Archive for August, 2014

system11 picked up a SemiCom ‘gambling’ game called So Ho Sung. It’s protected the same way as all SemiCom games, and we still need to extract the proper data the MCU places in RAM, but since the actual codebase seems VERY close to Puzzle Break I was able to use a temporary cheat to get it booting.

Interestingly the copyright shows 1997, the same year as Puzzle Break, but the backgrounds ingame have a coin with ‘Semicom 2002’ on them, maybe it’s a revised version of the game?

Also I say ‘gambling’ I don’t think it’s actually a gambling game, there doesn’t seem to be any payout mechanism that I can see, so it’s probably a card themed game with fake betting for amusement purposes only (it even has your regular ‘continue’ and ‘game over’ type sequences, and you only ever need to insert one coin to play)

Until the actual data for this game is extracted I still consider it non-working as there could be issues unknown to me, but here are some screenshots of it running with the fake data.

In other news ShouTime picked up the kit for a Power Drift Communication / Link version upgrade with funding help from rtw, B2K24, Gor, Dullaron, anonymous, Mucci, gregf, ghoolster, Smitdogg and The Dumping Union.

This game doesn’t yet work, it looks like it needs the extra link board emulated at least, possibly both PCBs. Currently it runs one loop of the attract mode where you can clearly see problems (all players are shown as the same character, and only one car moves) although you can also see the course is slightly different (a jump in the middle of it at the top of the ramp) You can’t start a game if you attempt to coin it up, and it crashes after the attract loop.

I don’t know what it will take to make this work, I might have to emulate 2 y-board units at once.

Here are some pictures of the kit ShouTime took.

Above you can see 4 replacement sprite roms (for the HUD layer, to handle changed graphics) and a pair of replacement program roms for each of the 3 68000 CPUs. Unlike other versions of Power Drift this one only has a single pair of roms for the main CPU as you can see from the ROM test in the pictures above.



And this is the link board that stacks on top of a y-board setup, connecting to another y-board setup.

Please note, this was a very expensive purchase, and there are always things available we could do with picking up, so do consider making a donation to the Dumping Union by contacting Smitdogg. Not every board is going to be to your personal taste, but there is important work to be done and always boards we could do with securing to further MAME. The fundraiser associated with this game was at Mameworld Forums but help is always appreciated, even when no targets are announced.

Also apparently there is a funding issue with my host here, not sure what’s going on there because nobody has told me anything directly, but if this site ends up vanishing you’ll know why. That was also mentioned in a post at Mameworld .

UME is the complete/combined version of the MAME / MESS project.

0.154ex1 is built from SVN revision 31598

There were still a number of issues with DCS sound in the 0.154 MAME release causing some games like Carnevil and the 3D Gauntlet games to lack music, these have since been resolved so it is recommended you use this build instead. Some other issues such as missing sound in the Eolith titles have also been resolved, in addition to a number of other bugs that were caught after the 0.154 release. Assuming no new bugs have been introduced this should be considered a more stable build than 0.154.

I have specifically built against SVN rv. 31598 rather than the more cutting edge ones because the revisions immediately after 31598 do nothing but destroy the human parsability of some areas of the source. Assuming the team has any common sense these changes will be quickly reverted so I’d rather not inflict them on my users due to it being unlikely they’ll appear in a final build, it would just result in confusion.

UME 0.154ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.154ex1 sources

Here is the 0.154 to 0.154ex1 SVN log

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.154ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(SDL binaries might come later)

Points of Interest

Fixes as mentioned above, Music Ball as shown below, some other stuff I’ll write a bit about soon.

Back in May of last year Marcos75 dumped his rare Music Ball PCB. Music Ball is an alternate version / semi-sequel to the well known ‘Speed Ball’ pinball title.

What is strange about Music Ball is that despite being advertised on the flyers alongside Speed Ball the images used on mocked up cabinet shots were both from Speed Ball.

As far as emulation was concerned the big issue was that unlike Speed Ball, the Music Ball PCB had an encrypted CPU module and the Z80 code was encrypted.

The good news is that Andreas Naive has now managed to decrypt the ROM making the game playable.

One of the weird things about this game is that despite coming from what seems to be an original PCB, with encrypted Romset the title screen display and copyrights have all been removed, the graphics are still present in the graphic roms, but are unused by the game.

I do wonder if this copy was actually bootlegged from a prototype version, and encrypted by the bootleggers, or whatever licensing agreement existed between DE Systems and Tecfri fell apart and this is all that was left, I suspect we’ll never know tho. Either way, a huge thanks goes to both Marcos75 and Andreas Naive for the emulation of this one! Aside from the encryption it runs on the same hardware as Speed Ball, and while I did make some clean-ups and improvements in the driver last year when it was first dumped (as did hap, adding the external LCD score displays) I can’t really take credit for the emulation here!