etabeta's playground

Ok. The code update I worked on during last weekend is finally ready for submission. Let me take some time to fully explain why these are definitely good times for NES emulation in MESS and why MESS is no more light years away from NEStopia (even if we still have quite a long distance to cover up)!

As a first step, once I had fully fixed MMC3 emulation (as the screens from Nintendo 2-in-1 & 3-in-1 multigame carts shown in my previous post witnessed), I worked on adding MMC3 clone mappers. This was quite an easy task, thanks to the wonderful original design of the driver (Brad Oliver had done an astounding job with it, and thanks to the recent updates by Heretical One is now very easy to translate most real behaviors in MESS code) and thanks to the available documents

Samurai Spirits by Rex Soft (mapper 14)

Crayon Shin-Chan and Sangokushi 4, both by Future Media (mapper 117)

Super Fighter III (mapper 197)

They still present various glitches in-game, but I’m not sure what the problem is exactly. In the meanwhile, they are playable.

On the other hand, no particular glitch affects either K’s Panda Prince (mapper 121), a Donkey Kong Country rip-off

or Family Kid + Aladdin 4 (mapper 134)

or Thunder Warrior by TXC (mapper 189)

Then, it was time for some Waixing showtime. Waixing is a very prolific Asian producer, responsible for a lot of unlicensed Chinese translations of Japanese games and many “original” titles as well. Now MESS supports:

their Sugoro Quest (mapper 191) and Super Robot Taisen (mapper 194) translations,

their Chaos World and Captain Tsubasa translations (both on mapper 195),

their Dragon Ball Z translations (both on mapper 199)

plus a few (possibly original) other games on Mapper 192

and a few bootlegs on Mapper 242 and 245

I’m pretty sure that there exist at least other 2 versions of the first game (Waixing Zhan Shi), running on different mappers and marketed by other companies… I think we now run them all (but I don’t know Chinese, so I cannot appreciate possible differences among the versions)

Talking about Waixing, I also fixed mapper 115 (labeled as 248, previously) which was not booting some of the games like Shisen Mahjong 2 and Thunderbolt 2


Now, you can see they both work. And that’s all for Waixing games.

Back to other pirate carts, I added a couple of Super Mario bootlegs (running on mappers 50 and 106, respectively)

and I fixed both the SMB bootleg running on mapper 40 (which maybe had been working in very old MESS versions, but it’s been broken at least since 0.123)

and the game selection in Mario 7-in-1 (now you can enjoy most of Mario pirate games in a single cart, together with SMB2 & 3 and Mario’s Missing 🙂 )

While at it, I added/fixed a bunch of multigame cart mappers (namely 205, 217 and 231)


All the games on the each cart should be working, to my knowledge.

Finally, to conclude the pirate mappers review, I have added IRQ triggering to Mapper 91, and Mortal Kombat 2 is now playable (despite a couple of graphical glitches, here and there) as well as some other terrible pirate beat’em up

Actually, I also added mappers 249 & 252, but they only partially work, and mappers 187, 198, 208 & 215, which are completely not working at the moment. Hence, no snaps for the latter ones.