While all the talk at the moment is about the leap in progress made with Raiden 2 / DX there are some other noteworthy arcade developments going on at the moment.

dgPix

System11 was in possession of a number of undumped dgPix titles, including 2 completely unemulated games.

The first of those is Elfin, a Puzzle Bobble-like game with an interesting mechanic whereby the puzzle rotates. Like most dgPix titles it includes flashes girls on the screen from time to time and has a zooming picture viewer every couple of rounds. The game isn’t especially polished, but is fairly interesting.

The other game is Jump Jump, and starting with the title you could write a book on the fatal design flaws this game has. In this game, called Jump Jump, you don’t actually have a Jump button, instead you must descend through the level, it’s a bit like the ‘Shaft’ section from the ‘Tower & Shaft’ game (N64 hardware, in MAME) but worse in every way.

The translation is very lazy, platforms are called ‘Footstools’ Worse, you can only actually use your weapon when on solid ground, despite the fact you spend most of the time in the game falling, some of the later stages barely have any safe locations to land!. Equally offensive is the speed the scrolling reaches, to the point where you really don’t even have time to get off the platforms. Some platforms recharge your anti-fall ‘cloud’ but require you to stand on them for a certain period of time to get that bonus, time the game doesn’t even permit! Later levels have platforms that are simply traps, preventing you from moving and killing you, land on one and you’re practically guaranteed death, and often you’ll respawn right above another one! There are also flags to collect, and unless you collect a certain number of them you won’t be granted access to to final levels (aptly called ‘Hell’) of course if you miss a flag you can’t jump back up and get it, because you can’t jump, and you don’t know when they’re going to appear so getting them all relies on a certain degree of luck, or knowledge of the levels.

Being a dgPix game it naturally has girls, each level has a number of Showtime platforms which change the background for a moment, the last one in any level also gives you the picture viewer.

There are also bonus levels, and believe it or not you can actually jump in the bonus levels, but even then it isn’t clear what you’re meant to do, it looks like you’re meant to collect crystals by jumping into them, but instead you’re actually meant to jump ON them for random bonuses, it’s one of the most pointless bonus levels I’ve ever seen.

System11 also dumped a new set for the ‘X-Files’ arcade game. This is a World set, and has less censorship than the Korean set previously dumped (actual nude images rather than bikini ones) In the other dgPix games you can select between Nude/Bikini in the service mode, but in X-Files you can’t. To keep things clean I’ve manually censored the new title screen below.

World (Nudes) version

Korean (Bikini) version

The game has nothing at all to do with the X-Files series (it’s a tile matching game, a fairly decent one with various extra features) and was sold by some manufacturers as ‘The Sex Files’ instead, I’m not sure if a version with that title screen exists or if that was just to avoid legal trouble with the marketing.

None of the games have sound because we lack CPU opcode level documentation on the sound CPU.

For all the games in this driver the game code is stored on flash roms, and to save the score data and settings they reprogram an area of the main program rom rather than using a separate eeprom device. It also looks like if you boot the games on real hardware with the security chip missing they’ll erase an important part of the flash rom, rendering the game useless, even if you then put the security chip back, nasty.

Thanks to system11 for dumping these, and Brian Troha for figuring out the protection patches needed.

system11 picked up a SemiCom ‘gambling’ game called So Ho Sung. It’s protected the same way as all SemiCom games, and we still need to extract the proper data the MCU places in RAM, but since the actual codebase seems VERY close to Puzzle Break I was able to use a temporary cheat to get it booting.

Interestingly the copyright shows 1997, the same year as Puzzle Break, but the backgrounds ingame have a coin with ‘Semicom 2002’ on them, maybe it’s a revised version of the game?

Also I say ‘gambling’ I don’t think it’s actually a gambling game, there doesn’t seem to be any payout mechanism that I can see, so it’s probably a card themed game with fake betting for amusement purposes only (it even has your regular ‘continue’ and ‘game over’ type sequences, and you only ever need to insert one coin to play)

Until the actual data for this game is extracted I still consider it non-working as there could be issues unknown to me, but here are some screenshots of it running with the fake data.

In other news ShouTime picked up the kit for a Power Drift Communication / Link version upgrade with funding help from rtw, B2K24, Gor, Dullaron, anonymous, Mucci, gregf, ghoolster, Smitdogg and The Dumping Union.

