Bubble Bubble

In the comments of my update about Nostradamus an original reference video for another game I’d emulated a long time ago was posted. That game was Aquarium by Excellent System, the video was this one by YouTuber ‘zu4989’

The post was made in relation to an audio issue in the emulation, now, the driver was done long before I really had any idea how to hook up audio chips, so that side of thing was done by somebody else (R. Belmont from memory?) but with a better understanding of these things myself now I decided to take a look.

The basic issue was that the wrong music was being played at the wrong times.

Initially I thought it might be a simple case of a bad modernization, old versions of MAME required you to leave a gap in the CPU region where you loaded a ROM if RAM was present for 8-bit CPUs (Z80 etc.) Newer versions don’t have this flaw and as a result a lot of drivers were cleaned up to remove that hack and handle things properly, it looked on the surface like the rom loading on Aquarium had been updated, but the modernized banking code was pointing to the wrong places (it was looking for 7 banks of 0x8000 from an offset of 0x18000 in the z80 region, which actually exceeded the size of the region and could have potentially caused crashes if the final banks were actually banked in)

However, even fixing that, the music did NOT match the reference videos provided.

Looking more closely at the banking writes the game was making revealed a little more, we were using the bottom 3 bits of the register, so writes of 0x00, 0x01, 0x02 … up to 0x07 would select different banks. What the game was actually writing was 0x0, 0x1, 0x2, 0x3 and 0x10, 0x11, 0x12, 0x13, nothing else. At this point it was clear that we were using the wrong banking bits, the correct bits to use were the bottom 2 bits, and the 4th bit.

Each bank contains a difference piece of music, so by cross-referencing with the video again I was able to establish which bank write related to each real bank, and re-order the above bank select bits into the proper bank value (bit 0x01 -> 0x01, bit 0x10 -> 0x02, bit 0x02 -> 0x04) with that done, the music was fixed. This scrambling isn’t too surprising, the driver already had a descramble function for the OKI commands.

I’ve recorded a video of the game with the correct music being played, (CHEATS ARE ENABLED TO MAKE DEMONSTRATING ALL THE LEVELS EASIER) You can cross-reference it with the video linked above if you want

The reference video also showed a number of cases where our priority handling wasn’t correct, namely the top border should have been chopping the large fish sprites and wasn’t, the large fish sprites also needed to go under the insert coin text (already correct) but at the same time needed to be shown above the bottom part of the NEXT text. Furthermore the smaller sprites showing the next pieces to appear needed to go underneath the tilemap. All those cases were fixed. The background colour was also incorrect, this wasn’t really visible anywhere except on the Winners Don’t Use Drugs screen, but I fixed that while I was at it as it was obvious even without a reference.