Sometimes it’s difficult to know if the emulation of a game is correct without studying reference videos, and sometimes those reference videos don’t surface until much later.
That was the case with the FACE shooter Nostradamus, which has a number of video effects we didn’t know were missing until they were highlighted by somebody watching a 1CC (1 Credit Clear) of the game recorded from a PCB.
There were a number of effects, including a sprite masking effect and a shadow flicker effect missing, as well as the arms of the final boss (this one we did actually suspect was a bug for a long time, the PCB evidence provided confirmation)
I’ve uploaded a recording of the game after making several fixes to YouTube (the video has cheats enabled, it’s not meant to be a gameplay video) You’ll probably want to make sure you’re watching a 60fps version.
Here are some links to specific parts of the video
Stage 6 Boss appearing – This is a masking / stencil effect created by putting a sprite behind the background layer causing it to cut holes in other sprites without being directly visible
Stage 7 Boss appearing – This flickering shadow is not actually a sprite and is done by using the tilemap enable register, turning it on and off every few frames, previously the tilemaps were alwyas enabled and the shadow was displayed as solid.
Final Boss arms – The arms are priority 0 sprites, and due to the way we cleared the priority buffer to 0 they were never being displayed.
nice work!
no where near as good as nost, but here’s a quick vid of a tecmo v-goal soccer pcb (with pitch chip fault) may or may not help interesting none the less
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtFvW_yy8pI&feature=youtu.be
Thanks Haze for being only dev still caring of his old drivers to make them PERFECT
Aron, Belmont , Luca let old bugs show forever , never fix , sad
Hammy> that layer is just weird, I think the zooming is non-linear or something, haven’t managed to make any sense of it no matter how many times i’ve looked over the years. Also the dump you sent is just bad, the program rom has random bad bits so doesn’t even boot (otherwise the same as the parent set) and the Mask roms are very, very wrong (but would otherwise match the other sets) For the program rom I’m actually surprised you managed to get that read more than once (I assume you’re going by the first and most important rule of rom dumping, do everything twice to verify it) because the damage looks random, for the Mask roms I guess you used the wrong setting.
i’ve just sent in another attempt. the mask roms are non standard i think, either way my programmers are crap i’ll get a new one and try again at some point.
Any news about Dripzone (Amstrad CPC64) whit speech?.
no, got no responses, I guess it’s lost until somebody finds it.
Hey Haze, speaking of finding and fixing bugs through PCB plays…
There’s this little-known arcade game emulated in MAME called “Aquarium”, it’s a puzzle game developed by Excellent System, emulated in MAME.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW_jvZ804Qc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b1j4XXlzH8
These are videos of the game being played through MAME
Now compare to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyAQPrkt_a4
This is Japanese player “zu4989” playing the game through a PCB. It’s not a complete playthrough, but it gives an idea enough on how the game plays through the genuine hardware. It seems that in the MAME version plays the wrong music at the wrong times, and I think the instrumentation for the song played at 6:45 of the zu4989 video in particular is wrong in MAME (either that, or missing entirely). Unless if zu4989 is playing a different revision of the game that isn’t the same as the one in MAME (pretty unlikely, though), I think that this music issue needs to be checked. I do remember that what music plays at what time has been switched between versions of MAME at one point, though (don’t remember which two versions, but it has been a few years back), so I think it’s more likely a matter of the sound driver in aquarium.c being a bit off rather than zu4989 playing a differing revision.
Thoughts on this, Haze? Is it possible to look into this and maybe fix it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gn2Kj2M46Q
Also, forgot to post this, but this is the attract mode of Aquarium run through a PCB, same Japanese player recording. Again, different music than what’s played in MAME.
yeah, the sound banking is definitely wrong in the driver, the code isn’t even valid right now, maybe it was at one time, but even if I make it valid it doesn’t match the video, so it looks like it’s never been correct.
I’ve fixed it now, looks like the bank code was scrambled slightly (the OKI codes were also scrambled, so I guess this isn’t too surprising)
I’ve also discovered a strange thing with Mortal Kombat. On my PCB (T-Unit Version 5.0) when I push down the 2nd gard button for each player (button6) it doesn’t work as in MAME. On my PCB it just bring a little and very quick gard move but can’t be maintened as in MAME. The effect on the PCB is not the same as the 1st gard button and so MAME appears to be wrong.
similarly, Nebulasray has some missing graphical effects, not sure if it applies to other games on that Namco system (I think Outfoxies is, but I remember that having the stage rotation emulated..?)
it’s mostly some rotation+stretching background effects, as seen here on the starfield https://youtu.be/YU4PxXfO8S0?t=1m11s
From what I remember in Mame the background just pans around, disjointed feeling.
The Nebuluray effects have been emulated for a while, not 100% perfect (and it breaks the sprites in places for now) but a lot closer to that video than they used to be…
@Haze: Ah thank you for fixing that for the next update. Quick question, does this mean that the “proper” Stage 3 music (6:45 of the reference video of zu4989 playing the game as the dolphin) will have the correct instruments while playing too, or will it still sound wrong until someone figures out the issue?
I’ve not specifically changed it, but it sounds OK to me?
https://youtu.be/DVBO66HM3oM?t=9m38s is from MAME now
https://youtu.be/nyAQPrkt_a4?t=6m45s is the reference position
the OKI rom isn’t banked, and the descramble on the sound command seems correct, so the instruments should be fine (I’m not even sure it uses any OKI samples for the music, sounds like it’s all FM to me?) The only thing that could be off a bit overall is the OKI vs YM balance?
(I also fixed the video priorities, so sprites go above / under the things they’re meant to, including the clipping at the top of the screen for the fish that pass over the screen, and the ‘next’ pieces under the tilemap)