While all the talk at the moment is about the leap in progress made with Raiden 2 / DX there are some other noteworthy arcade developments going on at the moment.
dgPix
System11 was in possession of a number of undumped dgPix titles, including 2 completely unemulated games.
The first of those is Elfin, a Puzzle Bobble-like game with an interesting mechanic whereby the puzzle rotates. Like most dgPix titles it includes flashes girls on the screen from time to time and has a zooming picture viewer every couple of rounds. The game isn’t especially polished, but is fairly interesting.
The other game is Jump Jump, and starting with the title you could write a book on the fatal design flaws this game has. In this game, called Jump Jump, you don’t actually have a Jump button, instead you must descend through the level, it’s a bit like the ‘Shaft’ section from the ‘Tower & Shaft’ game (N64 hardware, in MAME) but worse in every way.
The translation is very lazy, platforms are called ‘Footstools’ Worse, you can only actually use your weapon when on solid ground, despite the fact you spend most of the time in the game falling, some of the later stages barely have any safe locations to land!. Equally offensive is the speed the scrolling reaches, to the point where you really don’t even have time to get off the platforms. Some platforms recharge your anti-fall ‘cloud’ but require you to stand on them for a certain period of time to get that bonus, time the game doesn’t even permit! Later levels have platforms that are simply traps, preventing you from moving and killing you, land on one and you’re practically guaranteed death, and often you’ll respawn right above another one! There are also flags to collect, and unless you collect a certain number of them you won’t be granted access to to final levels (aptly called ‘Hell’) of course if you miss a flag you can’t jump back up and get it, because you can’t jump, and you don’t know when they’re going to appear so getting them all relies on a certain degree of luck, or knowledge of the levels.
Being a dgPix game it naturally has girls, each level has a number of Showtime platforms which change the background for a moment, the last one in any level also gives you the picture viewer.
There are also bonus levels, and believe it or not you can actually jump in the bonus levels, but even then it isn’t clear what you’re meant to do, it looks like you’re meant to collect crystals by jumping into them, but instead you’re actually meant to jump ON them for random bonuses, it’s one of the most pointless bonus levels I’ve ever seen.
System11 also dumped a new set for the ‘X-Files’ arcade game. This is a World set, and has less censorship than the Korean set previously dumped (actual nude images rather than bikini ones) In the other dgPix games you can select between Nude/Bikini in the service mode, but in X-Files you can’t. To keep things clean I’ve manually censored the new title screen below.
World (Nudes) version
Korean (Bikini) version
The game has nothing at all to do with the X-Files series (it’s a tile matching game, a fairly decent one with various extra features) and was sold by some manufacturers as ‘The Sex Files’ instead, I’m not sure if a version with that title screen exists or if that was just to avoid legal trouble with the marketing.
None of the games have sound because we lack CPU opcode level documentation on the sound CPU.
For all the games in this driver the game code is stored on flash roms, and to save the score data and settings they reprogram an area of the main program rom rather than using a separate eeprom device. It also looks like if you boot the games on real hardware with the security chip missing they’ll erase an important part of the flash rom, rendering the game useless, even if you then put the security chip back, nasty.
Thanks to system11 for dumping these, and Brian Troha for figuring out the protection patches needed.