System 11 recently acquired the PCB for a game called ‘Spider’ (it was actually dumped last month by another dev before being sent off to him)

On the surface the PCB looked practically identical to ‘Twins’ and ‘Hot Block’ which, interestingly enough both live in different drivers in MAME and have things hooked up in rather different ways.

Expecting an easy hook-up I was surprised to find that Spider did not simply drop into the existing driver, or more to the point, it did, but there were issues, mainly a complete lack of ingame sprites and title screen; considering how simple the hardware looked this threw me back a little.

Upon closer inspection I noticed that the game was behaving in a very similar way to another game I’d encountered in the past, Table Tennis Champions. Unfortunately Table Tennis Champions was one of those drivers where things never quite made sense, and I was starting to think the protection chip on that board was involved somehow. The Spider PCB however had no protection chip, blowing a hole in that theory.

What was actually going on took a while to figure out, and ultimately ended up being one of the strangest implementations of a ‘blitter’ I’ve ever come across. The game code writes to an i/o port, after which the next 2 writes to anywhere on the system bus are used as blitter parameters rather than actually falling through to RAM (the write offset is used to set a read offset) and writes to another region after that use those parameters to draw sprite data.

Whether the Twins PCB has this functionality and simply doesn’t use it, or if the FPGA is programmed differently on Spider to add support for the feature I don’t know, but with it hooked up the game became playable.

Things aren’t perfect yet, sometimes sprites remain on the screen when maybe they should be cleared (I need to check my framebuffer clear logic) and the EEPROM isn’t hooked up in the driver (it’s never been hooked up for Twins or Hot Blocks either) so you can’t change the game settings.

The game, as you can see, is a Qix clone, although it has enough unique features to make it interesting – the most significant being that the size of your line is limited by the web power you have available. There are also bonus rounds where you must circle numbers as quickly as possible.

I’ve also poked around a bit with Table Tennis Champions and it’s definitely the same blitter system as this, although there is extra banking I need to take care of with that one, and of course there’s also the protection PIC, although I have a feeling now that it’s simply used to drive the sound.

The PCB was found in Spain, and appears to be yet another original Spanish game.

UME is the complete/combined version of the MAME / MESS project.

Official whatsnew texts for (MAME, MESS) provide full details of what has changed since 0.158.

This is based on the official ‘mame0159’ tagged version at GitHub.

UME 0.159 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(source matches official mamedev.org source distribution, here for completeness)

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.159 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools

Windows SDL builds
32-bit SDL MAME / MESS / UME for Windows
64-bit SDL MAME / MESS / UME for Windows

Points of Interest

0.159 could be the point where interesting work being done in the MESS side of the project really overtakes the work being done on the arcade hardware.

Recent work on decapping / reading out MCUs from old electronic toys, as well as lots of work from hap on the CPU core to run them means that those represent some of the more noteworthy pieces of progress in this release. A number of them really need good quality external artwork files if they’re to be fully playable. Obviously the scope for this kind of work, and potential it has is expansive; we might even see a number of the things currently handled by MADrigal’s simulators emulated at a CPU level if they turn out to use MCUs we can read and emulate, and running the original game code is obviously a big step up from simulation of all the game logic.

There are some bits of MAME progress that you might find interesting however, obviously there’s PuzzLove shown below, and Super Miss World (which is an alt version of Miss World ’96) but some of the clones are potentially a bit spicier.

The versions of Asura Buster and Macross II are versions that were sent to Japanese arcade magazines for review and contain built in ‘pause’ functionality when holding down a button (in Asura Buster it’s the otherwise unused Player 1 Button 4, in Macross II the service coin button does the trick rather than adding a credit) I suspect the ‘STOP VERSION’ we see on some CPS2 games has the same meaning (there’s a Vampire Hunter set with it in MAME) although I don’t know the button press for that yet. While these are rare versions of games I don’t think you can call them prototypes, as they’re likely built from the final code, just customized by the original manufacturer for the magazines so that capturing screenshots was easier. A version of Ultra X Weapons was added from the same source, that actually has a newer build date than the existing set, although I’ve left it as a clone due to the likelihood of it being a review build rather than one intended for arcade use. Thanks of course must go to ShouTime for tracking down these rarities.

R.Belmont sums up some Apple 2/3 fixes and improvements that appear in 0.159

Lots of drivers have also had their save states improved in this release in addition to the usual bout of modernizations to bring drivers up to scratch with current standards.

Again in the MESS side the recently added Gamate (obscure handheld system made to compete with the GameBoy) driver has seen a number of fixes, including the addition of sound.

Manuel Assoni dumped a Korean game for which there was previously very little information about online.

The game is called ‘PuzzLove’ and it’s by Para (Paradise of Amusement) so it slotted into the driver we have for their other game (Silver Millennium) however there were some graphical errors with the sprites (wrong sizes, flickering). The Silver Millennium hardware is one of the many Korean hardware types using Tumble Pop style sprites as a base so I was a little surprised to see sprite glitches.

I took a quick look and it turns out they had simply swapped one bit of the sprite height attribute with the ‘blink / flicker’ bit. This was probably done as a simple kind of protection to stop board swaps. I added a special case for this game, and the glitches were fixed.

The game is a collection of mini-games accessed through the maze screen, I don’t get the impression there is a huge variety on offer but it’s an interesting original Korean development from 1994. Huge thanks to Manuel Assoni for dumping the ROMs from his PCB.

