Enricnes (from AUMAP) dumped his MegaPhoenix board, a game by Dinamic & Inder that was also released for a large number of home platforms.

The hardware isn’t entirely what I’m used to working with, it has a 68000, a TMS34010, and a Z80. The TMS34010 CPU handles most of the graphics while I think the Z80 CPU drives a DAC for sound.

By looking at how the TMS34010 is used in other drivers I’ve managed to hook things up to the point where I get the following screenshots.

Obviously there are still some significant issues here. Actually I don’t even know where 2 of the ROMs map properly yet, the game has a weird memory setup whereby RAM is mapped at 0, and the ROMs are mapped higher up, but I have to copy the boot vectors to RAM. It’s not really playable at the moment.

A video recorded from the PCB was uploaded to YouTube last year, this is what the emulation should look like once it’s finished.

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Unigame has come up with some interesting prototypes, arguably the most famous so far being Bubble Bobble 2.

The prototype that was dumped today possibly rivals that.

It’s been known for a long time that there was an early version of Master of Weapon called ‘Yukiwo’, named after the programmer. In reality it was one of those things that was probably never going to actually show up, and if it did it would probably go for such an absurd price most people would never get to see it.

Well, it turned up at Unigame, it’s been dumped.. and it’s now supported in MAME.

In terms of differences, there are many, it’s almost a different game in places. The most obvious difference you notice from the start is the story telling. While it lacks some of the attract mode story screens you get almost enough text to fill a novel with between levels. Let’s first look at Master of Weapon.

Brief.. (and the same in both the Japanese and English versions, so it’s not like the Japanese one tells a longer story either)

Now let’s look at the Yukiwo prototype.

Much more text… and this continues throughout the game, there is a part where the game is scrolling for about a minute without anything happening apart from it telling you that an enemy is approaching and getting closer! This is unusual because prototypes usually have LESS text and LESS story, clearly the story for this one was written before the game and cut later because it was just too wordy.

Level design is different too, the first stage with the annoying siren is much longer, although it lacks the palette effects in the final game. Bosses are less developed too with less attack patterns and more recycled bosses which seem to take forever to kill.

It’s practically a different game, much like Bubble Bobble 2 was.

Let’s look at the first level.. In Master of Weapon it consists of the tunnel scene then jumps to an outdoor area with a boss battle and quickly tells you that you’re on Act 2.

For Yukiwo on the other hand the first level goes on and on with multiple sections that have been simply cut (or moved) in the final game.. (the Alarm music plays until you reach the desert part, which is actually a long time and very annoying!) Again you can see the extra story as you get to the 2nd part as well.

Master of Weapon might not have been popular in the same was as the Bubble Bobble series was, but this prototype is every bit as interesting!

Aside from this a Fantasy Zone prototype was also uncovered at Unigame, but the board had 2-3 bad roms and 2 missing graphic roms. As a result it has missing / corrupt graphics in MAME. If there’s no duplicate board of it I might attempt to reconstruct the graphics using the other sets (it looks like some things should just be shifted down in ROM a little so the addresses line up) In terms of development that proto seems mostly complete but lacks the story (both at the start and end) and also lacks a test mode, it also only has 2 music tracks, level and boss.

Yesterday marked the final Unigame meeting, there were less boards available to dump this time around, but one that did get dumped was the often mentioned ‘Aaargh’ by Arcadia Systems.

This game is slightly unusual in that it doesn’t use the Arcadia bios, the rom board plugs straight into the Amiga motherboard meaning it can’t be used in a multi-game setup. Other than that it’s a similar deal to the rest, same type of encryption, similar memory mappings, the same I/O etc. It took a little bit of time to figure out (mainly because I hadn’t realised it didn’t work on a multi-game setup) but with everything hooked up it appears to play fine.

This just leaves ‘Pool’ and ‘Rockford’ in the list of ‘known but undumped’ titles in the Arcadia driver. Hopefully they’ll surface one day.

Thanks to Unigame for allowing this to be dumped

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

I’ve not finished the 2013 write-up mentioned in the previous UME release yet, although it is still in progress. In the meantime I feel there has been enough interesting progress to put out another update.

0.152ex2 is based on SVN revision 27126

The changelog (simply a copy/paste of the SVN log) can be read here. This isn’t formatted as a whatsnew, but as usual I’ll summarize the main points below.

