I’ve made some progress with ‘The Gladiator’ by IGS
this can’t be considered working yet because it needs quite a few hacks to get it this far, the intro doesn’t play (boots straight to title screen, crashes on game over), and it only seems to operate in freeplay mode, scrolling is broken, and sound + inputs fail once you reach the 2nd level….
thanks to rtw for running some tests on the PCB
nice job !! continue
olso i wish you emulate this game
Xtreme Rally / Off Beat Racer : emulation is not complete
i will be happy when i see you progress game very fast
Nice work guys
Haze not give up.
Best of mame are you.
Thanks for your effort.
Cool stuff. Could you put a bit of the code up into your next update? What I am thinking is if you show how to fill in the code and what the different structures do you may attract more people to the project? You even have a couple of cool bugs you probably will fix and you can show what you are thinking?
oh very nice, haze
i’m happy to see your works.
good luck:)
Some guys on these past days need to learn that you need some respect for your awesome work in this project. Keep it going master!
well the main issue here is missing code..
The Gladiator uses the later type of IGS027A chip that includes an execute-only area.
The internal rom is 0x4000 bytes, we’ve dumped most of that now, hence being able to show the screenshots above at all
The problem is the first 0x188 bytes of that is however execute-only, meaning you can’t read it not even from code executing on the ARM, you simply get whatever is currently on the bus instead of the data. Various tricks have been tried to read it, none work, even code in the execute-only area can’t read the area as data.
Recently a bootleg of The Killing Blade Plus / EX showed up (which is probably the most significant thing in 0.151 even if it wasn’t mentioned) which gives us some insight into things, so some parts of the missing code have been simulated based on that game, but it isn’t good enough, and there is probably code unique to the gladiator hiding in there.
basically somebody is going to have to pull apart the game code and try to guess the missing bits of ARM code in order to get it any further… with the majority dumped (the missing 0x188 byte is a tiny fraction of the internal ROM, 392 / 16384 to be exact) that isn’t exactly an impossible mission, but neither is it really something that suits my skills too well..
very good!
Great pgm progress,I love your work,hope you can also get full pgm sound system
Friggin’ awesome Haze! This was No.2 on my “waiting-to-be-emulated” list, right after Zero Team! I knew it was just a question of time when this will be playable. Keep up the great work!
Well done.
Haze, you rock!!!
Excuse me Haze but i would known if will be reinsert Cave CV1K driver(with video improvements) on the next Mame version(0.152). Thanks and I’m happy that you came back.
Don´t release on MAME 0.152, just released on MAME 0.153. Because, you need more time to fix that errors, a lot of work as been done on this hard devil proteccions, and you still beat a lot of respect on this trolls around here.
Thank you so much for your hard work.
My Dream come true again.
can the same tricks be applied to SPECTRAL VS GENERATION ?? is alsoa PGM game :) good luck and thanks for the new game
you could probably do the same to “Spectral Vs. Generation” and “Happy 6” to get the readable part of the internal ROM, but as you can see from this, that doesn’t actually guarantee you a playable game because the missing part is still important.
There is a slight further complication with rom types that might make the exact trick used more difficult to pull off, and the guy running the tests for me has neither game.
It’s a lot of work for something that still ends up incomplete, and ultimately will still need another (probably direct hardware probing) technique later down the line.
I’m not sure people quite grasp the magnitude of the problem with these games, I make absolutely no guarantees I can make this ‘working’. The fact that it executes a completely unknown and impossible to extract piece of code on game over is highly worrying, that code could be doing anything, and the issue of not knowing what the proper code startup flow should be isn’t exactly trivial either (and again could be missing an entire jump table of calls)
XingXing can help you (i guess) i’m not guarantee 100%.
I fully understand the complexities i keep my fingers crossed but understand it might not be possible
any time soon
I can take or leave this game but I have to say that you’ve helped emulate things you once thought were impossible to emulate. You can DO EET!
Nice work,this is my long-awaited game, see this news, I’m so happy. I wish you success in your work, good luck! man.
Glad that your back working on the games again. :)
Yes he can, and is showing potencial on MAME History.
Somebody point AnimalBear towards a fucking English Dictionary. Even Google Translate can’t understand his broken fucking “Engrish” !!!