UME is the complete/combined version of the MAME / MESS project.

Official whatsnew texts for (MAME, MESS) provide full details of what has changed since 0.157.

This is based on the official ‘mame0158’ tagged version at GitHub.

UME 0.158 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(source matches official mamedev.org source distribution, here for completeness)

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.158 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools

Windows SDL builds
32-bit SDL MAME / MESS / UME for Windows
64-bit SDL MAME / MESS / UME for Windows

Points of Interest

0.158 represents steady progress in the right direction, all of the recent progress you’ve seen here is included, and a couple of things that I’ve not covered too, including what seems to be a rare original Italian game called ‘Star Trek’ running on Head On hardware) I’m inclined to think it should have a thruster sound instead of the car skid sound from Head On tho ;-) It’s not a game you’re going to lose sleep over playing, but does appear to be a very rare find!

There are some important little bugfixes in there too, things like the fix for the Space Harrier MCU simulation (it was doing the very subtle job of setting some bonus lives flags, not easy to catch) and priorities on one of the Batrider bosses (although if anybody notices any new priority bugs in the Toaplan 2 driver with 0.158 please do let me know) Super Punch Out also had an annoying reset ug in 0.157 due to premature removal of some protection workarounds, that’s fixed too. Work was also done on the -mt flag to fix a number of palette glitches that occured when using it, while I haven’t tested it extensively it might be safe to use once again for a fractional performance gain. (unless you have really bad video card drivers that are dog slow in even doing a simple blit, in which case the gain is more noticable) A number of Windows specific issues were also fixed in the SDL builds, which is why I’m offering those again for this release, more on that later tho.

Tetris heads will be happy to know that TGM2 is now set to the correct ~61.7 refresh rate, rather than the incorrect ’60’, meaning that timing should now properly match the PCB, even if that means the ingame timer is no longer counting real seconds (it assumes 60fps)

About SDLMAME/MESS/UME

If you’re running MAME on Windows XP using a nVidia card then you might be familiar with the instant Blue Screen of Death (or just instant machine reboot) you get when running MAME with any drivers nVidia from the last 5+ years. This is due to a bug in the nVidia drivers that happens to be triggered by MAME. We’re not doing anything illegal, or even fancy, we’re just unfortunate enough to get caught by it. nVidia have confirmed that they’re not going to fix it because it only affect unsupported Operating Systems and we and unsupported cards, and w can’t really fix it because it’s basically impossible to debug, so the only remedy for this using regular MAME is to either use the Software / DirectDraw renderer (-video ddraw) or stick with very old nVidia drivers.

If you want to avoid that problem then the SDL builds could be useful to you. For an accelerated mode they use ‘OpenGL’ instead of D3D and appear unaffected by the nVidia bug, meaning no BSODs on launch even if you use the latest drivers. I’m offering SDL builds for 0.158 because some important Windows specific bugs in the port were fixed over the course of the 0.157 -> 0.158 cycle.

The SDL builds also use GLSL shaders instead of HLSL, they can be a little tricky to get working (and there’s no Vector shader support) but a number of people have found they prefer the results over the HLSL approach (it’s personal preference) and there are shaders available that might actually be more suitable for lower end hardware.

You might also want to consider the SDLMAME builds if you’re running an Intel graphics based system and simply getting a black screen with MAME, or random error messages on startup telling you that D3D couldn’t be initialized. I’ve noticed this happening quite a lot even on Windows 8 laptops with Intel HD chipsets, older ones seem even worse. I haven’t checked if it does fix the ‘black screen’ problem with older Intel chipsets, but as it’s a completely different codepath it’s worth a try.

If you’re on XP + nVidia and would rather just go the ‘older drivers’ route, I’m told ‘258.96‘ from 2010 work with the regular versions of MAME we post. Some people have said the issue affects Vista users too, although there aren’t many of those left ;-)

There were 3 other Model 3 games with encrypted graphics, Metallic found the keys for those, and the graphics have now been decrypted.

Note, not all of these run well in MAME for other reasons.

LA Machineguns had an encrypted title screen and encrypted HUD graphics. The game still runs in slow motion in MAME tho (even if you were to speed it up to 100%) I guess interrupt issues or similar.

Virtual On 2 had various encrypted 2D graphics (insert coin text, player / enemy status during gameplay, various target graphics) MAME still has issues with bad textures on the robots due to missing features of the 3D emulation (not encryption related) Also controls aren’t set up correctly afaik.

Magical Truck Adventure also had encrypted 2D graphics for insert coin etc. and some ingame status graphics. There are still some game logic bugs in MAME (it seems impossible to avoid obstacles even if you select the right direction and the controls aren’t fully mapped) Also it glitches out and loses 3D graphics if you leave it in attract mode for long enough (see last shot) probably a CPU core bug.

After hooking up the 315-5881 encryption/compression emulation to Model 3 I collected some data from Dirt Devils and sent it to Metallic in order for him to search for a key. He found one, and now the HUD graphics (text etc. on the screen) get correctly decrypted and decompressed – something which is currently lacking in the ‘SuperModel’ emulator. Here are some shots of Dirt Devils running in MAME with the text layer working.

As this is MAME, and this is a ‘modern’ 3D game it doesn’t really run too well on my hardware (although I’ve heard it’s not so bad on an i7) so fingers crossed this brings the SuperModel team back to life and they backport some of this work.