Other News (part 2)

I’ve mentioned the Afega shooters here before, and how they run on hardware basically copied from NMK (unsurprising because Afega’s first shooter was just a reskin of USAAF Mustang. The (final?) Afega shooter doesn’t really get as much coverage, maybe because it doesn’t carry the Afega name, or was never ‘licensed’ by them.

That game is the one known in MAME as Spectrum 2000 (with a Yonatech copyright) or Fire Hawk (with an ESD copyright)

Until recently MAME supported horizontal versions of both games, the exact relationship between them isn’t fully understood, but they are basically the same game. Spectrum 2000 is a buggy piece of garbage, you can glitch it out very early in the game, eg the first big enemy you encounter has a glitched state after you first blow it up, and if you blow it up a 2nd time it appears normal.

I didn’t think it was actually possible for such a bug to simply slip under the radar, but it did, I tested this on the actual PCB around when it was dumped and the very same thing happened there!

There’s another bug, in the attract mode they manage to draw the ‘B’ button in the wrong place when it’s pressed down. I don’t know if this happens on the hardware, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Firehawk, as I said, is basically the same game, but with a lot more polish (power up texts etc.) It has a normal explosion sequence for the first big enemy, and doesn’t have the issue with the button display in attract mode. I think it’s fairly safe to say it’s a newer version of the game.

Now what’s interesting is that Shoutime recently dumped a VERTICAL version of Spectrum 2000, the fact one exists wasn’t a surprise, there are horizontal and vertical versions of all the Afega shooters (more on that later) but what is surprising is that he thought it was an older version due to the board / rom types used. If you look at the game however it does NOT have the bug with the first big enemy.

What it does however have (and I haven’t verified this on the PCB) is the ships on the player select screen sometimes drifting off the screen if you coin the game up during the attract demos (not always) this hasn’t been verified on real hardware but the weird part is these are SPRITES, and there’s no global offset register or anything we should ignore on that screen. It also still has the weird display issue with the attract instructions (also not verified on hw)

The story doesn’t end there however, because system11 dumped a vertical version of Firehawk as well. Unfortunately he didn’t dump the graphic roms so for now you can’t see anything and I can’t tell you much about this set.

What IS interesting about the Firehawk is that it’s meant to be a switchable orientation set; Afega actually boasted this feature on a number of their games, and it’s true that several of the games contain graphics for both orientations (the Horizontal Firehawk we have does not) I always assumed this was a program rom switch, but apparently on this version of Firehawk it’s a dipswitch, and it can’t be a dipswitch simply banking the program roms either because they only contain one copy of the code. In all honesty I’m not sure how it works at this point!

There’s another annoying problem with all the Afega games in MAME, the lives display (regardless of if it’s drawn with sprites, or as part of the text layer) has corrupt colours for some of the ships. I don’t know / understand why this happens. There’s also an issue with some enemies popping up in strange places (the bottom corner). We previously had this issue with bullets in some of the games, but that was fixed by adding memory mirrors (and there are no unmapped accesses now). Maybe some of these issues are just ‘features’ of the original game; I think one day somebody is going to have to verify a lot of the issues against the boards.