Stern – Mazer Blazer & Great Guns (Arcade)
Another classic era game for which the emulation has been criminally neglected over the years. The dump might be incomplete (missing speech roms on Mazer Blazer) but I feel the driver for these could be substantially improved.
Konix Multisystem (Home)
This one is another tricky case, the system was never released. An emulator showed up a while back (at first I thought it was some elaborate April Fools style joke but I guess it’s actually real) but a bit like the Nuon mentioned above, I’m not sure any actual system roms are dumped, despite software for the system being available. There are further issues in that the software available (from what I can gather) is developed for different revisions of the hardware, including different CPUs. MESS does already emulate the video chip, at least partly, it’s used for some UK Quiz machines made by Bellfruit, but MESS certainly doesn’t have any kind of HLE of the rest of the system. At least I *think* that’s the situation with this one anyway, it isn’t really 100% clear. More info on the system can be found here.
(Konix Multisystem video, from existing emulator, not MESS)
Casio – Loopy (Home)
The Casio Loopy was a home system from Casio aimed at girls, most of the software is of ‘edutainment’ quality, but it’s still an interesting system to emulate. I mentioned in briefly in a previous update here when Kale got some of the software showing graphics in MESS. The main issue is that we need a way to dump the internal BIOS, that will aid greatly in the emulation because right now we’re having to bypass it and would be required to do an HLE simulation of the missing function calls to make further progress. I did come up with an idea of how we might be able to read the data out, but it doesn’t seem like anybody on the development teams has access to a working unit + the required games to run test code so for now it’s on the backburner.
(Casio Loopy hardware information and video from original system)
SNK – Hyper NeoGeo 64 – Fatal Fury Wild Ambition, Samurai Shodown 64, Samurai Shodown Warriors Rage, Roads Edge, Xxtreme Rally, Buriki One, Beast Busters 2nd Nightmare (Arcade)
It’s true that Wild Ambition has been mostly playable in MAME for a long time, and these days you can even play the Samurai Shodown games a bit, but the Hyper NeoGeo emulation is undeniably incomplete. First of all, many games don’t accept inputs, don’t run at the correct speed, have many missing graphical effects (or in the case of the driving games, most of the graphics missing entirely) There is also still no sound. It’s difficult to really consider the system emulated to any real degree.
Part of the problem is the lack of games, and the way each group of titles appear to want to handle the video hardware in a slightly different way, resulting in direct conflicts between the meaning of various registers, probably due to other configuration registers being set in a different way, this is highly annoying if you want to emulate it without hacks. It’s an annoying piece of hardware to say the least, as mentioned there is no sound, and part of the reason for this is that they use a relatively obscure V53 variant of the V33 instead of a plain one meaning there are additional peripherals to emulate and the like. The games also have annoying / buggy code, last time I tried looking at the sound I realised that some games test more RAM than they actually have, and expect the tests to FAIL otherwise they upload the sound programs to an invalid location for example. While that was in the end easy to spot you’re left wondering how much more odd behavior there is.
The problem with the inputs comes down to missing MCU dumps, it seems the games talk to the MCUs through shared ram, and expect replies probably in the form of packets containing the control data (a bit like JVS) for Wild Ambition the game code just does a simple check on the content of a single location of the shared RAM, but other games seem to want something else (maybe checksums of the data?) and will require code studying in order to simulate the MCUs. The lack of MCU dumps and poor simulation could also be the reason the Samurai Shodown games coin up too quickly and glitch if you coin them at the wrong time. Further compounding this is the system SNK used, each board time (Shooting, Driving, Fighting) has a different IO board, which at the very least provides a different ID code. With decap hopes basically dead at this point (and some of the accusations of chips being ‘stolen’ rather than decapped not being pretty at all) I guess further work will be needed on the simulation
(A selection of Hyper Neogeo 64 games running on original hardware)
Kaneko – Gals Panic II (Arcade)
Most of the Kaneko protection systems are well understood at this point but Gals Panic 2 remains the odd one out. The MCU sits between the two 68k CPUs on what can only be described as an wasteful over-engineered piece of hardware when you consider the game it runs (and how badly it performs) The exact role of the MCU isn’t understood, it at least copies data between the CPUs, but could also play a role in decompressing graphics from the main CPU data roms (which seems to be a very slow operation on original hardware) As a result of this not being understood / emulated the game(s) remain unplayable. It’s probably quite a realistic emulation target at this point.
