Archive for February, 2019

Some of the better known JAKKS Pacific products were the ones based off popular arcade games, late home ports of classic 80s titles. These were some of the last times these games were ported, rather than simply emulated as is traditionally the case now.

That means the games have their own sets of quirks etc. due to either design choices to make the games more suitable for the target platform, or errors / lack of care in the porting.

With the now 20 donations from the previous donation drive, one of the things we picked up was the GameKeyReady Ms. Pacman 5-in-1 unit, and 2 GameKeys to go with it (one has arrived, the other has not yet)

Like all the JAKKS stuff so far this runs on SunPlus architecture. There are imperfections with the MAME emulation still, mostly noticeable with the sound, but otherwise all games in the collection play well.

With Ms. Pacman you can see how the game was squashed a little to fit on a horizontal screen.




Pole Position seems to be the weakest of the ports, the game difficulty is considerably less, and best I can tell you have no brake input. The system has 2 digital buttons, one is accelerate, the other is change gear (there’s also a 3rd on the front for the menu) there was however a special spinny joystick for the analog steering, which makes it a nice little addition anyway.




Galaga is Galaga, it feels like a solid port to me.




Xevious again seems to play well, the vertical area is cut off a little, and so maybe there are a few more shots coming from off-screen, but it doesn’t seem to impact playability, was a better choice than squashing the graphics or trying to implement a ‘smart’ scrolling, which never works well in a vertical scrolling game as it distorts bullet trajectory etc.




Mappy also feels like a solid port, stages and bonus levels intact, gameplay is challenging. There’s a slight vertical scroll to compensate for the playfield being larger than the screen, but it’s handled well.

You might say ‘why bother’ when it comes to emulating these, as you can just run the originals in MAME, but at least to me, part of the MAME journey is to document the paths each IP was taken on, and as these are official licensed ports, they’re part of that journey, and as they’re running on an entirely different architecture to the originals (the SunPlus ‘unsp’ core is certainly different to the ‘z80’ etc.) they’re interesting to study from that point of view too.

From an emulation point of view, MAME does need work, there’s an odd glitch where after saving the scores (because yes, all these on the GameKeyReady unit save scores to internal memory) a sound channel goes missing. Strangely Disney Friends suffers from a similar issue, but in that case ALL sound goes missing. Hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of it.

Thanks again to everybody who has been putting money forward, it’s really helping to source these and cover the unit costs and shipping costs for getting them where they need to go.

I mentioned Game Keys, and I’ll cover those in a future update.

Thanks to the 19 people who donated, we’ve managed to pick up a whole bunch of JAKKS TV stuff which is now en route to Sean. The first thing to arrive was one of the relatively easy dumping cases for Sean (already knew how he was going to handle it) so here is JAKKS Pacific Dragon Ball Z.

Note, there were no specific requests to be credited in the messages with the donations, if you donated and wish to be credited then let me know, otherwise I have to respect your right to privacy. Without specific requests I’m just going to list the number of people who donated :-)

The DragonBall Z Plug and Play is a 3-in-1

The game I was most curious about in it was the Pinball. This one actually led to an emulation fix, because it requires the raster interrupt to repeat, even without the triggers being rewritten; it is used to split the screen between the dot matrix display at the top and playfield + sprites at the bottom. Overall it’s a pinball game, it plays fast (60 fps) and while the flipped physics seem a bit weird it’s actually alright, it has tilt/nudge features, saves high scores, and you could play competitively for score on it with a friend I’m sure.

The second game, Kamehameha Assault, clearly takes influence from the NeoGeo title Battle Flip Shot, you bounce around a ball trying to hit targets, if you hit the target you steal it, but the CPU can steal back. You can also knock the CPU player off their feet by firing at them, including special attacks. I don’t think these units were linkable (although I could be wrong) so it’s VS CPU only, but overall, it manages to provide a challenging experience.

The third game, Buto-Retsuden, is a Vs. Fighting title, with a bit of a story too. I guess it wouldn’t be a DBZ game without a fighting mode.

Overall I think this one is a decent package, good variety in the games, and some level of challenge means there’s always a reason to come back to it, especially the Pinball part.

Thanks again to everybody who donated, and to Sean for taking care of the hardware side of things.

Here is a video of the Pinball game running in MAME.

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As MAME is the only choice for Gamate emulation on a PC, some MAME users and readers might be happy to know one of the rarest Gamate cartridges was dumped earlier today, and will be documented in the Software Lists for MAME 0.207.

The game, Fortress of Fierceness, has a part code / serial of C1050, and was relased, we believe, in 1991. Gamate emulation has been another side project between Peter Wilhelmsen and me, with Peter taking care of sourcing / buying / dumping the cartridges, and me doing the emulation of the system in MAME. This one took a long time to track down, but works well under emulation, and is actually a decent game all things considered.

It’s a maze shooter, run around, kill enemies so that the room unlocks and you can move on to the next screen, collect weapons, find a special key to open a specific door that lets you progress, find the hostage and free them. The levels have passwords etc. and overall it’s well executed. Not sure why this one is rare, easily one of the better games on the platform.

For those not aware of what the Gamate is, it was released as a competitor the the original GameBoy, although the hardware is different in almost every possible way.

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The Radica Baseball series is an interesting one, 3 very different looking games across 2 hardware platforms.

