I’ve mentioned the Afega shooters here before, and how they run on hardware basically copied from NMK (unsurprising because Afega’s first shooter was just a reskin of USAAF Mustang. The (final?) Afega shooter doesn’t really get as much coverage, maybe because it doesn’t carry the Afega name, or was never ‘licensed’ by them.

That game is the one known in MAME as Spectrum 2000 (with a Yonatech copyright) or Fire Hawk (with an ESD copyright)

Until recently MAME supported horizontal versions of both games, the exact relationship between them isn’t fully understood, but they are basically the same game. Spectrum 2000 is a buggy piece of garbage, you can glitch it out very early in the game, eg the first big enemy you encounter has a glitched state after you first blow it up, and if you blow it up a 2nd time it appears normal.

I didn’t think it was actually possible for such a bug to simply slip under the radar, but it did, I tested this on the actual PCB around when it was dumped and the very same thing happened there!

There’s another bug, in the attract mode they manage to draw the ‘B’ button in the wrong place when it’s pressed down. I don’t know if this happens on the hardware, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Firehawk, as I said, is basically the same game, but with a lot more polish (power up texts etc.) It has a normal explosion sequence for the first big enemy, and doesn’t have the issue with the button display in attract mode. I think it’s fairly safe to say it’s a newer version of the game.

Now what’s interesting is that Shoutime recently dumped a VERTICAL version of Spectrum 2000, the fact one exists wasn’t a surprise, there are horizontal and vertical versions of all the Afega shooters (more on that later) but what is surprising is that he thought it was an older version due to the board / rom types used. If you look at the game however it does NOT have the bug with the first big enemy.

What it does however have (and I haven’t verified this on the PCB) is the ships on the player select screen sometimes drifting off the screen if you coin the game up during the attract demos (not always) this hasn’t been verified on real hardware but the weird part is these are SPRITES, and there’s no global offset register or anything we should ignore on that screen. It also still has the weird display issue with the attract instructions (also not verified on hw)

The story doesn’t end there however, because system11 dumped a vertical version of Firehawk as well. Unfortunately he didn’t dump the graphic roms so for now you can’t see anything and I can’t tell you much about this set.

What IS interesting about the Firehawk is that it’s meant to be a switchable orientation set; Afega actually boasted this feature on a number of their games, and it’s true that several of the games contain graphics for both orientations (the Horizontal Firehawk we have does not) I always assumed this was a program rom switch, but apparently on this version of Firehawk it’s a dipswitch, and it can’t be a dipswitch simply banking the program roms either because they only contain one copy of the code. In all honesty I’m not sure how it works at this point!

There’s another annoying problem with all the Afega games in MAME, the lives display (regardless of if it’s drawn with sprites, or as part of the text layer) has corrupt colours for some of the ships. I don’t know / understand why this happens. There’s also an issue with some enemies popping up in strange places (the bottom corner). We previously had this issue with bullets in some of the games, but that was fixed by adding memory mirrors (and there are no unmapped accesses now). Maybe some of these issues are just ‘features’ of the original game; I think one day somebody is going to have to verify a lot of the issues against the boards.

There hasn’t been a great deal to write about lately, but there are a few recent findings I feel are worth highlighting.

ShouTime has been busy as always, trying to find interesting undumped clones, and he recently acquired a different version of the Video System game Ta’o Taido

Tao Taido is a rather goofy VS fighter from the post-Street Fighter 2 period where everybody thought creating their own definitive fighter was the way forward.

As far as the game goes there are a number of unanswered questions about it. Take the following screenshots of the game as emulated in MAME.

The test mode shown there seems to indicate that the game was designed as a 4 player game, with 3 buttons per player. The HUD layout in the actual game shots, and the fact it has battles with 3 characters involved would also suggest that such a direction was considered during development. This however never came to be, and the game Video System released was a 2 player game, and the best known version makes use of 2 buttons only; to execute special moves you must hold down both buttons and a direction; these are all shown during the attract sequences. This wouldn’t be the first time Video System had such plans, there’s code for a 4 player version of Welltris hidden away in those roms too!