This game doesn’t yet work, it looks like it needs the extra link board emulated at least, possibly both PCBs. Currently it runs one loop of the attract mode where you can clearly see problems (all players are shown as the same character, and only one car moves) although you can also see the course is slightly different (a jump in the middle of it at the top of the ramp) You can’t start a game if you attempt to coin it up, and it crashes after the attract loop.

I don’t know what it will take to make this work, I might have to emulate 2 y-board units at once.

Here are some pictures of the kit ShouTime took.

Above you can see 4 replacement sprite roms (for the HUD layer, to handle changed graphics) and a pair of replacement program roms for each of the 3 68000 CPUs. Unlike other versions of Power Drift this one only has a single pair of roms for the main CPU as you can see from the ROM test in the pictures above.



And this is the link board that stacks on top of a y-board setup, connecting to another y-board setup.

Please note, this was a very expensive purchase, and there are always things available we could do with picking up, so do consider making a donation to the Dumping Union by contacting Smitdogg. Not every board is going to be to your personal taste, but there is important work to be done and always boards we could do with securing to further MAME. The fundraiser associated with this game was at Mameworld Forums but help is always appreciated, even when no targets are announced.

Also apparently there is a funding issue with my host here, not sure what’s going on there because nobody has told me anything directly, but if this site ends up vanishing you’ll know why. That was also mentioned in a post at Mameworld .

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

0.154ex1 is built from SVN revision 31598

There were still a number of issues with DCS sound in the 0.154 MAME release causing some games like Carnevil and the 3D Gauntlet games to lack music, these have since been resolved so it is recommended you use this build instead. Some other issues such as missing sound in the Eolith titles have also been resolved, in addition to a number of other bugs that were caught after the 0.154 release. Assuming no new bugs have been introduced this should be considered a more stable build than 0.154.

I have specifically built against SVN rv. 31598 rather than the more cutting edge ones because the revisions immediately after 31598 do nothing but destroy the human parsability of some areas of the source. Assuming the team has any common sense these changes will be quickly reverted so I’d rather not inflict them on my users due to it being unlikely they’ll appear in a final build, it would just result in confusion.

UME 0.154ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.154ex1 sources

Here is the 0.154 to 0.154ex1 SVN log

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
MAME/MESS split 0.154ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(SDL binaries might come later)

Points of Interest

Fixes as mentioned above, Music Ball as shown below, some other stuff I’ll write a bit about soon.

Back in May of last year Marcos75 dumped his rare Music Ball PCB. Music Ball is an alternate version / semi-sequel to the well known ‘Speed Ball’ pinball title.

What is strange about Music Ball is that despite being advertised on the flyers alongside Speed Ball the images used on mocked up cabinet shots were both from Speed Ball.

As far as emulation was concerned the big issue was that unlike Speed Ball, the Music Ball PCB had an encrypted CPU module and the Z80 code was encrypted.

The good news is that Andreas Naive has now managed to decrypt the ROM making the game playable.

One of the weird things about this game is that despite coming from what seems to be an original PCB, with encrypted Romset the title screen display and copyrights have all been removed, the graphics are still present in the graphic roms, but are unused by the game.

I do wonder if this copy was actually bootlegged from a prototype version, and encrypted by the bootleggers, or whatever licensing agreement existed between DE Systems and Tecfri fell apart and this is all that was left, I suspect we’ll never know tho. Either way, a huge thanks goes to both Marcos75 and Andreas Naive for the emulation of this one! Aside from the encryption it runs on the same hardware as Speed Ball, and while I did make some clean-ups and improvements in the driver last year when it was first dumped (as did hap, adding the external LCD score displays) I can’t really take credit for the emulation here!

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

The release of 0.154 has arrived roughly 3 and a half months after 0.153.

There have been a large number of changes and additions over this period, many worthwhile, but unfortunately some regressions remain, of note the DCS sound issues haven’t been 100% fixed so the 3D Gauntlet games and Vapor TRX currently don’t run as they should. For details on what has changed over the course of the cycle you should check the write-ups for the previous ‘ex’ build updates. The official whatsnew texts (MAME, MESS) also provide full details.