From what I’ve gathered online many consider the original release to be the best one, it has very simple gameplay and a serious look to it, while the sequel has a pre-rendered cartoon look, and the 3rd game is on inferior hardware.

The first game was also subject to a product recall due to the bat separating while in use, potentially causing damage to surroundings, or injury. It’s interesting to note that it’s one of the only motion control games that does not have the warning about using it too close to the TV etc. appearing on startup. Relatively early days for this kind of thing.

Anyway Sean managed to dump said original game in the series, it’s one that had been sitting around for a while after Peter picked it up. It runs, although I haven’t mapped the analog inputs yet. You can tell it’s an earlier piece of coding too because it fails to initialize the sound base register for example, just relying on the default location in memory, it also uses a darker than usual palette for the XaviX logo, which was already very dark, causing it to be near invisible the way I scale the palette. Hopefully the controls will be easy to map when I start looking at them.

The donation drive below has gone pretty well, we’ve managed to pick up a whole bunch of JAKKS units and have them sent to Sean for analysis. I’ve mostly picked ones I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to handle, but there are a few oddball ones in there too. If anybody still wants to send money this way I’m not going to say no, there are still plenty of items we could potentially pick up.

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There’s even an old TV advert for this one on YouTube

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As people are hopefully aware, and, if they’ve been following, will have likely seen from the 7 updates already done in January
One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven (and plenty of those before that) Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve
I’ve been doing a lot of work with Sean Riddle, Peter Wilhelmsen and others to emulate a whole bunch of old TV game systems, XaviX based, SunPlus based and otherwise.

Some people helped with funding for cartridges earlier a few months back (for which we’re very grateful) and we’ve also invested a lot of our own money into buying up systems for analysis so that we can eventually emulate them too (as I write this there is something like $500 worth of stuff, if not more. being shipped around that Peter and myself have put own own money towards)

However, I’m going to do a first here, and a first in the almost 20 years I’ve been doing emulation, and actually ask if people can gift me some donations directly, so that I can pick up some additional items for this venture that I feel would be useful. I think it’s important to get hold of as many of these kind of thing as we can while there are people active who can process them, and since I currently have no income of my own, it is a struggle paying for these out of pocket.

The following link can be used

If we can raise something like $300 that would help buy a number of interesting bits and pieces and/or help cover shipping for people who have things they want to send. If you want to be credited leave a note with the donation. I’d really appreciate any help people can provide; a lot of this stuff is probably just going to end up forgotten

Anyway, on to the CURRENT update… Starting with some XaviX stuff

In 2004, Radica got a license from Electronic Arts to produce an SSX themed Plug and Play TV game and ended up releasing a TV game running on XaviX based technology. This is therefore probably the most obscure ‘officially licensed’ SSX game there is. It runs on the oldest style XaviX hardware, which really surprised me as visually there’s a lot going on; it’s an impressive looking game, especially compared to the earlier Snowboarder release. It uses entirely digital controls and will be marked as working in MAME 0.207

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What is interesting is that Radica reissued the game 2 years later, but with the SSX theme stripped out entirely, presumably because the license to sell the SSX product had expired by that point. The re-released title was simply called Play TV Snowboarder.

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Maybe more interesting is that Radica ALREADY had a game called Play TV Snowboader, from 2002. After giving this a good testing I’ve decided to mark it as working for 0.207 as well. It’s much more primitive than the newer game, but still, I’m surprised the newer game didn’t have a ‘2’ appended to the title.

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Another XaviX game, an seemingly quite an uncommon one at this point (or at least one that’s in a market full of so many products with a similar name and thus difficult to find) is Barbie Dance Party. It’s a ‘watch and copy’ game, a bit like Simon, but in this case, because it’s aimed at kids, it simply tells you what you need to press. It’s not unpleasant, despite the scathing reviews you can find of the product; I guess it’s just a bit dated for a 2002 product, offering basic tunes and very simple gameplay.

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We also toned down Shaggy’s power a little, so he can no longer walk on water as seen in previous screenshots. This actually turned out to not be a CPU bug at all, but a bug in the SoC emulation, the random number generator of all things, apparently unexpected / out of range value cause bad things to happen. I started to track down the issue looking at what I thought was an unrelated thing in one of the Disney minigames, and Mooglyguy worked out the problem originated with the number generation, the fix here was entirely unexpected! Still needs the save feature looking at tho.

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MooglyGuy also mapped the inputs for Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, which turned out to be analog (with a rather large dead-zone, making it difficult to play with digital controls) Both the base games and game key games are playable although sound is pretty rough still.

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In addition to those, and other little bug fixes, I also started reverse engineering the earlier hardware type used by Classic Arcade Pinball, although having only a single game to work with for this chip type makes conclusions more difficult to deduce from the behavior.

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Finally for this update, a mention of Radica Play TV Basketball. This one runs on ELAN type hardware and like quite a few others was developed by FarSight Studios, and is one of those annoying things with a motion tracking camera, so not really sure how to map the inputs right now. Still some work needed on the video/audio emulation as well.

If you’ve scrolled down this far and are still interested, then please, if you’re able to, consider throwing a donation to the PayPal address shown at the top of this post, it will help allow for more updates along these lines in the future. I understand that people would like to see arcade work too, but for now this is what is keeping me interested in the project, so naturally the arcade side of things will benefit too from my continued involvement.