The clone set of the game in MAME makes even less sense, it’s a 6-button game, obviously influenced by what Capcom etc. were doing, but the test mode is the same as the one above, the extra punch / kick buttons actually map onto the inputs shown for Players 3 and 4. Furthermore the set does NOT show you how to do the special moves in the attract mode (it shows them, just not how to execute them) This set also allows you to enable debug information with some of the dipswitches which are unused in the other set. I wonder if this version is some kind of prototype.

Those both help bring me to the new version that was just dumped. This version is closest to the main version in MAME, but instead of only supporting 2 buttons it has a 2/3 button dipswitch. In 3 button mode the special moves are activated by holding the 3rd button instead of holding both the other buttons. This version still has the 4-player test mode, so that hasn’t been cleaned up (and I’ve checked all the dipswitches, none of them enable a 3/4 player mode) also it doesn’t have the debug switches found in the 6-player version, so quite where it fits chronologically I’m not sure. Was the option for the 3rd button added later, or taken away?

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

It’s always a little disappointing to have to post 3 UME updates in a row with no actual WIP news between them, but that’s the situation right now, I’ve not really made any changes worth doing an update about it, and progress elsewhere has been slow too if I’m honest.

0.153ex2 is built from SVN revision 30169

UME 0.153ex2 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.153ex2 sources

Here is the 0.153ex1 to 0.153ex2 SVN log

Also split mame/mess (non-ume) binaries of this revision can be found here

Points of Interest

The main addition of note here is support for Wyvern F-0, already extensively covered by Luca. It’s not really quite as rare of valuable as it’s hyped up to be, but it’s an interesting addition as it further shows the influence Namco’s Xevious had on the arcades, employing a similar air / ground bombing system (Taito had tried this previously with Fire Battle) As Luca mentions there are still a few issues with sprite colours, as you can see.

For UME / MESS users I’ve added the parsing of some additional ini files based on how the drivers are defined in the source. Drivers are defined with either a GAME( macro, a CONS( macro, COMP( or SYST( depending on what type of system they are. This information was previously unused, but the emulator will now attempt to parse ‘arcade.ini’ for anything defined as GAME. and ‘console.ini’, ‘computer.ini’ or ‘othersys.ini’ for each of the others. While this relies on things being properly defined in the source it will allow UME users who might want specific .ini options to be applied only to drivers that originated in MAME to create an ‘arcade.ini’ with those specific options in. Even if you’re not using UME the option will benefit MESS users who can use the computer/console.ini files for the same purpose.

system11 dumped a couple of clones, the most interesting being a Korean version of Kaneko’s ‘The Berlin Wall’ This version carries an ‘Inter’ license like the Korean version of Gals Panic and appears to be a fully legitimate version of the game licensed by Kaneko for the Korean market.

The set is also interesting because it uses the same character graphics as the ‘berlwallt’ clone set, but preserves the normal stage order. Interestingly it suffers from the same ‘COPY BOARD’ issue when you die / continue on world 4 and above that resulted in the ‘berlwallt’ set being marked as a possible bootleg. I’ve asked for system11 to check if this actually occurs on real hardware, because the board the set comes from is definitely original so we need to establish if it’s an emulation glitch (meaning we’re missing some way the game detects a bootleg board, or some way of hiding those sprites) or an oversight by Kaneko with these versions of the game. Luca also fixed a few bugs in the driver.

While on the subject of Berlin Wall, I find it a shame that ‘Wani Wani World’ never made it to the arcades, it’s a much more refined, much better looking, much more fun version of the game that was released on the Sega Mega Drive in Japan. (you can always give it a spin in UME, “UME megadrij waniwani”) I think the ‘RESET’ button on the MD emulation broke at some point tho, a shame because you need to reset the game 19 times to activate the cheat mode (and F3 resets too much of the system for that)

Kale has also been busy with improving the Model 2 emulation, although it’s still a long way from being correct or any kind of rival to ElSemi’s emulator.

Other than that a lot of the work done has been refactoring as usual, although a number of the small improvements are important, the Sega Master System timing tweaks that went in fixed a number of bugs I was seeing where screens were flicking that did not occur on real hardware (menu screens in Micro Machines for example – although there does seem to be a flickering line again on Fantastic Dizzy now) We’ve also seen work started on a long overdue cleanup of the MSX drivers.

