Kale's Mame Wip

My Own Sharpen Summer

Kale — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:20:51 +0000

More improvements to Sharp MZ-2500 in the last few days, almost every available game/software works just fine now hence I’ve promoted system to working:

In the other news, me and Dirk Best recently fixed a z80dma <-> wd17xx fdc communication issue that was causing several Sharp X1 Turbo games to not work.

Kaori Stomp

Kale — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 17:30:09 +0000

Working on Sharp MZ-2500 (Super MZ), a Japanese computer system of the mid-80. It appears to be a sort of follow-up of the Sharp X1 system, with the same basic characteristic plus (attempts to) remove bottlenecks of that system (color limitations, PCG uploading etc.). I’ve seriously started to work on this system in these few days:

Tape Wait and Bleed

Kale — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 14:38:44 +0000

I’ve lately started to emulate the NEC PC-6001 Mk2, that is a modified version of the regular PC-6001. Unlike the latter, this one adds some decent video capabilities, a 40 x 25 character tilemap and a 4bpp bitmap mode, banked in two parts. It’s still nowhere near the capabilities of other PCs of that time (namely Sharp X1), but at least here games looks like … games and not a bunch of random Hunter S. Thompson-esque colors .

Systems Over Nearly everYwhere

Kale — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:13:27 +0000

Started to work at the Sony SMC-70 / SMC-777, that is a pretty powerful (for the time) 1983 japanese computer. Basic spechs includes 16 colors with RAMDAC, PCG graphics, a bitmap layer and 3.5″ floppy drives (it’s the real first system that uses them). After some basic hooking, I’ve managed to get basic CP/M OS to work on it:

Washizu Mahjong

Kale — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:14:41 +0000

Charles MacDonald extracted the internal ROM on the Eagle 909 HW games (Janshi, Ron Jan and Pinkiri 8). Me and Haze recently did some efforts to emulate this HW, that is a Z180 with a fancy video emulation (that isn’t yet fully working).

Janshi and Ron Jan have an original thought of the mahjong game, on which you can see what type of tile is with different tilesets for the back.

Janshi

Pinkiri 8

A Queen at the River

Kale — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 11:17:24 +0000

Charles MacDonald recently did some nice researches to the not too much hatred Night Gal HW. I’ve taken a look to these docs and, after that I’ve figured out that there was an undocumented protection / open bus thing (!) I’ve got Royal Queen to work without the major graphic artifacts, unlike all the other games in the HW.

I just need to figure out why inputs doesn’t work, I guess that it should be something simple & different. Then I’ll move on to the other games on this HW …

EDIT1: fixed inputs, just a stupid mistake from my part. ^^U

EDIT2: Figured out that Night Gal, Royal Night and Night Bunny doesn’t have any real difference with Royal Queen, they now works them all:

Modal Zwei Mode

Kale — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:51:48 +0000

By request, started to look at the Sega Model 2 HW. First thing, I’ve added a basic work-around for the network boards in Super GT 24h and Over Rev to boot in MAME. They needs inputs and presumably protection patches / simulations and/or gfx fixes:

There was nothing we could do…

Kale — Mon, 03 May 2010 01:12:31 +0000

Found the reason that kept The House of the Dead 2 / The Typing of the Dead to crash without any log, it was an int32 overflow bug in our renderer. Following are snaps actually taken from HOTD2 (that is known to have an earlier revision of the PowerVR, hence there are more video glitches than normal), since I’ve recently discovered that it boots fine in MAME, with the same protection check as Zombie Revenge / Dynamite Baseball.

(Following are The Typing of the Dead snaps)

Ideal World vs. Real World

Kale — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:30:43 +0000

Fixed a timing GD-ROM DMA bug to not fire the irq and zero the status flag instantly. This allows us to boot The King of Fighters Neowave.

The Scorfano Dance

Kale — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:37:11 +0000

Looking at Sega Marine Fishing (obviously yet another Naomi game). After some time of study I’ve found the way to bypass the annoying Naomi I/O fault (there’s a clear program flow RAM check at 0xc0279be).

Interestingly, it looks like that our renderer goes nuts with some elements of this (especially the “Rayman-style” Fishermen and presumably missing fog effect):