Microwaved Hedgehog

Gary> can you confirm that everything is the same? the one in MAME is a ‘rev B’ so there is a B on the end of the rom labels (although from what you’ve said I guess your friend verified them by dumping them?) I also wonder about the sound rom due to the guy above you saying he remembers different sounds.

They don’t really ‘just show up’ that often, there are a number of other kiddie rides like the Waku Waku Patrol Car with different themes too, usually expensive when they show up due to being part of a complete cabinet.

All you can really hope is that the boards fall into the right hands, or the news about this being emulated gets to somebody who already has them but didn’t realise they were valid emulation targets (a lot of people still see MAME as being a project about games and only games, as for the first 10+ years we excluded anything that wasn’t, we’re hoping the recent strides including integration of all the console / computer stuff from MESS will help people realise that we’re willing to emulate literally anything we can emulate)

The downside is that some will see it as an opportunity to try and inflate prices instead, this one certainly wasn’t cheap.

Also some of the ones themed around less popular characters might already be long gone, Sonic has more staying power than most.

Newer ones could be on anything from ST-V to Naomi or even Sega System SP (which is similar to Naomi and was clearly used for a lot of medal type games)

ok, things that actually existed and were used on hardware etc. half of HBMame has never even been near a PCB – a significant amount of it is known to not even work on a PCB and requires things like the 68k bus exceptions to be disabled ;-)

also we don’t want a situation where people cheat, and make a lame hack, put it on one PCB and expect us to emulate it.

of course when something like that does end up on a significant number of PCBs, and we start to see it sold, then yes, as you see, 0.167 does actually include Bubble Bobble Lost Cave, the DK Pauline hack, and the Cave hacks, because we’ve seen then used / sold to a point where they become important to document. I imagine the Outrun Enhanced sets will make the jump at some point too.

the MESS part of the project has always been more open to modern games on old systems / ‘homebrew’ too, so again finding a balance is important, what I’m actually seeing is that to do things right we’re going to have to put in a lot more work than some other emulators, some of the new A2600 releases for example use a 70Mhz ARM inside the cartridge that monitors the entire bus and feeds the A2600’s main CPU opcodes in realtime so that it can simulate the behavior of any other mapper on the fly. The other emulators cheat and emulate it as if it were a regular mapper able to execute some custom ARM snippets (which is fast and relatively easy to do) but MAME will have to emulate the entire ARM at all times, feeding instructions one by one just like the hardware does, which is VERY slow, and so insanely tricky to set up properly I’m not sure what approach to take!

I’ve stated before a desire to include ‘test software’ that has been developed specifically to verify hardware behavior as it can help guard against regressions that might otherwise only appear late in a game, also things like completely original developments that have been tested on real hardware (like the recent Taito L stuff) should probably be considered, somebody changing the name of Mario to squiggly penis man and putting it on a cartridge less so.

I wasn’t really talking about HBMame anyway tho, just devices in general, be it a microwave, vending machine, bread maker, exercise machine, phone, PDA, or even a set of christmas lights that plays a tune, if there’s a chance we can emulate it, and are supplied with all the details / data we need to do so, then it’s viable.

I guess the only real rule is that it has to be something real, not somebody trying to fuck with us, apply common sense etc.