Unicycle Olympics and Other Topical News

Right, bit of a round up post here showing some work from various developers.

The Rare Sega game that was won on auction a while back was Last Survivor, and is quite possibly literally one of the Last Survivors, very rare game using Sega’s FD1094 encrypted CPUs which thankfully was alive and could be read out by Charles MacDonald. Aaron Giles has actually posted an update about this, with a couple of screenshots etc. The game was apparently location tested in the UK because one of the Speccy magazines did a review of it, but I guess it failed, or was just too expensive for most arcades. It also got a port to the FM towns, but the arcade version is graphically superior and also allowed linking up to 4 cabs for an 8-player pre-‘Wolfenstein 3D’ deathmatch experience (although MAME can’t do this, yet). Anyway I’ll post a video at some point too, because people seem to like videos and it helps show that some cool stuff does still happen in MAME but for now check Aaron’s page :-)

*edit* here is a video of Last Survivor, I’ve made a few comments about the game / control setup in the video description, it’s a little awkward on a PC and really needs the original rotary controller to play well.

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Speaking of videos, Kale got Cycle Maabou working when improving the I/O simulation code for Sky Destroyer. It’s a rather unique Taito game, just as rare as Sky Destroyer, although probably not as rare as Last Survivor above. You play the role of a guy on a unicycle, and must performed timed jumps to land on various items to collect points, holding the button longer does longer jumps etc. At the same time you need to balance your character using the paddle / spinner control so things can get quite tricky. Each stage gives you a target score, here is a video of me failing on the first stage. Note, no sound as of yet, I’m hoping Phil B. can hook it up, he mentioned he was looking at these MCUs in a comment on one of the posts below (with a view to actually emulating the ones which were dumped for Taito’s Gladiator)

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So, thank Kale for that one, I do wonder if the colours are correct on those traffic cones tho :-)

I’ve been hacking away at the fruit machine drivers a bit more, sorting things, moving things around based on hardware profiles, and adding basic CPUs in places where they can be added. One that has the potential to be quite interesting is ‘Big Chief’ which is one of the few (possibly only, or at least the only one there are dumps for) MPU4 games using a Dot Matrix display extension. The Dot Matrix is actually driven by a 68k and the good thing about working in MAME is that it’s quick and easy to hook anything up for a quick test. I haven’t looked at the MPU4-video board comms yet, but the video roms do show a boot screen at least. There’s a video of the real thing on YouTube.

*edit* Also identified Clickity Click as a Plasma game, and one for which we have the Plasma roms too. The Flyer at Mametesters was useful confirmation :-)



‘Apache’ and ‘Elite’ also seem to be Plasma based, although the Plasma roms for them don’t appear to be dumped, and I can’t find any flyers to confirm.

Still a staggering amount of sorting out, identifying and labeling to do with the various sets tho, working out which are original, and which have been hacked etc.

So that’s your mini-round up, this progress will all be in u5 when it gets released.