed
3) Sprites are tile-based
4) The data in those roms can also be used for the backgrounds as the bad tiles are drawn with perspective on the title screen.

Hopefully now that we know this, we’ll be able to decode those roms, and maybe get something more interesting on screen. I’m not overly optimistic of great progress as this stage as the system sits somewhere between System 32 and ST-V in Sega’s Lineup, and with only one game running on it and what appears to be a VERY strange video setup progress is likely to be long and slow.

In the most basic terms this means that any black parts of the image to be blended become invisible, and any grey/white parts cause the image to become tinted white. (In reality it can appear a bit more complex as both bitmaps can be full-colour, not greyscale)

We’ve already seen that this is supported on sprites; several places use it, and basic (buggy) support for it on sprites was added in the last MAME update.

It is however also used on the tilemap layers to do special effects. The Samurai Shodown games are a good example of this as they use it on various stages to add dust effects, and lighting effects. The following screens from the Samurai Shodown 64 Warriors Rage attract mode show it being used for a light beam. (Left is the normal tilemap data, right is with the additive blend enabled)

It’s a subtle effect, but on the real hardware, with the 3d enabled (which it blends over) an impressive one for the time period.

The original Samurai Shodown 64 also uses it, although it’s probably less obvious in screenshots, but this is why there are ’solid’ layers covering the background graphics on some stages at the moment, they’re effect layers. This effect is move obvious when moving because the effect is moving quickly, creating disruptions in the original image which are meant to represent fog / snow.

Of course, things aren’t that simple. MAME doesn’t natively support additive blending in it’s tilemap draw calls, so I had to copy half of tilemap.c into the driver to hook up the effect, and furthermore it isn’t clear how they enable it on the real hardware, so it’s currently hooked up to some debug keys anyway.

If you combine additive blending, and RGB control registers, you can use the blending to do other effects such as fading something out, or causing a whiteout. I have a feeling that they do this in places, which is making it more confusing and harder to tell which registers enable the / select the fade to use, and which enable the blending.

I wouldn’t expect astronomical progress on Hyper Neogeo 64 the same way that CPS3 was emulated, the 3D especially is tricky, and only really currently works in Fatal Fury, and partially in Buriki One due to some fairly gross 3d-ram access hacks, which don’t REALLY full represent how the hardware works. It’s a somewhat complex system, with limited test cases, and even understanding something as simple as the tilemap ordering and effect enables is difficult due to effects being used together making it hard to isolate individual bits responsible. Also, as a further roadblock, developers who generally do 3D work don’t seem very interested in the driver at all.

In other words, don’t expect these things to be fully playable for at least another couple of years, I know I’m not.