Archive for November, 2014

When system11 picked up Super Duck he also picked up an undumped SemiCom game, Cute Fighter.

Cute Fighter is often listed as the world release of SD Fighters, but it was obvious from the pictures of the board that it was something more. SD Fighters runs on an older 68000 based SemiCom platform, the Cute Fighter board was a 68020 based board, the same as Dream World and Rolling Crush.

Emulation followed the usual steps for a SemiCom game with the protection data extracted etc. giving us the following screens.

As you can see, there are more characters than SD Fighters, and the stages are different. The game is clearly intended as a sequel rather than simply a clone/ alt release. Unfortunately the sound has really suffered, and feels unfinshed, one of the M6295 chips seems to be only used for female hit sounds, and the game doesn’t even play sounds for the round announcements etc. The 68020 hardware also lacks the YM2151 of the older hardware so all the music is simply looped samples. The game also appears to lack any kind of scoring system, unusual for an arcade game.

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

Official whatsnew texts for (MAME, MESS) provide full details of what has changed since 0.155.

This is the 2nd official release since the official source repository was moved to GitHub, it is based on the official ‘mame0156’ tagged version (or in GIT hash version nonsense, ebeaa953a3a6ae98842b4a169bc95e5f3c673d8c )

UME 0.156 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(source matches official mamedev.org source distribution, here for completeness)

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.156 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools

Points of Interest

-will write it later

It’s no great secret that the majority of Comad’s games are just hacks of something else, and when system11 picked up a Comad ‘Super Duck’ board on eBay, with no ingame screenshots, my initial feeling was that this would be no difference.

When the board arrived and was dumped by system11 I was in for a surprise however, this was actually one of the few original Comad titles, up there with Pushman and Bouncing Balls. The hardware was clearly derived from a similar base as those two titles, but had some significant differences, the main one being that instead of 1 large ROM based tilemap (fixed layout) it had 2 RAM based background tiles. Working out the format of those tilemaps (the page layout, tile size etc.) took a little while, and again proved to be somewhat related to the original ROM based tilemap in that the tiles were 32×32 pixels, and the whole thing was arranged as pages, but the subtle differences took some ironing out.

The palette also took some work, it uses an unusual format xRGBRRRRGGGGBBBB format where the group of 3 bits at the top are the most significant bits of the palette data, the xRGBRRRRGGGGBBBB format in MAME uses them as the least significant.

Sound etc. was easy enough, basically the same as Zero Zone etc. but with added sample banking.

It’s a fairly simple maze game where you need to collect a set number of items from the maze to progress. Every few levels there is a boss level, the first one being an octopus. You can collect power-ups which allow your character to release some gas to stun the enemies. Various other bonus items exist. Another interesting point is that this appears to be one of the few Comad games with no adult content, assuming it doesn’t come later at least.

Another previously unknown game saved for the ages..

*edit* It was pointed out on Mameworld that the game looks a lot like ‘Hell Out’ for which we have a Comad flyer. The tile roms do indeed contain a logo for ‘Hell Out’ but there is no way to make the set we have use that as a title, I thought it might be a message for when you complete the game, but based on the flyer evidence it’s probably a clone of this.

Thanks to CPZ the site theme is now looking more like it used to look before and feels like home once again. In the meantime there have been a couple of new developments, but the one that caught my eye most was the discovery of a unique Space Invaders variant called ‘Alien Invader’

An external contributor ‘Seth Soffer’ discovered a Space Invaders game running on a tiny bartop cabinet using a 6502 CPU. He provided the following pictures, and a rom dump.

There are a few things that stand out here, first of all the 6502 CPU, meaning it’s definitely not running Taito Space Invaders code, that used an 8080 CPU. Second of all, the cabinet, it’s tiny, as is the display (which is black and white with a colour overlay attached to the screen)

The manufacturer of this unit is unknown, we’re told the PCB is etched with ‘Forbes’ so that’s our best guess. When it was manufactured is also unknown, externally it manages to look almost like some retro-contemporary item, but chances are it’s not much newer than the original Space Invaders.

