The non-video games we emulate don’t really get the coverage they deserve, in this case even I almost didn’t notice the progress made on this one so I thought it was worth highlighting.

The game is Wacky Gator, a Whack-a-mole style game created by Data East in 1990. The driver was started by Felipe Sanches, and quietly finished by Sandro Ronco who brought it up to a playable state using the MAME internal artwork system to represent the various elements of the game. The progress shown here will be available in tomorrow’s 0.167 release.

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It doesn’t currently have clickable artwork (that would be a next step) but can be played using keys to represent each gator.

A video of the real unit can be seen on YouTube too

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This type of thing is a prime candidate for interactive 3D models if we ever do get that far (hopefully we will)

Chaos Emeralds, Microwaves, same difference right?

Anyway, ShouTime and the Dumping Union (with a whole list of people donating) purchased the PCB for another novelty Sonic item, this time SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, a popcorn dispenser machine with a video display. It runs on the Sega C2 board (Genesis type hardware)

Interestingly it has a region dipswitch for Export, USA or Japan which makes me wonder if did actually leave Japan at some point in limited numbers.

It’s hard to really class this as ‘working’ because the mechanical side of the Popcorn machine isn’t emulated, but the code does run so you can see how the machine would operate.

There’s a small graphical glitch next to Sonic near the end of the video, I’m not sure why that happens, or if it happens on the PCB; all roms pass in service mode.

Here is a video of it running (dipswitch set to ‘Export’ so English text)

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The graphical glitch mentioned above was due to a bad / inverted sensor input, with it flipped the glitch is gone so I’ve recorded videos of it running as USA / Japan region without the glitch.

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When I had an Amstrad CPC back in the day one piece of software I owned was a game called ‘Dripzone’

It’s fairly easy to find this game online, for example there is a copy at CPC Power, and there are copies in the Tosec, GoodCPC and Non-GoodCPC collections, most of which have found their way into the MAME/MESS Software List.

HOWEVER..

the copy of the game I had came free with the Dk’Tronics memory expansion for my 464, and was an extended version of the game with some sampled speech. From memory it only worked on a 464 with the memory expansion AFTER loading the ‘bank.bas’ program from the tape/disk supplied with the unit, it did not play speech on a 6128 etc.

I’m pretty sure none of the copies online are that version as they all say ’64k version’ if you load the “drip.bas” program and list it (if I’m wrong please correct me)

So does anybody still have the extended version? My CPC stuff is long gone, but it would be nice to see that version again for nostalgia purposes; I can’t even find *reference* to that version online.

Capcom’s LED Storm has an unusual history to it.

The home conversions of the game (Amiga, Spectrum, C64 etc.) were all based off a version called LED Storm Rally 2011. The most common arcade release is simply called LED Storm, or Mad Gear depending on your territory.

A partial dump of an arcade version of Rally 2011 has existed for a while, but the sprite roms, until now, hadn’t been fully dumped because Capcom used a very unusual type of ROM to store the data, one that no devices appear to support out of the box. Guru spent some time dumping his however, so that all changes from this point forward.

system11 did an article on LED Storm last year when he picked up a PCB (which also happens to be an undumped European version – he’s promised to dump the different program ROMs soon which has now been dumped). Mentski’s excellent ‘One Credit Champ‘ series on YouTube also mentions the differences briefly during a play of the more common arcade version in one of his videos (most of which are packed with little bits of trivia while he sees how far a single credit can get him in a game).

Anyway, lifting some of system11’s screenshots for comparison, here is how it looks in MAME now with the correct sprite ROMs, PCB pics on the left, new MAME shots on the right.

Much better than how it is if you run it right now!

I’ve also made a video.

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My role in all of this was fairly minor, the arrangement of the data in the new dump was a bit different to the existing sets in the driver (those use 4/8 roms to contain the data) so in order to continue using the same decode function for all sets I had to adjust the ROM loading for everything else in the driver so that the data was in the same order as the data in the new roms, then adjust to decode function to match. (I could have simply added a new decode for this set, but I do prefer to try and keep things neat)

Anyway, if you can’t wait for 0.167 (which will be released on the 28th of this month) then the current progress can be found in the GIT, you’ll need the update Romset tho.

MAME 0.166 was released today (the last Wednesday of September) and as always there are a few things I think are worth highlighting.

I was actually too busy to do any kind of update for 0.165, and this one is also going to be rather brief, but here goes.

Personally I’m always happy to see old / rare software for home systems dumped and emulated, and MAME documents via the Software Lists when this happens. Shortly before 0.166 two pieces of software for the Tomy Pyuuta were dumped and added to said lists, these are Triple Command and 3D Rescue, both of which are rare and expensive titles for the system, previously undumped

Triple Command is a simple time-pilot like shooter where you move around blasting waves of enemies. I’ve recorded a video a video of Triple Command and uploaded it

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Rescue 3D is a more complex piece of software, or at least the controls are, I haven’t actually managed to figure it out properly yet, so to avoid complete embarrassment here are some screenshots instead of a video for that one.

In terms of functionality a potentially useful option ‘-global_inputs’ was added to MAME (built on top of the rawinput functonality) which allows MAME to still read inputs even when the MAME window isn’t in focus. The use of this might not be immediately apparent, but anybody who has tried using multiple connected instances of MAME on the same machine (for example to try out the comms work done by SailorSat) will have found the default logic problematic, as only the instance of MAME in focus could receive inputs.

Ramiro Polla was busy pushing more boundaries in the emulator with emulation of a printer, including emulating the motors, print head position etc. and rendering what would go to the paper on a virtual screen (we eventually need to decide on an actual output format for virtual printers) he uploaded his own video of this (with the printer running a self-test) which can be seen below. Remember, if something can be emulated we’re interested in emulating it, and even when things can’t be emulated fully we’re still interested in giving them a shot, at least to have the code running.