(Original Hardware, Video might not be 100% safe for work, although doesn’t appear to contain nudity)
TCH – Wheels & Fire (Arcade)
Dox was given the source code to this one, but doesn’t have much time to work on MAME these days. You can kind of play it in MAME right now (it’s an OutRun style racer) but the graphics are very glitchy and it lacks sound. The game is a European creation and employs typical interrupt driven raster effect techniques to draw the road, much like many home games of the period did, the hookup for this is currently imperfect, hence many of the road glitches. The rest of the hardware is basically a zooming blitter, also not fully implemented, some kind of CPU driven DAC for the sound (not implemented at all)
I don’t know if Dox will find the time to finish it, if not it is one I might take a look at myself.
(No original hardware videos available)
Nichibutsu – Tatakae! Big Fighter / Sky Robo (Arcade)
Nichibutsu produced a number of arcade shooters including a significant number of classic ones before moving on to producing almost exclusively Mahjong and Casino titles. Out of all of the games they produced Tatakae! remains one of the few unemulated ones. Like so many games the issue comes down to protection with an MCU supplying important game data (including jump offsets and the like) which causes the game to malfunction very early on. There isn’t really even much footage of this one about (at least not on YouTube that I can find) so a video of some of the game music will have to suffice.
(The music of Tatakae! Big Fighter)
Space – Quiz Punch / Quiz Punch 2 (Arcade)
This Korean quiz game makes unlicensed use of a number of Disney characters (much like Comad’s Bouncing Balls does) and isn’t really otherwise that noteworthy. Both games are protected with the MCU supplying jump addresses. The first game also has a badly dumped ROM. I guess most people aren’t really going to be excited by this one, but it remains an interesting target.
(original hardware video of Quiz Punch 2, a protected Korean quiz game with unlicensed Disney characters)
Gaelco – 16-bit Era games – Thunder Hoop 2, Glass, World Rally 2 + more (Arcade)
Gaelco’s games, using a ‘Dallas’ protection MCU are well known due to their devious use of protection. For the original World Rally we were lucky enough the Gaelco shared the original game code after wanting to make it available to the public, however for the remaining games we’re not so lucky. The MCUs are secure RAM based suicide devices meaning these games have a strictly limited shelf life. The actual protection in the game code consists of hundreds of checks against values in shared RAM in the game code with many small, but significant failures in the gameplay or overall presentation should any checks fail. Dumping the MCUs is beyond the ability of anybody involved in the project, and the protection scheme from a code point of view is so devious and subtle that being confident you’ve caught and patched out / simulated all the checks in near on impossible. Needless to say these are difficult tasks, and if the protection is to be simulated would require both somebody with the coding skills, hardware understanding and inside-out knowledge of every aspect of the game to make any progress with confidence; an unlikely combination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSfqhtAM9a0
(original hardware video of Thunder Hoop 2, YouTube embedding is disabled for unknown reasons)
Taito – Air System – Top Landing & Air Inferno (Arcade)
I can’t say I’m a bit fan of the Taito ‘Landing’ games, to me they seem to be very weak arcade games, providing neither a detailed simulation, nor really exciting in any way but they were popular, and you even still see the odd one about so must have some appeal I’m not understanding. Due to the basic 3D requirements of these games the actual hardware they used was upgraded compared to regular Taito hardware of the era, with additional maths DSPs and other helper chips to accelerate the rendering. Air Inferno is a more interesting game and definitely the worst emulated of the two right now, but even Top Landing has it’s share of problems in MAME at present.
(Taito’s Top Landing and Air Inferno on original hardware)
Continued on next page..
don’t want to upset LM, but what skills are required for Votrax SC-01 emulation?
NBA Jam Extreme has never worked, from The Impact / Zinc time to now. Though I see it’s in Phil Bennett todo list, so maybe in the future..
Just love these write ups. Can not say i totally understand everything you describe, but the dedication you ( devs) all show is amazing.
I have a spare Casio Loopy and I’m in the UK, I did sent one to the guru w/ carts, which is where the internal printer ROM and cart dumps are from. Hit me up and its yours.
send*
I’m hungover and typo’d my email address too.
I have a spare Casio Loopy, I’m in the UK too, looks like the previous comment makes no sense as it was deleted for containing the R-O-M word.
Hit me up and it’s yours.
what carts do you have, are you in a position to reprogram them? can you do a ‘double size rom + upper pin bankswitch’ mod if needed (bios might checksum the carts in an unknown way)
I think the best entry point would be to hack something like the speech bubble graphics and capture a couple of hundred pages (or a video, and split it up) that way we’re modding something we know gets displayed at least, even if it sounds horrible inefficient ;)
Two copies of Anime Land (XK-401) and one of Wanwan Aijou Monogatari (XK-501). These are the duplicates, the rest I had sent to the guru with a loopy console, which is where we got the current dumps from. He still has those dumped carts and a loopy as I didn’t need them back.
I do have a programmer but no adapters for any flash chips, I’m also not confident in my soldering skills in modding it.
If you are willing, you can have this junk and hack away at it, I only collect this crap for dumping.