UME 0.152ex2 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.152ex2 sources

Points of Interest

One of the most significant bits of progress in this build comes from the MESS side, with the Bandai Super Vision 8000 (SV8000) being emulated for the first time, for this you can thank Wilbert Pol and a number of others, including Charles MacDonald who was able to dump several cartridges much like he did for the Nichibutsu My Vision recently. It’s an old system (as in 1979 old) so don’t expect anything to look spectacular, but also don’t underestimate how significant having systems like this is emulated, they’re an important part of the overall picture and very rare these days. (thanks must also go to ranger_lennier who located, and purchased all these games before lending them to Charles)

(Othello)

(Gun Professional)

(Pac Pac Bird)

(Space Fire)

(Missilevader)

(Beamgalaxian)

(Submarine)

0.152ex2 also sees the latest PGM progress incorporated, including a properly working V201 Cartridge version of Spectral vs Generation. For those in the know this is the version of the game to own. The Japanese V100 PCB version that was previously ‘working’ feels like an unfinished game, the V200 / V201 cartridge versions are much more refined, with better AI, less odd audio design choices (no silly vocal track every 2nd round), bosses unlocked and a bunch of graphic effects etc. on certain special moves that are completely absent from the V100 sets. In all honesty if you own a V100 PCB you’d be best trading it in and buying the V200 cart, the experience is (IMHO) much better; there’s good reason they boosted the version number!. Prior to the current progress you could boot the V201 set in MAME with a hack, but inputs wouldn’t always respond properly, the region screen was missing, and it crashed sometimes, we’re now using the proper V200 internal ROM and those problems are gone. Huge thanks should go to rtw for picking up the cart for this one and running the tests, a lot of people might have been put off with a version of the game already emulated but it’s always good to try and do things properly where possible.

(Spectral vs Generation V201 Cartridge version – the proper version of the game!)

While still on the subject of PGM the Happy 6-in-1 progress is here too, although unless you read Chinese or already know the rules to the card games the only real playable game is the rendition of Dragon World Pretty Chance, although you can laugh at some of the goofy graphics elsewhere.

ElSemi’s progress on the Crystal System games is here too. Top Blade V, I’ve already featured in the previous update (I was going to leave coverage until this release writeup, but did it early)

(Working in ex2 – Top Blade V)

His progress on the other two Crystal System games I haven’t shown yet, but keep in mind that NEITHER IS PLAYABLE at the moment. They both have significant graphic corruption and stability issues, as good as some of the screenshots below look. First is Donggul Donggul Haerong, which basically follows the gameplay style of Wonderboy. As you can see the playfield is obscured by garbage, the game also crashes at random still. I’m mentioning these only because it is a nice bit of progress, but don’t expect to play them yet.

(NOT YET PLAYABLE – Donggul Donggul Haerong)

The other game is Office Yeo In Cheon Ha, even getting the screenshots below was difficult because the game is completely unstable at the moment.




(NOT YET PLAYABLE – Office Yeo In Cheon Ha)

0.152ex2 also contains support for one very noteworthy clone, a new set of Outrun that uses an encrypted CPU. While to the end user this might not seem significant it is an important find as far as documenting the history of the game is concerned. Until now all known Outrun versions were completely unprotected, no MCUs, no encrypted CPUs. This Japanese Deluxe release appears to have been the only one to use any kind of protection at all making it interesting for the fact alone. It’s also great to see another one of the Sega CPUs read out before they all die so a huge thanks must go to Shoutime for his work on digging up these clones once again! (now if only we could find the original Galaxy Force release)

(this Outrun set used an encrypted CPU unlike all the others!)

A slightly less interesting, but still curious clone is “Pocket Gals V.I.P” we’ve known for a long time that Gals Hustler in MAME is an evolution of this hack (you can see the pool balls used for the periods in V.I.P still on the title screen) but the original version of the hack wasn’t supported. It’s interesting because the actual ROMs contained Afega stickers, and the way the rom data is arranged is a lot closer to Gals Panic with the adult images contained in separate data roms mapped higher up in address space. It’s also interesting because I’m not even sure it’s entirely finished, the character select screen doesn’t function correctly and it doesn’t look on the surface like an emulation bug. The copyright still displays Ace International, but I now wonder what Afega’s role in this was. Definitely one of those cases where finding something new has left us with more questions than answers.

(Pocket Gal V.I.P is an earlier version of the Gals Hustler hack, possibly the original release)

Osso has been hooking up sound to a couple of BMC titles, showing that fresh eyes can find the odd easy but worthwhile fix in the source. Konkyuu no Hoshi (aka BMC Bowling) now has full sound and music, as does King of Football (we should probably add the original title for that too) although that isn’t yet marked as working. It reminds me I should probably revisit the ‘unknown BMC poker’ driver at some point.