UME 0.154 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
(source matches official mamedev.org source distribution)

Here is the 0.153ex6 to 0.154 SVN log

Other Binaries (if you don’t know what these are you don’t need them)
UME/MAME/MESS split 0.154 Windows *SDL* binaries – 32-bit
UME/MAME/MESS split 0.154 Windows *SDL* binaries – 64-bit

Points of Interest

Robbert has continued with the emulation of the video portion of some of the hybrid video/pinball games starting with one of the better known ones, Granny and the Gators. This is another Bally one, like Baby Pacman and runs on similar hardware but with doubled up video chips for better video capabilities. Again you start play on the video part and enter the pinball part by hitting one of the exits at the side of the playfield. The pinball part isn’t emulated as a playable pinball machine, but you can mash the various target / exit ramp inputs to score points and return to the video portion of the game.

He also looked at the less well known ‘Mr. Game’ pinballs, two sets boot up, ‘Motor Show’ and ‘Dakar’. There is another game in the driver ‘Mac Attack’ but the dumps are bad/incomplete. A 4th game ‘World Cup 90’ runs on slightly different hardware and shows nothing as of yet. The procedure to get these to accept coins at the moment is non trivial.

Olivier has also been working on Pinball systems, in his case the Williams DCS based ones.

The Rolling Crush and Center Court progress covered here already is included so both of those are fully working.

A potentially important stability fix for the cheat engine was also submitted in the brief period since ex6, it might stop some of the crash-on-startup issues some people have been seeing with cheats enabled. Also some important fixes for the Lua integration (which saw a rewrite earlier in the cycle) went in, so if you use the ‘autoboot’ functionality it’s important you use this build and not ex6.

In the MESS side of the codebase we’ve seen the Psion Organiser II XP and Psion Organiser II P200 added as working, simple portable devices from the 80s.

A few weeks ago I did an update about Ken Sei Mogura, a rare Street Fighter II themed Whac-a-mole game found by Alan Meades at a disused location in the UK. It turns out that was not the only rare game being stored at that location.

Also there was a very dusty looking cocktail cabinet marked ‘Center Court’ with full original Sega artwork etc. We knew from Japanese flyers and a review in a UK magazine that Center Court was an alt title for Passing Shot, but apart from those references and the odd photo of a cabinet there had been no trace of it.

Alan returned to the site and picked up the board (with a view to fixing it / restoring it for actual use) and it quickly became apparent that this was a bit more than a simple clone; to cut the story short it’s a prototype. A picture of the board can be seen below.

Immediately obvious are the handwritten labels, while the game does have official Sega EPR stickers the numbers were not finalized at this point so instead the locations have been written in, and for the program roms the checksums of the current build.

The other important feature to note is the use of the MC-8123B. The MC-8123B is an encrypted Z80, all other versions of Passing Shot use a regular Z80 and an encrypted 68000 (Fd1094) instead. This has the 68k unencrypted. The game also has 8 sprite roms whereas the final version uses 6.

The board was sent to Porchy and he dumped the roms remarking that the legs on them were in a very fragile state and, despite the clean appearance of the boards in the photo, it seems this is another to file under “saved just in time”

Anyway, looking at the dumps I could see that aside from the sound sample roms they all differed when compared to the other sets. This suggests that the sound code / samples were probably final at this point, maybe why Sega chose to encrypt the sound program. Charles MacDonald has a tool to help decrypt the sound programs, but for the time being I opted to load the original sound program rom over the encrypted one on the gut feeling that once decrypted the code will be the same.

Upon booting the games in MAME a number of differences were immediately obvious. I’ve put Center Court screenshots on the left and Passing Shot screenshots on the right.

(The most obvious difference is the title screen, the entire presentation sequence here is different)

(The Vs. screens in Center Court show less detail)

(In Center Court the ball flashes when serving, in Passing Shot it has a flashing outline instead)

(The layout of the court differs)

(Center Court has a less elaborate Game Over screen / sequence)

There could be other differences too, but those were the most obvious once.

The first time I booted Center Court I was surprised by something else too, debug text on the screen.

After playing with the dipswitches a bit I found that the ‘Demo Sound’ dipswitch turns On/Off this display instead of turning On/Off the Demo Sounds, again further evidence for this being a prototype build.

Another very nice find, huge thanks to all involved!