The Huntin’ series are, as the titles suggest, Hunting games. Specifically they’re deer hunting plug and play titles released by Radica.
Huntin’ 1 and 2 run on XaviX hardware, whereas Huntin’ 3 appears to be a cost reduced version of Huntin ‘2 running on Elan EU3A14 hardware.
Both Huntin’2 and Huntin’3 were giving me some issues with emulation. Huntin’2 would crash if you opened up the pause menu or Trophy Room screens while Huntin’3 was missing many video emulation features.
I’ve spent the past week improving both of them. For Huntin’3 I added Ram based tiles, proper palette selections, proper priorities, proper bitplane depth selection and a rowscroll mode. There is still some kind of Windowing effect missing (used on the Trophy Room screen for highlighting and the timer in the Target Range mode)
Debugging Huntin’2 was trickier, as the CPU emulation would just crash when entering the screens and the underlying code on the XaviX titles is far from simple (it’s a complex task based engine with many pointers etc.) I figured out in the end that it appeared to be crashing as a result of stack corruption, with the stack descending too far in some cases and overwriting pointers that had been placed to other tasks. I had a hunch that maybe the extra bytes used by the extended Far Call and Far Return opcodes on the XaviX processor might be to blame, so I tried placing those in an extra, private, stack, and the crashing stopped. I don’t know for sure if that’s the correct solution, but it does solve my issue and seems feasible as it would maintain 6502 compatibility better that way.
I haven’t yet mapped the guns in any of the games, but it’s getting to the stage where that should be more realistic. Sound emulation on Huntin’3 is very poor due to incorrect ADPCM decoding.
Huntin’2 is on the left, Huntin’3 is on the right. I’ve tried to pick similar shots for each game so you can easily see how Huntin’3 is just a reskinned uglier version of Huntin’2 (and both are inferior games to the original Huntin’)
Haze, can you help me somehow, to contact Andreas Naive… Looks like it is not his real name, rather pseudonim? I trying over facebook and twitter but without success. I found only one mail that is connected with him (@github) but he still not respond, 8 days passed? I have some interesting questions for him and hiss great mathematical/statistic analysis skills, but not know how to comunicate? thanks anyway.. my mail is included with comment (mm…@gmail.com)
It is possible he doesn’t want to be contacted… He has github accounts as you found etc. if there are no further public details there I’m not sure what to say.
Haze, this question has nothing to do with the Radica emulation, but about the Sega Genesis/Virtua Racing. I noticed in the manual for Virtua Racing it mentions a steering wheel peripheral the game supports that never came out. If memory serves me correctly this was to be the same racing wheel that Sega released for the Saturn. While you were investigating Virtua Racing to reverse engineer the SVP stuff did you ever run across anything in the code about the analog wheel?
The VR work wasn’t done by me, although I’d be quite surprised if any such code exists. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the ‘steering wheel’ was just digital at that point as it wasn’t even until later in the Saturn life that Sega really pushed Analog controls.
(trivia, the Radica Outrun 2019 unit just appears to be an unmodified ROM from the Sega cartridges, it might have a ‘wheel’ control, but that is just the digital inputs again)