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2 of the clones added in 0.166 are quite interesting too, the ‘Minefield’ and ‘Rescue’ sets were both created by ‘Free Enterprise Games’ which was apparently one guy in the UK. They’re interesting because they employ their own weird scrambling / protection techniques which have required extensive reworking of the code. Minefield I was able to fully descramble and get working, Rescue has caused more issues, it feels like there’s something missing (I’ve since compared it with the original and found out what the missing code should do, and can’t find it in ROM) Interestingly the game does have a single ROM with nothing but a message taunting anybody wanting to copy it, ironic considering AFAIK these weren’t actually licensed conversions anyway (I could be wrong, but nothing I’ve read leads me to believe they were)

The taunt message reads

” OR TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES AS IT IS A WASTE OF TIME TO TRY AND SUE YOU I WILL JUST SEND THE LADS AROUND ALL RIGHTS RESERVED COPYRIGHT 1983 BY JOHN RICHARDS OF FREE ENTERPRISE GAMES LTD IF YOU CAN GET THIS PROGRAM RUNNING AS A PROM CHANGE I WILL GIVE YOU A REWARD AND PROBABLY EMPLOY YOU AS WELL TELEPHONE 01 399 8587 GOOD LUCK ”

what is weird that it seems to start in the middle of the message, as if the ROM is too small, and the rom contains no useful code / data at all. We’ve encountered other games from ‘Free Enterprise Games’ before (a version of Anteater, which was then further ‘sublicensed’ to Tuning for Germany) but in those cases, like Minefield, locating all the code was easy enough, maybe I’m missing something obvious or the set is actually incomplete.

The ‘suicide-repair’ sets for a number of Sega 16-bit era games were also added in this release (as bootlegs, because they’re unofficial modified code, not approved by Sega) These are becoming commonplace on PCBs and the whole lot actually ended up being sold as a ‘Universal Sega Repair kit’ by an Asian seller, I’m not 100% sure they were all tested on hardware mind you, just looks to be somebody trying to cash in on their availability by pulling chips from other boards, erasing them and burning the sets to them! It’s hardly a universal kit as my contact who bought it was hoping! If you do find a specific set doesn’t work on hardware, let me know. It’s important for MAME to keep track of these things so if 20 years down the line boards get dumped that have been converted to run this unofficial code MAME recognizes it correctly so we don’t think it’s some long lost official set.

Under the hood there were some potentially important edge-case fixes for the M68020 CPU, not known to actually affect anything in MAME, but important, and entirely possible that some software for one of the home systems depends upon that we haven’t yet noticed.

Tweaks to the default state of the SN76489 sound emulation, improvements to the Sega PICO sound etc. also happened. XorWorld ended up with better sound and gameplay speed too.

There were some Chihiro improvements / fixes with a view to allowing the Xbox to boot, they do seem to have stopped OutRun2 from booting tho, so I can’t easily see if they improve anything there.

Some drivers were converted to use the generic ‘polynew’ rendering, including the Hyper NeoGeo 64 driver, this reduces code in the driver, and also potentially gives performance boosts as that code natively supports threading while the in-driver code did not.

The ‘Pacman on World Cup 90’ hardware bootleg is another weird one, we know who created it, Mike Coates, somebody who has contributed to MAME for many years in the past, however, it somehow ended up in use on some actual PCBs in Spain that were pulled from a bar. (Judging by the number of Pacman bootlegs originating in Spain it seems like there was almost an unwritten rule that every single place must have a Pacman machine?!)

(more to come)

Amusement machines came in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and styles of game to cater for a wide variety of different audiences.

One complaint some people had when we started merging in the MESS code was that MAME was now open to emulating ‘junk’ they didn’t care about, but that was never unique to the MESS side code, and I imagine the game being covered here would be considered junk by a lot of people too.

The game in question is a Sonic themed kid’s ride, it has gameplay on the level of a redemption title (complete a very simple fixed task) but unlike redemption games it doesn’t even offer tickets, simply a ‘score’ at the end (which meaningless, you get 3 stars if you simply insert a coin and leave it)

It’s a piece of a history, and maybe more noteworthy to the general population because it’s Sonic themed (there are several others currently undumped with different themes) but there’s very little to it. The title of the game in question is ‘Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car’ and it was released in Japan only to the best of my knowledge.

There are various videos of the game on YouTube including the following one from YouTube user ‘Crazysonicfan110’

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The game has 4 buttons (Lights, Jump, Accelerate, Turbo) as well as a Left / Right ‘Winker’ (indicator) and a Steering Wheel (which in reality just acts as another left/right joystick, it’s not analog at all)

The Lights and Winker buttons seem purely cosmetic, triggering sounds and animations on the screen. The Accelerate and Turbo buttons allow you to move faster and overtake cars but really have no real influence on the progression of the gameplay, you’ll get to Robotnik regardless. The Jump button has no real purpose until you reach Robotnik, at which point it’s used to jump attack his car, destroying it is optional, the game will end after that either way.

The hardware used is the Sega C2 board, the very same PCB as Puyo Puyo etc. It’s a board using the Genesis VDP, but with some changes to the rest of the hardware compared to the home system. The protection chip used on this one is the same as Bloxeed. The C2 driver is one of my older drivers (actually one of my first major contributions to MAME) and getting this running in the C2 driver didn’t really require any additional work, just mapping of the inputs.

Acquiring this was quite pricey, and while MooglyGuy fronted some of the money on behalf of the Dumping Union, others (who I don’t know if want crediting or not, the whatsnew text lists Will Medved) were very generous too. As always, if you wish to help secure more boards then The Dumping Union is the correct place to donate.