Another thing that Sean managed to dump was the BIOS for the LeapFrog ClickStart ‘My First Computer’ which was a SunPlus based learning system, similar to the V.Smile etc. Currently the controls stop responding almost instantly, but it’s definitely something there is a high chance of seeing progress on over the course of the year.

Some cartridges for it were also dumped, here is a selection of screenshots.

While still on the subject of these SunPlus based educational systems, MooglyGuy also made a whole bunch of improvements to the V.Smile system, actually bringing a large part of the library to playable status, that deserves and update of its own at some point tho.

I’ll cover some more SunPlus things in part 3.

January has been a busy month, although so far there is relatively little in the way of ‘complete’ work to show for it. Sean Riddle has been working in overdrive to dump a lot of Plug and Play TV games, and many of them show promise under emulation, although due custom controls and different ways of hooking things up that are often employed not many have been elevated to ‘working’ state. I figured it was about time to at least put up some pictures of the progress tho.

First up, the entire Huntin’ series by Radica was dumped. The first game runs on XaviX hardware and is apparently a decent game. You can’t play it in MAME yet because the light gun isn’t hooked up.

The 2nd game in the Huntin’ series also runs on XaviX hardware, the presentation was improved here, but from reviews I’ve read the gameplay took a hit, offering a less satisfying simulation with some major oversights compared to the first game. Again the gun isn’t hooked up, and curiously it crashes when you bring up the pause menu, which could point to a useful edge case in the XaviX emulation if I could track down why it happens, as it stands, it’s annoying.

The 3rd game in the Huntin’ series saw a switch from XaviX hardware to hardware with a SoC manufactured by Elan. This is an odd choice because the Elan hardware seems like a total downgrade from XaviX, presumably it was a cost saving measure. There aren’t many games dumped on the Elan style hardware, so emulation is much more primitive with many visual effects missing. The good news, from an emulation point of view, is that Huntin’ 3 pushes this hardware much more than the other dumped games so should open the way to some improvements. The actual game seems to follow the exact same formula as Huntin’2, reusing many assets, often downgraded. Again no gun emulation yet.

2005 actually saw a number of games released by Radica on this Elan hardware, another Sean dumped is Baseball 3, developed by Farsight Studios. Again I think people consider this to be a downgrade from the original Baseball game (undumped) but this time it isn’t a simple remake of Baseball 2. Analog controls aren’t emulated, so you can’t pitch or bat.

Another release on Elan hardware is Real Swing Golf, this is almost the same game as Golden Tee Home Edition, also developed by Farsight Studios and dumped some months prior. In this case there is no Golden Tee license, and the controller is different, using a motion tracked club instead of a trackball. This also tells me that sprites have their own priority values, something I need to implement for the menu text to render correctly. Analog control not yet emulated.

The other known games on this hardware; the aforementioned Golden Tee Home, as well as ConnecTV Football were improved slightly in terms of making use of the correct registers for various modes etc. but still need a fair bit of work.

Another case of Radica switching hardware for a sequel is Football 2. Football and Madden Football both ran on XaviX while Football 2 runs on a SunPlus based platform. There is an emulation problem where sprites don’t always appear in training mode, also input mappings are unclear; in the original Football games the ball was strictly an analog input, using system timers and event interrupts to calculate the time between a switch going on and off based on how hard you threw the ball, here the game responds to a digital input, it’s unclear if that is an intentional change or a debug feature, it is also unclear how Player 2 maps, assuming it ever shipped in a 2 Player unit (Radica had a tendency to leave 2 Player options in games even where they couldn’t be used) The actual game is very like the original Football but with added Powerups, unsurprising as all of them were developed by FarSight, although that makes the switch of hardware even more curious.

This next one is actually mostly playable, and only marked as NOT WORKING because the difficult select hasn’t been found (the machine has OFF and 2 difficulty settings as one 3 position slider, and the game select as another 3 position slider) The game in question is Mattel Classic Sports 3-in-1, an attempt from the mid 2000s to turn the old handheld electronic games into something you could play on a TV instead, long before anybody was emulating this kind of thing for real. This runs on SunPlus based hardware.

Some more interesting stuff did happen in January with XaviX emulation and SunPlus emulation, which I’ll do a further update about in a bit.

The previous few updates have been about Japanese music games running on XaviX hardware. Those games were quite popular in Japan back in the day.

One lesser known piece of history is Radica’s attempt to bring such a game to the non Japanese markets. While Radica flooded the market with a terrible licensed Tetris game and other things using novelty controllers one of their less talked about products is actually one of the better ones. Opus is basically the same gameplay concept as Popira, but with a fixed library of songs (no cartridge support) and a few extra features, such as Smartbombs to clear the screen if you think you’re about to lose, and a ‘Red Ball’ mode, where you a ball will randomly be coloured red and you have to let it drop instead of hitting it.

