Here is another one I didn’t add myself, but feel is worth highlighting.
I’ve mentioned in past updates that every single Crazy Cross I’ve ever seen sold has actually been the Japanese version with the sellers simply using the ‘Crazy Cross’ title because it was better known outside of Japan under that name due to the home releases. I was actually very much doubting an English language version existed for the arcades, because even if there had been an Asia or Korean release in English we’d never seen a trace of it.
Well, I always love to be proved wrong over cases like this, and the other day Arzeno Fabrice* (aka zozo) actually found and dumped the proper English version of the game, and more surprising is that it isn’t some obscure Asia / Korea release, but an actual European release.
Note, due to a bug in MAME at the moment you have to go through the EEPROM initialization sequence EVERY time you boot the game or it will fail the a bunch of ROM checks (that’s reset with F2 held down) This has bug has been around for a few versions now, so there’s no guarantee it will be fixed when this hits a public release. A couple of other games in the GX driver currently suffer from similar issues.
Again Brian Troha added the dump, I’m just highlighting the finding because I thought some people here would find it interesting.
* he’s been dumping a few things lately, including an interesting earlier set of Sega’s Borench which appears to have buggy initialization code, causing sound to fail if NVRAM is corrupt – something they addressed in the later game revision.
Thanks for all news.. Great job. Never give up. Cheers.
On the subject of merging drivers, is it perhaps a possibility that bublbobl.c and mexico86.c are the same hardware?
They are from around the same time period an both are based around two z80’s running at 6mhz.
The video sections are certainly similar, although the bubble bobble emulation has advances to use the PROM for some screen layout stuff, kicknrun might implement that in a different way.
I imagine a shared device could be made for some of the early Taito video systems that use common chip configurations, although how many drivers it would cover is unknown.
It always seemed quite strange to me that Taito would have so many different hardware configurations to achieve such similar results, so it seemed quite logical to me that the video hardware might be the same and they just added the required amount Z80’s, various sound chips or protection as needed.
Although having boards designed just to run one or two games seems to be the case with other developers before things started becoming more standardised towards the end of the 80’s, so I guess it wouldn’t be uncommon.
A lot of the earlier boards predated the use of customs, or used very simple ones with a lot of game specific TTL meaning you often ended up with similar but not quite the same implementations across games.
It was advantageous at the time, because obviously back then the hardware was more limited (and expensive) so if you could design something around the needs of your game then it made sense to do so. Also using slightly different hardware made life a bit more difficult for bootleggers / people wanting to hack boards to run different games.
When we’re talking about manufacturers like Comad they didn’t actually use original Capcom boards but cloned the behavior of them in more generic programmble chips. Snow Bros, Tumble Pop and Gals Panic were popular pieces of hardware to clone, other manufacturers cloned spriteless System 16 boards, NMK boards and more; typically ones that were also commonly bootlegged! Pushman for example doesn’t actually run on a Capcom board, but the memory map and video hardware behavior is 100% identical to the Capcom titles mentioned, for games like Gals Pinball Comad changed quite a lot of things instead at the same time as cloning the hardware, but you can still trace the roots back to Tecmo’s Super Pinball Action.
Some drivers are said to be very similar to others, can “NY Captor”, “TNZS” and “Bank Panic” be merged? Not with each other of course! “NY Captor” with “Lady Frog”, “Bank Panic” with “Appoooh” and “Dr. Micro”. “TNZS” with “Cherry Chance”, “Championship Bowling”, and others that use the same Seta chip?
No, the ones you mention shouldn’t be merged, sharing the video chips is correct (which is why I devicified those and shared them a long time ago) The rest of the hardware is definitely not the same even if the same CPUs are present. Decisions tend to be made by unique traits any piece of hardware might have that could identify it as part of a family.
There are some drivers I feel should be split up instead, I don’t feel Dragon Gun has enough in common with anything else in Deco 32 to live there for example ;-)
The only thing that needs a merge on which I’m aware of is the trio thepit.c / suprridr.c / timelimt.c drivers.
In the source there are a few comments about drivers that could be merged. I don’t know if they’re up to date, nor if it’s really useful to do it.
aquarium.c:/* the hardware is similar to gcpinbal.c, probably should merge it at some point */
bigstrkb.c: maybe it could be merged with megasys1.c, could be messy
midas.c: This driver should be merged with neogeo.c
timelimt.c:- driver should probably be merged with suprridr.c
zodiack.c:- can eventually be merged with espial.c
btw Roberto has moved his site to
http://www.robertofresca.com/
and has some interesting news about a Spanish game called Coco Loco
Some of them maybe.
midas.c is clearly copied from NeoGeo, but the actual NeoGeo driver implements a lot of hardware tested limits etc. and it’s unlikely the midas.c hardware is even close to the same in those areas (it has 8bpp tiles instead of the NeoGeo 4bpp ones for a start)
maybe you could convert all the NG video to devices and add a ‘modern bootleg’ mode for it that ignores some of the limits and draws 8bpp tiles, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
such cases will be interesting with the NES clones in the future too, a number of later Chinese NES rip-offs don’t follow many of the original rules / limitations of the NES video chips, but at the same time are clearly derived from them.