Archive for December, 2017

Peter and Morten dumped the internal ROM from Knights of Valour 3, the China / Taiwan / Hong Kong only installment in the series, and first game to make some significant changes to the gameplay formula.

Metallic bypassed an additional check the game makes for an FPGA on the ROM board, and I fixed up a few holes in our video emulation needed to make the game look correct (it runs at a higher resolution of 512×240 pixels) There are still some slightly odd looking visuals in some stages where the bottom row of background tiles is repeated, but I think that’s because those backgrounds were originally designed to run at 224 resolution and IGS were simply hoping nobody would notice.

Here is a video, I don’t play well here because I put the game on the hardest difficult in Service Mode. Video shows the save cards work fine in the MAME emulation anyway :-)

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Here are some screenshots

Morten and Peter managed to dump the internal rom of Dodonpachi Daioujou Tamashii, a Chinese release of Dodonpachi Daioujou on PGM2 hardware that offers an ‘easy’ mode.

extracting this one was more difficult (I’ll update this post / do a new post explaining why later)

unfortunately for now it also appears to expose some more bugs in the MAME ARM core, these are being looked into, but basically a lot of the sprites end up with a value of ‘0’ for palette selection instead of the correct value causing them to be rendered with incorrect colours. There are no additional video attributes being set so it seems logical to conclude it’s a CPU emulation problem at this stage.

Yes, the service mode really renders at the wrong orientation, bit lazy considering they didn’t have a bios to worry about and all the code is on the game boards.

*edit* MetalliC traced down the ARM CPU core bug and fixed it, resulting in correct colours. This also potentially improves things in the GBA driver. This fix might not make 0.193 as it missed the deadline, so unless those in charge of the release decided that it’s important the 0.193 version will have broken colours shown above instead. *edit* Looks like the progress to fix the colours will be in 0.193, unless it gets backed out again at the last minute.

.. and a video of it running in MAME

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Here are the first Work in Progress shots from The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match HERO after Morten Shearman Kirkegaard and Peter Wilhelmsen dumped the internal rom.

They show that the PGM2 emulation still needs work, especially with a missing sprite enable register and screen resolution control. There is also no music at the moment, and a hardlock in attract mode.

*edit* fixed various bugs, made a video. sound is still incorrect but being worked on.

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*edit2* MetalliC improved the sound emulation, it should be good now

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Some pictures for the non-videoy people

This progress will be in MAME 0.193

*edit* Further bug fixes to the audio, stage music doesn’t play over intro if left in attract now.

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The PGM2 system allowed for use of Memory Cards (supplied by the arcade, specific to each game / region) in order to save Character progress. Each card allows for a limited number of saves (500?) but allows you to store items, XP and money your character has acquired and reuse them between playthroughs. For the 0.193 release (or current GIT code) this is supported.

The English language version of Oriental Legend 2 does NOT have this feature (and the game is rebalanced to not require it) however the Chinese version does use it, so knowing how to use it in MAME makes sense.

Anyway, using it…

Once you get to the character select screen you’ll be presented with a 10 second timer to insert a memory card. It’s recommended you pause MAME at this point (with p)

It’s worth noting that without a memory card the bottom 2 characters are locked,you can’t move the cursor over them without inserting a memory card.

Bring up the tab menu, go to File Manager

from filemanager select ‘memcard1’

and from the next menu select ‘create’ as this will allow us to create a blank (default) memory card

Type in the name of your new memory card, with a “.pg2” extension (I used oriental2.pg2) (note, MAME is silly, so pressing p when typing pg2 will actually unpause it, so don’t take too long here)

Select ‘Create’

and you’ll see that the memory card is inserted in memcard slot 1. You can now close the menu with tab

and choose your character (I chose the bottom left one that is now unlocked)

you can now enter a name, I’m not actually sure how this screen works as it’s all very Chinese.

you’ll see that you start the game as level 0, with 1500 gold.

so play it a little bit, level up, collect some gold etc.

At this point (for the purpose of our testing) allow your character to die, so that you get the Game Over message (if your character doesn’t die no progress is saved) Take note, we’re a LV01 character (progressed from LV00) and have 1521 gold pieces.

Quit MAME, reload MAME and get back to the character select screen.

You’ll be prompted with the ‘insert card’ screen you saw before, again it makes sense to pause the game here.

Bring up the tab menu, select file manager, select the first Memcard slot as before

This time, instead of selecting ‘create’ you should scroll down the file browser (or type the name of the filename previously used) and select that file

The game will take a brief moment to read the card, and tell you a value (I believe the number of writes left on the card)

It will then show you equipment you have etc.

And then you’ll be back at the game. Note, the character is ‘LV01’ (not LV00) and has 1521 gold pieces, exactly as it was left when we killed the character off earlier.

Knights of Valour 2 New Legend has a similar feature.

Note, the default (blank) cards have been added to the romsets, so you’ll need updated roms.
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2017/orleg2card/blank_orleg2.zip
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2017/orleg2card/blank_kov2nl.zip

*edit* after some new information about the actual Card Reader came to light here are the new default card images, that include some additional ‘security data’ used as unlock passwords, current GIT requires these, old 256 byte memcard images are invalid.

https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2017/orleg2card/blank_orleg2_new.zip
https://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2017/orleg2card/blank_kov2nl_new.zip
(*edit2* the blank cards are part of the romsets for each game / region)

Thanks to MetalliC for reverse engineering and implementing the Card Reader MCU logic.