etabeta's playground

While SNES got me busy for awhile (you can check the MESS board post linked in the previous entry for a lot of screens of the progresses), last weekend I had to spend something like 12 hours in trains. The result is that I managed to work a bit on NES emulation.

In addition to a general clean up of the code for Multi-Memory Controllers (aka Mappers) and to the inclusion
of some info about most mappers (more info will be added in future, when I have some more time), I managed
to add a lot of new mappers and to fix a few of the broken ones. Enough words, time for screenshots!!!

DISCLAIMER: none of the screens below were possible before in MESS!

First of all, I fixed the Lagrange Point crash due to the code assuming CHRROM was present (no screens because the game was working in older MESS versions… nothing new to see here).

Then I added Mapper 152, which features Arkanoid 2, GeGeGe no Kitarou 2 and Pocket Zaurus (maybe others as well? I dunno)

These games were maybe working to some extent in very old versions, by using Mapper 70 code, but they became unsupported when switched to their correct Mapper 152. Not sure if they still miss anything.

Next, I fixed Mapper 22 and now TwinBee 3 and Ganbare Pennant Race! are playable for the first time in MESS (to my knowledge they had always been broken before).

Mapper 86 was choosing the wrong PRG banks. Once I fixed those, Moero!! Pro Yakyuu started to work.

Mapper 87 had some banking problem as well, and Jajamaru no Daibouken was not even reaching its title screen.
Now it is fixed

[btw I found the solution to this problem in NEStopia source: thanks a lot for the wonderful emu, Marty!!]

Mapper 93 was using the wrong writes to decide which PRG bank to use. While this was ok for most games,
Shanghai (the non-Sample version) was not working. This got rectified and the title is now playable

Another round of fixes and, for the first time, we have working Mapper 95 emulation. This means that we can play Dragon Buster in MESS

I also fixed Konami VRC1 CHR swapping, and now Tetsuwan Atom shows the correct graphics (thieves in the picture below were garbled previously)

I found out that Mapper 232 was not refreshing its PRG banks. Once properly implemented, Quattro series titles were finally working (although some games still present glitches)

Fixing Mapper 33 starting bank config, Akira now shows its intro rathen than a black screen

The game still lacks part of the graphics (e.g. texts at start), but it is still a progress.

Finally, I found why Mapper 46 was broken and now games in the Rumblestation multigame cart can be selected and played

This basically covers the fixes I have done to classic mappers. More work is required in the driver: not only MMC5 is missing several features (which are probably beyond my skills), but other common mappers like MMC1 and MMC3 have some small problems that would be nice to fix. I will look into those later.

In addition to the above, in the past couple of weeks I also added a few pirate mappers for Asian games which were previously unsupported in MESS. Let me review here these new mappers as well.

MESS is now supporting:

Mapper 143

Dancing Block is remarkable because is probably the only NES game which works in MESS and does not in NEStopia (the basic idea of the fix came from FCEUMM, thanks to Cah4e3 and other authors)

Mapper 250 – Time Diver Avenger looks like an interesting action game

Mapper 156 – Metal Force is a nice MegaMan kind of game

and Buzz and Waldog (mapper 156 again) is a cute platform game

Moreover, I decided MESS had to support all games made by Sachen. Hence, I added

Mapper 136

Mapper 137

Mapper 138

Mapper 139

Mapper 141

Mapper 145

Mapper 146

Mapper 147

Mapper 148

Mapper 149

I also fixed Qi Wang (mapper 133) which was not working, and now is ok (almost)

I also added the following Sachen mappers, which still have some graphical issues

Mapper 150

Mapper 243

While the above mappers include most Sachen games and they are mostly playable, I’d like to fix the graphical problems sooner or later…

But Sachen / Thin Chen was not the only Asian producer in the famiclone market. Therefore, I also worked on implementing / fixing some more easy pirate mapper for MESS. The results are the following (notice that a few games, like some Subor ones, won’t work without emulating custom keyboards/controllers, but I’ll look into these later):

Mapper 36

Mapper 38 (but inputs are not recognized apparently)

Mapper 39

Mapper 132

Mapper 166

Mapper 167

Mapper 171

Mapper 172

Mapper 173

Mapper 176

Mapper 177

Mapper 178

Mapper 179

Mapper 196

Mapper 216

Finally, some multigame carts got added / fixed

Mapper 58 (fixed)

Mapper 201 (fixed)

Mapper 204 (added)

Mapper 212 (added)

Mapper 213 (added)

Mapper 214 (added)

Mapper 222 (added)

Mapper 104 (added, but not working)

Mapper 225 (added, but not working)