(Konkyuu no Hoshi / BMC Bowling – now with sound)

Carket Ball makes it to the supported list here too, I’ve already featured this one a few times, so I’m not going to write anything more about it.

(Carket Ball is working in ex2)

I should also mention there have been many ‘invisible’ source level changed between ex1 and ex2, mostly code refactoring from smf (but also some CPU core modernizations from others). While hopefully none of these have caused any breakage there is always a risk as it’s impossible to test everything. Some of the Mac drivers were broken in the ex1 build as a result of this kind of change. Hopefully everything is fine, but if something unexpected does crop up when things were fine in the ex1 build do make sure to let me know so that we can get to the bottom of it before any proper / official release.

The netlist code (Pong etc.) has continued to advance significantly as well, that’s also mostly invisible progress but as I’ve mentioned before is essential if we’re to see pre-cpu hardware supported well, and likely to come in use for improving the discrete sound emulations we have too.

As always be sure to check the changelist logs to see if there’s anything of interest to you that I’ve missed, these release writeups are only intended to highlight things from the time period that I think people will find interesting rather than mention every little change made.

Over the last few days I’ve been tidying up some loose ends now that some of the people I’ve been working with have a little more time after Christmas.

First up there is the PGM game ‘Happy 6-in-1’ I’d posted screens of this running with a hacked internal ARM rom from The Gladiator in the past, but it wasn’t playable. By working with rtw (who picked up a new cart for testing because the one the original dump came from was dead) we were able to find a way to extract the real data (same method as the other games) and it works now. Also the new cart is a higher revision (V102 instead of V101, but it hasn’t been dumped yet) Thanks to iq_132 for helping with data entry.

In a similar story I also worked with ANY on getting the correct data for Carket Ball, another game previously featured here (this time by Semicom) Again we had to pick up a different PCB for this because the original PCB was dead, in this case we picked up a Cookie and Bibi PCB and transfered the MCU across. The game now works without crashing and without the sound glitching as soon as you insert a coin.

I said the story was similar, so I should also mention that the Cookie and Bibi board we picked up also turned out to have an undumped revision of that game on it, again probably newer because the test mode doesn’t crash in the new set. (It also used different protection data so we had to extract that too) Interestingly the graphics roms and z80 program were also different, unusual for a clone, makes me wonder if the older dump wasn’t a prototype set. There are no real changes to the graphics, just from what I can tell some redundant tiles removed.

So there you go, a couple of loose ends tied up.

*edit* I was originally not going to mention this one, because it’s not my WIP, but a number of people have suggested I mention it because it’s interesting progress.

ElSemi has done some MAME work on his old Crystal System driver. The Crystal System game Top Blade V is protected like many of the others, with a PIC providing code patches. We have a dump of the PIC (it was decapped a while back) but no CPU core. ElSemi was however able to analyse the dump and figure out the addresses it is meant to patch. By doing this he made the game playable.

He also did the same for Office Yeo In Cheon Ha (a Bishi Bashi Champ type game), but there are still stability issues with the emulation that need looking at before it can be considered working.

Here are some pictures, I stress again this is ElSemi‘s work not mine.

He did also kindly pass me the sources to his Model 2 emulator, I plan on seeing if I can use them to improve the MAME emulation (although no promises, 3D systems aren’t really something I’m known for my work on so it might go nowhere.)

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

As I’ve mentioned in other posts here I’m working on a ‘MAME/MESS progress in 2013’ article for this site to go with the one I did for 2012. For the 2012 article the cut-off point I used was 2 weeks into 2013 because the point at which an official release happened, however, that has confused a few people because it meant that things like Grasspin and Rise of The Robots were covered in the 2012 article despite happening in early 2013. To avoid this problem for the new article I’m putting out this 0.152ex1 build today, the first day of 2014, and using it as the cut-off point.

0.152ex1 is based on SVN revision 26855

The changelog (simply a copy/paste of the SVN log) can be read here. This isn’t formatted as a whatsnew, but as usual I’ll summarize the main points below.

UME 0.152ex1 Windows binaries – 32-bit, 64-bit and all tools
UME 0.152ex1 sources

Points of Interest

There’s actually not been a great deal of visible progress since 0.152, mostly code reorganization, although smf’s work on the Sharp X68000 is noteworthy as it follows on from some other recent work and is starting to bring the driver back into a usable state and it’s a driver I consider to be important because it was one of the most capable and interesting of the Japanese home computers.