Archive for October, 2015

The non-video games we emulate don’t really get the coverage they deserve, in this case even I almost didn’t notice the progress made on this one so I thought it was worth highlighting.

The game is Wacky Gator, a Whack-a-mole style game created by Data East in 1990. The driver was started by Felipe Sanches, and quietly finished by Sandro Ronco who brought it up to a playable state using the MAME internal artwork system to represent the various elements of the game. The progress shown here will be available in tomorrow’s 0.167 release.

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It doesn’t currently have clickable artwork (that would be a next step) but can be played using keys to represent each gator.

A video of the real unit can be seen on YouTube too

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This type of thing is a prime candidate for interactive 3D models if we ever do get that far (hopefully we will)

Chaos Emeralds, Microwaves, same difference right?

Anyway, ShouTime and the Dumping Union (with a whole list of people donating) purchased the PCB for another novelty Sonic item, this time SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, a popcorn dispenser machine with a video display. It runs on the Sega C2 board (Genesis type hardware)

Interestingly it has a region dipswitch for Export, USA or Japan which makes me wonder if did actually leave Japan at some point in limited numbers.

It’s hard to really class this as ‘working’ because the mechanical side of the Popcorn machine isn’t emulated, but the code does run so you can see how the machine would operate.

There’s a small graphical glitch next to Sonic near the end of the video, I’m not sure why that happens, or if it happens on the PCB; all roms pass in service mode.

Here is a video of it running (dipswitch set to ‘Export’ so English text)

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The graphical glitch mentioned above was due to a bad / inverted sensor input, with it flipped the glitch is gone so I’ve recorded videos of it running as USA / Japan region without the glitch.

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When I had an Amstrad CPC back in the day one piece of software I owned was a game called ‘Dripzone’

It’s fairly easy to find this game online, for example there is a copy at CPC Power, and there are copies in the Tosec, GoodCPC and Non-GoodCPC collections, most of which have found their way into the MAME/MESS Software List.

HOWEVER..

the copy of the game I had came free with the Dk’Tronics memory expansion for my 464, and was an extended version of the game with some sampled speech. From memory it only worked on a 464 with the memory expansion AFTER loading the ‘bank.bas’ program from the tape/disk supplied with the unit, it did not play speech on a 6128 etc.

I’m pretty sure none of the copies online are that version as they all say ’64k version’ if you load the “drip.bas” program and list it (if I’m wrong please correct me)

So does anybody still have the extended version? My CPC stuff is long gone, but it would be nice to see that version again for nostalgia purposes; I can’t even find *reference* to that version online.

Capcom’s LED Storm has an unusual history to it.

The home conversions of the game (Amiga, Spectrum, C64 etc.) were all based off a version called LED Storm Rally 2011. The most common arcade release is simply called LED Storm, or Mad Gear depending on your territory.

A partial dump of an arcade version of Rally 2011 has existed for a while, but the sprite roms, until now, hadn’t been fully dumped because Capcom used a very unusual type of ROM to store the data, one that no devices appear to support out of the box. Guru spent some time dumping his however, so that all changes from this point forward.

system11 did an article on LED Storm last year when he picked up a PCB (which also happens to be an undumped European version – he’s promised to dump the different program ROMs soon which has now been dumped). Mentski’s excellent ‘One Credit Champ‘ series on YouTube also mentions the differences briefly during a play of the more common arcade version in one of his videos (most of which are packed with little bits of trivia while he sees how far a single credit can get him in a game).

Anyway, lifting some of system11’s screenshots for comparison, here is how it looks in MAME now with the correct sprite ROMs, PCB pics on the left, new MAME shots on the right.

Much better than how it is if you run it right now!

I’ve also made a video.

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My role in all of this was fairly minor, the arrangement of the data in the new dump was a bit different to the existing sets in the driver (those use 4/8 roms to contain the data) so in order to continue using the same decode function for all sets I had to adjust the ROM loading for everything else in the driver so that the data was in the same order as the data in the new roms, then adjust to decode function to match. (I could have simply added a new decode for this set, but I do prefer to try and keep things neat)

Anyway, if you can’t wait for 0.167 (which will be released on the 28th of this month) then the current progress can be found in the GIT, you’ll need the update Romset tho.