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 .
Unless “So Ho Sung” appears written like that in official materials (like in the game code or whatever), the romanization is incorrect. When going by romanization rules as proposed by the RoK government, it would be “Suhoseong”.
Haze, I’m sure there are excellent reasons for it, so I’m curious how you came to be hosted here. I’ve always found the fact you’re hosted at mamedev.emulab.it kind of strange anyway. Maybe it’s just unusual for me to see an .it domain. And anyway it’s just my vague impression, nothing serious so please take it easy on me.
It’s how it was sold on auction, I’m sure it’s open to correction.
Because he made someone mad and dared them to kick him off :) They did. To say more is just massive emudrama…
Yeah, “Su Ho Seong” if you want to go with standardised Romanisation or “Soo Ho Sung” if you want to go with the “friendly for English speaker to pronounce” approach. “So Ho Sung” is definitely wrong.
I ended up here because I can post what I want, not be censored by the interests of the host site. Also .it seemed fitting because MAME is after all a product of Italy ;-)
that works too :)
Would I be right In thinking that Kale and others might have made some small progress with Seibu’s COP co-processor?
At least in regards to the way it calculates angles?
Not trying to spread any undue excitement just wondering if some small piece of the puzzle has been uncovered.
can you guess the pc specs for emulating 2 y boards and the com board….?
Indeed you are! It seems Oliver Galibert figured some stuff out from the PC version of Raiden II and used it to implement a missing opcode in the Seibu COP. Now flying popcorns and tank turrets actually aim at the player like they’re supposed to instead of only facing down and the players in Seibu Cup Soccer face the correct directions (but missing their heads).
Unfortunately when I asked Oliver Galibert whether it was likely we’d see any “silver bullet” progress or not using such deductions, the shoutbox progressed too far up for me to see the response before it disappeared into the internet void. :/
BP: Olivier and Kale agreed that if people stop asking them questions there will likely be further progress ;-)
I guess one cannot reasonably expect a silver bullet. It is probably more of a slow grind. But I loved the updates and explanations on Kale’s blog… :-).
Oh, of course. Even reverse-engineering an x86 app is not exactly a “trivial” matter at all, making sense of it for emulation even less so.
Sorry for asking too many questions MAMEdevs. :)
Why guess? Just run two simultaneous instances of MAME playing Power Drift and see if your PC explodes.
Kong speaks! Sorry for posting in a totally unrelated article, but your http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2012/03/08/in-brazil-everything-is-fantastic/ is closed for comments.
Anyway, I have evidence that Kong (Taito) might have had a voice synthesis module. Watch this video, it is in portuguese but you won’t need to know the language to understand what I’m talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HTZEVKoYlGM
It is a video recorded in Taito do Brasil’s offices. I don’t know when (if) it aired on TV but this video is from a television broadcast for sure. At aproximately 1 min. you can hear the machine “speaking” VENHA ME ENFRENTAR with a very foreign voice (maybe the software for voice synth was intended for english language). I think it is from the arcade board and not an external machine communicating with the game because you can clearly hear glitched out voice when the game is reset.
Even if you don’t care much about it to see if you can find anything resembling voice modules on the dumped ROMs for Kong the video would still be of your interest since you can see the correct coloring for the graphics, and a cursory glance at other games being made/modified by Taito do Brasil. This version shown in the video could also be an undumped version, or even unreleased.
Thanks a lot.
Find it hard to believe that the PC version which is a port of the PSX version would’ve allowed that.
Nonono, Su Ho Sung not So Ho Sung.
http://www.grb.or.kr/download/GameImage/1999/제2348호.jpg
98 Su Ho Sung 2 Collection
http://www.grb.or.kr/download/GameImage/1999/제2490호.jpg
These games doesn’t have features of gambling as these description. But they have betting features so they could remodeling to gamble games. But 1997 was too early to do that.
The “Badaiyagi shock” was in 2006.
(http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EB%B0%94%EB%8B%A4%EC%9D%B4%EC%95%BC%EA%B8%B0)
We appear to have settled on Su Ho Seong, is that ok?
Interesting, I wonder if the sequel is on the same hardware, another we need to keep an eye out for anyway.
There is one unused rom, but I have no idea if it contains speech data, nor if we have a CPU to play it.
*edit* also that’s not Kong, that’s a Crazy Kong bootleg on Galaxian hardware, Kong is an original piece of code instead, note how bad the gameplay mechanics are in Kong compared to all the others. Also look at the Donkey Kong / Barrel placement.
Can we page SailorSat about the problems the multiplayer version of Power Drift is suffering?
I was hoping she would chip in.
I’m willing to make the driver changes needed to run both machines at once if that’s what it takes (because in this case 2 machines might represent a single unit required for the game to function, rather than something that should be split)
but at least knowing what is going on, and what they need would help a lot, right now I’m not clear on it at all.
William’s Black Knight was produced by TAITO in Brazil and it had voice synthesis. Maybe that’s the tech they were dealing with the video?
Maybe they experimented with integrating that into the Donkey Kong clone, but may have never actually released it…
Or maybe you could check to see if the data/code in the spare ROM you have might be compatible with the technical specs of the speech synthesis chip used in Black Knight.
By looking at the MAME source, it seems to be called HC55516, I guess.
Mhm… I guess this will be almost similar to the System32/Multi32/Model1 Comm Board.
There is a Z80, 16kBit Dual Port SRAM, the infamos TOSLINK connectors and the MB89372 which most likely acts as a HDLC controller.
Sadly I never got the System32/Multi32 system “working”. Rad Rally linked up fine, OutRunners didn’t link up at all.
Does the Service Menu have any network related options? I doubt they only link up with two units :)
There is Com Board Test, at the moment it simply reports ‘failed’
I also don’t think there is any good reason to write it in three spaced segments. Short titles always appear like that on the GRB’s info sheets for layout reasons, but the actual title is one word (although the MAME database already has quite a few titles like that…).
Does that girl show her tits?