This was also one of the trickier ones to dump. Many of the other XaviX games have had TSOP pads near the ROM glob, which could have wires attached to them allowing the readout of the ROM data as if it were a standard ROM with that pinout. Opus, and a number of others do not have that, the traces go straight from the ROM glob to the CPU glob with no simple indication of which line is which and no easy place to solder on wires. Luckily we have Sean, and he managed to trace out the lines from each glob and use his skillset to work out what each line was for and hook up wires directly to the traces allowing for the ROM to be dumped that way. There are a number of other XaviX games (and Jakks games) that will need similar treatment (although many use smaller PCBs and will require even more delicate work)

Compared to all the novelty controller junk that was put out this holds up remarkably well, even if the graphics are maybe a little ugly. There’s an unemulated ‘Static TV’ effect that’s used in some of the menus; it can be seen in the only original hardware video of this thing on YouTube. As for an emulation video, here you go.

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Thanks also to Peter Wilhelmsen for purchasing this item.

I mentioned that I’d do an update showing Dance Dance Revolution running with some of the compatible e-kara cartridges.

The first thing you’ll probably notice if you boot with one of the cartridges inserted is that the Konami copyright is rendered in a less pleasing colour. Not sure why this was done, maybe to make it stand out more on a TV, it seems to be an intentional change tho.

Beyond that, it’s really just different lists of songs, the presentation doesn’t change.

Cartridge P-01

Cartridge P-03



Cartridge P-04

I say the presentation doesn’t change, but Cartridge P-04 is a bit strange, almost immediately upon starting the modes with the yellow background it flips the background to a blue colour, which means the characters don’t really blend in very well. This only seems to happen the first time, so could just be a bug that’s been introduced in the software. Will probably need to check it on the hardware, although it might even not happen if the game has already been played and there is data in backup ram.

The P4 cart also gives a 2002 copyright, and contains an SEEPROM, which doesn’t seem to be used by Family Mat, but can be used by Popira for saving how many of the songs you’ve completed.

Taiko De Popira is a variation of the Popira game featured in the previous update. Instead of 4 digital buttons it uses 2 analog drums. Otherwise it’s very similar in terms of gameplay. The analog controls make it more annoying to hook up in MAME however, with my current implementation seemingly hitting the drums with giant strength multiple times and causing some ugly sounds. The base ROM this time appears to present a story.

Like the others, this also allows you to plug in certain e-kara cartridges to expand the library, here is it running with DC0005 (TV Pop Volume 9)

Still needs work, especially the analog controls, and the SEEPROM saving, but you can get an idea from how it runs so far.

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Again thanks to Sean for taking care of the dumping and providing some hardware insight, and thanks to Shoutime for helping secure these things in Japan and getting them shipped out.

Another unit that was picked up in Japan by Shoutime, this time with me putting the money towards it, is Takara’s Popira TV Game. It was sent to Sean who managed to read out the ROM from the unit.

This is another XaviX title, and as such the sound emulation isn’t quite right yet (tempo is too slow, envelopes are missing) and won’t be marked as working until those issues are solved, but the basic game is playable in the XaviX emulation I’ve been working on in MAME over the past few months. The unit I picked up is the original single player Yellow version.

Like the Dance Dance Revolution Family Mat below, this is also compatible with certain e-kara cartridges (not a huge number of them, but enough) expanding the song library if you use them. Unlike Dance Dance Revolution Family Mat, 2 of these are already dumped. If you use a cartridge you get a slightly different title screen.



You can see below the song selection screen for one of the cartridges “gc0002 – BHT Volume 1 (Japan) (GC0002-BHT)” being used in both Popira and e-kara



and some gameplay shots of that one running on the Popira



Here is the same for another one of the cartridges “gc0006 – BHT Volume 3 (Japan) (GC0006-BHT)”

I also made some videos; you can see the music is too slow because the % bar reaches 100% long before any of the songs end.

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I also made a video of the DDR Family Mat for the previous update (again music is too slow right now)

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… at least with emulation I can cheat to unlock the Superhard mode in Popira ;-)

Some other stuff was dumped too, I’ll get to that in a later update.

While I probably should do an update about the recent SSV addition Pastel Island because there’s plenty to say about the way it uses special effects etc. and it follows up on the previous SSV posts well, for the now I’m making a post about something else.

One of the interesting things about XaviX is how it was used in all sorts of products. While researching the e-kara stuff it came to my attention that Konami put out a Dance Dance Revolution TV Game in Japan that could make use of a handful of the e-kara carts, so I became interested in seeing what it was.

The unit was known as “Dance Dance Revolution Family Mat” and was released in 2001. Peter worked with Shoutime to pick one up in Japan and have it shipped to Sean who dumped it for Christmas. Here are the first emulation shots (I still need to sort out the control hookup, but it doesn’t look complex) I haven’t checked how in sync / out of sync the music is, but since it’s XaviX based I imagine there’s plenty more work to do on that front; I’m hoping it tells me something new when I start digging into it.

This kind of thing, along with the previous work on the Famiclone based Dance Dance Revolution Disney Mix and Dance Dance Revolution Strawberry Shortcake developed by Majesco is the kind of thing that interests me, as it helps to show the lineage, and licensing deals made for poplar titles like this and how different parts of the world got very different products on very different hardware.

We do also have some of the carts used by this so hopefully in a future update I can show the same cart being used in both a DDR Family Mat and e-Kara unit.