Emulation also highlighted something else that you can maybe tell from the original photos. The screen resolution is very low, 128×128 pixels, something you’d associate more with a handheld device than an arcade machine. I did some of the emulation work, although the game jumped off into the weeds as soon as you generated an interrupt, Mariusz Wojcieszek noted that by simply returning in such a situation the game would run fine, so it’s possibly some kind of protection (Kale speculates that it’s a PROM) Maybe there is some other purpose to jumping there, like the address bus bits signalling some other hardware, I’m not sure. We could probably do with some clear PCB pictures to see what’s there to either confirm or rule out various theories.

The sound isn’t emulated, again we don’t know what generates it at this stage, could be discrete like the original Space Invaders, but without further PCB images I really don’t know.

Unlike Taito’s Minivader (which was actually just a cabinet test board) I think this was intended as a full ‘for arcade use’ game, the tiny resolution actually makes it more of a Mini-vader than Mini-vader itself tho :-) The game plays well and is a respectable effort to file with the other odd releases based on Space Invaders using unexpected hardware. (I think the only other one with a 6502 is ‘Attack UFO’ but that again is very different hardware, AFAIK based on similar hardware to the Commodore home systems)

Anyway, here are some screenshots of Alien Invaders running, the colour overlay positions are guessed based on the screenshots

Thanks again to Seth Soffer for this contribution, and if you’re reading, more PCB info / high res pictures would really be appreciated :-)

In response to the security issues a few things were updated here, including the site theme, which I was unable to update before because the site was using an older version of PHP. It does however appear that the new version of this theme looks nothing like the old version, and doesn’t really work properly with some things on the site. So far I haven’t actually found a single layout I like as much as the older one here, which was neat and unintrusive when it came to the style and layout of my pages (even if the new one is probably more technically correct from a CSS usage / enforcing CSS usage point of view)

As a result I’m going to end up having to do a bit of CSS hacking until I have something I’m happy with again, and also figure out a way to stop it only showing previews of posts (I’ve got WP set to display full text, but it seems to ignore that)

In other words, please be patient while I get everything looking like it should ;-)

One thing that has been on my ‘to look at list’ for a while is Race Drivin’ Panorama, a special 3 screen version of Race Drivin’.

Hard Drivin’ / Race Drivin’ alone is a bit of an insane hardware setup, and Race Drivin’ Panorama makes that even crazier by adding 2 extra slave video PCBs to drive each monitor (based on the lower resolution ‘Compact’ releases, using a standard monitor for each of the side views as opposed to the medium res one used by the center view)

Luckily as MAME’s device model has improved and more and more code has been converted to a device structure it has become easier to support multiple video boards etc. without having to duplicate large amounts of code or worrying about shared global variables etc. so I decided to take another look at this. As it happens there was actually one part of all of this that hadn’t been converted to a device yet, the Slapstic, and because we have more than one of them on this setup that was actually something, to my surprise, I had to upgrade.

Anyway, after doing all that, including converting the video PCBs etc. to act as devices and hooking up the serial connection between the boards (which was remarkably easy) we end up with the following

It’s actually playable (albeit very slow, it has rather a lot of CPUs)

Unfortunately there’s what I’m starting to strongly suspect is a MAME core bug causing partial updates to not quite work properly on everything except the primary screen, you can swap the order of the screens and the primary screen (be it a side screen or the main view) will always render correctly, but the other screens will only partially update the display, usually in the wrong places, causing those displays to stutter and appear incorrect frequently. There doesn’t seem to be any use of the ‘first_screen’ in the driver code, so I strongly suspect it’s something core level causing the issue. Fingers crossed somebody can help track that down, and this will be fully playable!

*edit* I’ve managed to find a kludge around the display update issue, however upon further testing the side-screens crash if you select the Roadster car. According to real hardware sources the game should display a full 3d view rather than the car panels at the sides for that car, which is probably related (the GSP seems to time out loading pictures in MAME, when I guess it should simply fail to load them because they’re not present?) I’ve put up a video of the thing in action here, although the sound is out of sync due to MAME not liking it when you record multi-screen games with dyanmic refresh rates ;-)