A significant number of devices have had uninitialized variables cleaned up which should make things more reliable as uninitialized values can result in unpredictable buggy behaviour (like the Namco flipscreen issue we saw in 0.153)

A fair amount of work has also been done on more obscure systems in MESS, but you’d be better off checking the changelogs yourself for those if you want more details. A driver for the Xerox Alto 2 from Juergen is one such addition, but work was also done on the Goldstar FC-100, the Dick Smith Super-80, the NeXT systems and a number of others, each change inching them a bit closer to a working state. The MESS side of the code has been a hive of activity when it comes to these lesser known systems and it’s always good to see some devs of old getting a feel for things again with them!

Beyond that we’ve also seen attempts to repair the collateral damage caused by some of the other recent refactoring / device conversions / core rewrites such as the 0.153 regressions seen with the Cybiko.

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

0.153ex1 is built from SVN revision 29720

UME 0.153ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.153ex1 sources

Here is the 0.153 to 0.153ex1 SVN log

Points of Interest

MAME 0.153 was buggy, use of the brightness / gamma settings in the 32-bit builds would cause BG colour issues in anything using the ‘black_pen’ feature of MAME, most notably many 80s classics like Galaga.

There were other problems also affecting Namco titles like Galaga, Pole Position etc. – uninitialized variables causing anything with the Namco customs of the era to randomly boot into service mode, or display the gameplay upside down etc.

Another problem was causing MAME to crash if loading 0 byte files, many sample sets you find have 0 byte files for dummy samples (eg. Gorf) and while having these dummy files isn’t recommended it wasn’t ideal behaviour for MAME to simply crash when they were present.

I do not know if there will be an official 0.154 build following shortly to fix these issues, but they’ve all been fixed in the SVN at this point, so I’ve decided to put out this ex1 build of UME as a public service. It also includes the fixes to allow the SC4 fruit machines to pass their init once again after the 68681 refactoring.

I believe some issues from 0.153 still remain (cheat finding doesn’t work) but I felt it a good idea to get this out there before further instabilities are introduced.

There are a lot of other refactoring changes in this build, as well as Kale’s WIP on Model 2, so I can’t guarantee nothing else is broken, but I felt having builds where the classics were known to be in a semi-broken state was not a good idea.

Note, a number of changes in the changelog mention the new menu system, this was backed out shortly before this build as it isn’t yet stable.

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

Here is a build of UME compiled from the official 0.153 sources

UME 0.153 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.153 sources

Here is the 0.152ex4 to 0.153 SVN log

Points of Interest

—

I do like it when rare clones of existing games turn up, some have proven to be more than just a little elusive over the years and the subject of this article is one such clone.

MAME has emulated the IREM title ‘Fire Barrel’ for a while now (with significant improvements a few years back) and if you’ve ever booted the game in MAME this Japan region warning and title screen will be a familiar sight.

Fire Barrel is quite a rare game compared to some other Irem titles but even rarer is the export version of that game known as Air Assault. For many years one could be found at the Trocadero in London, but apart from that nobody had seen a trace of it. We knew it was an official version because the tiles for the ‘Air Assault’ title were present in the graphic roms, just unused.

System11 has been a good source of clones in the last year or so, dumping every board he comes in contact with and often uncovering previously unknown revisions of existing games (especially Korean ones where there is no real indication whether something is an alt version until you’ve dumped the roms).

Anyway, to cut the story short one of his new arrivals was Air Assault, the very same Air Assault board that has been sitting in London for years. It looks like it might have been a location test version based on the ROM labels, although I think the code is actually a newer revision than the Japan set.

Luckily he got the board just in time, he’s also put up a strongly worded warning about a leaking capacitor problem that he’s witnessed plaguing these IREM boards, with this one already showing the first signs of that.

Getting this working in MAME wasn’t entirely straightforward, it uses a different encrypted sound CPU when compared to Fire Barrel, in this case the same as Gunforce rather than the same as R-Type Leo, however, there were some gaps in the encryption table causing the sound code to not run correctly and report a ROM error although I managed to fix them by using the code from the correctly decrypted set as a reference.

So here are some screenshots of Air Assault running in MAME, possibly salvaged from the only remaining board in existence. It might ‘only’ be a clone, but it’s one I’m very glad to see dumped.