David Haywood's Homepage | List of Recent YouTube MAME progress Videos

April 12, 2020 Haze Categories: General News. 9 Comments

This is kinda redundant as you could just check my YouTube channel, but maybe for some people a list of links to videos is preferable, so here are a whole bunch of videos I’ve uploaded of work being done on Plug & Plays stuff in MAME since Christmas. Many things covered in the posts before this didn’t get a video, but I do like to have footage up when I find time to upload it while working on things.

9 Comments

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Moo April 13, 2020

Holy shit! Someone’s been busy with updates. :)

Haze April 13, 2020

Yeah.. it’s easy to get behind with this kind of thing, sometimes it only hits you how much work you’ve done when you sit down and try to cover it all.

Fingers crossed some more donations come in, I did spend a considerable amount of time doing all these writeups, but so far only 2 people have donated since doing them, with 2 donations before I wrote them.

Raising money for unpopular systems is always going to be a challenge, but that’s forever the problem in emulation, people are willing to throw thousands of $ every month at things that aren’t really at risk, or where money isn’t really needed if the material is popular (emulators for the latest systems, frontends etc.) but when it comes to obscure / unpopular / at risk things we really have to fight for every penny, and a lot of the funding does end up coming in the form of kind donations from members of already established preservation groups. (which makes me feel a little guilty as I can’t imagine any of them are raising much either)

I was hoping that doing all these updates would show the sheer amount of work that’s been going on, but instead I’ve actually had more emails asking me to fix other MAME bugs via the email address I provided (that I specifically said wasn’t for emailing me) than support for what we’re doing here :/

I generally dislike having to ask for help with this kind of thing knowing that a lot of people really don’t like it or see it as a worthwhile cause, but our personal pockets certainly aren’t bottomless, and when I do see the things people ARE throwing money at I wonder if I’m right at all for feeling bad about asking.

Moo April 13, 2020

I never messed with any handhelds, beyond the old Mattel LED sports games, myself. In any case, it doesn’t hurt to ask. As you said, there are worse places the money could be going. Luck to you.

gizmomelb April 14, 2020

has the Jakks Pacific C64 been emulated?

Haze April 14, 2020

It’s not by JAKKS, it’s by Mammoth Toys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV

there’s a non-working driver for it, but it’s a hardware clone moreso than anything else, so would take somebody with a deep understanding of the C64 to emulate.

Emu April 15, 2020

Any plans for these plug and plays by Jakks Pacific?

Madden NFL 95 / NHL 95(Single Controller): https://www.ebay.com/itm/333575370730
Madden NFL 95 / NHL 95(Dual Controller): https://www.ebay.com/itm/333571820193
FIFA 96 / NHL 95: https://www.ebay.com/itm/264287967288

Haze April 16, 2020

yes, we have them, Sean was doing some analysis of them last month when Mortal Kombat was dumped as they’re rather similar setups (ROM + SRAM)

the single / dual controllers might contain the same code, we’ll see, could just be the hardware was exposed on one but not the other.

Emu April 17, 2020

Nice work, Haze and Sean! I’m glad that you two are reviving my childhood again with the MAME project. This plug and play by Jakks Pacific was my favorite one when I was growing up so, I’d imagine that you’ve it as well.

Spongebob Plug and Play (2003?): https://www.ebay.com/itm/293526734947

Haze April 17, 2020

We have it, but it’s currently considered ‘undumpable’ because it looks like the ROM and CPU are on the same die (MCU type) meaning there’s no way to directly access the ROM through any trace on the PCB. If you consider that we’re only just at the point where it’s becoming realistic to dump a wide range of MCUs with onboard ROM that are well documented and in regular packages because of the extra difficulty having the ROM onboard adds, then I’m sure you can appreciate how much more difficult that makes things when the MCU type isn’t in a regular package, isn’t documented, and even if test pins that might allow readout were to exist, they’re probably not exposed outside of the epoxy glob.

Sadly this is the case for the other ‘earliest gen’ JAKKS unit too (original Namco, Atari and Activision) Bass Fishing looks funky too.