Wanwan Aijou Monogatari does have speech bubbles so that may just work.
Well there was one specific game I had in mind, although I can’t remember which one it was now (will have to run through them again)
I have no electronics skills at all, so would be able to do even less with the hardware than you. I wonder why Guru didn’t reply about the loopy when I asked directly on the list a few months back then, I practically shelved all work I was planning on it at that point because it seemed nobody had one.
He was pretty annoyed at me for creating the undumped wiki, so he may have thrown it in the trash.
He still has a Pippin US export board I sent to him for dumping, he did dump the Japanese one I sent him, also sent him a banged up Bandai Playdia (turned out to have 2 8-bit CPUs, horrible console with its own VCD format)
All these were donated to him so I never needed them back, so there is no bad blood on my part as they were his to throw away if he wanted, although they could just be in storage and forgotten about, he does have a lot of stuff.
A bit off-topic but i found this set of Snow Bros bootleg roms, which have the copyrights still intact. Funny story, i had a ‘Sakowa Project Korea’ version for some time, and tried to add copyrights back myself, when i scored the second board (with copyrights & logo) as ‘broken’ on Ebay recently. (my attempts to add the logo back myself had failed miserably..) Download is at dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6773475/repairs/snowbros/wintbob-toaplan.zip
sure this isn’t just the old set from MAME?
we used to support a Winter Bobble with such a copyright, but it was also a bad dump (bitrot causing the game to crash on certain levels) so it was replaced with the newer dump we support now (which lacks said copyright, but is otherwise good)
It’s GAELCO, not Galeco. ;)
indeed, had Jaleco in mind when I wrote that
WHAT? The Hyper NeoGeo 64 expects the RAM tests to FAIL?? I… I have no comment. I’ll just leave it at that.
Not in a visible way (ie there are no message to tell you it fails on said test) but it becomes obvious if you’re following the code / accesses made.
I guess it’s possible some early dev boards had twice as much RAM I don’t know why else they’d be testing RAM there, but it really does screw up some data transfers if you put ram there (or even treat it as a mirror)
TBH the memory tests on something like MegaSystem 32 are worse, the actual RAM tests on those tell you almost nothing because I don’t think there is a single game that actually checks the correct regions, most of the tests overrun into other areas, rely on mirrors, or only test a fraction of the actual RAM.
Memory fail interesting hardware protection. Weak sauce but still effective. Think about it, if you have a cart people can copy easily. But maybe the 32k chips are slightly more expensive than the 64k chips (happens from time to time). So the ‘pirate’ would buy the 64k chips and just drop the 32k worth of code onto it… For software it is easy for you to just make it fail. But you have to know what size chips there were to make it act correctly. Then if they throw mirrors in there it could look like bigger than it is. To understand it you probably would need to know the spot prices on the chips at the time.
Dear Haze,there are still many unemulated Mame driver not list the article…
Correct, this isn’t meant to be a list of ALL things unemulated, it’s a list of ones I find interesting with a bit of background information where possible.
I would really love for there to be some effort put into Gamate emulation. Most of the 1990-1992 Bit Corporation titles leave much to be desired, but the later 1993-1995 games from the UMC era are often quite enjoyable and deserve to be both preserved & played.
Yeah, it would be nice, it shows an evolution, how the industry matured, and became competitive. It’s a shame there is no way to dump them yet. I’ve not even seen photographs of what is inside them (is it blob chips like many of the pirate genesis games?)
I’ve split this up into multiple pages, the embedded YouTube things don’t half lag Firefox when loading the page otherwise!
There are internal shots of the Gamate’s board revisions and one of the card here: http://fuji.drillspirits.net/gamate/hardware/
Looks a lot like hu-cards.
That page is great but is missing a shot of the LCD board under the main PCB, that can be found here: http://www.museo8bits.com/wiki/images/c/c0/Gamate_DSC01104.jpg
so yeah blob logic in the carts.. somebody will have to trace the lines to the CPU I guess..
I’m pretty sure my fellow digital coprolite collector ranger_lennier has a few gamate cards.
The Gamate uses standard 38-pin “Soft Cards”. SoftCard adaptors were available for the MSX, Commodore, Amstrad & quite possibly a few other computers. Have any soft card games been dumped yet?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_EbHQTW0DOT0/StuxkaGOaaI/AAAAAAAAAZQ/aTo6vCiFNso/s400/Amstrad+soft+card.jpg
http://www.mos6502.com/wp-content/themes/gabfire-snapwire-3e28dcb/timthumb.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mos6502.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F01%2Fsoftcard_big.jpg&q=90&w=660&h=366&zc=1
http://www.msxarchive.nl/pub/msx/photos/MSX_Game_Covers/Backgammon_-Electric_Software-_softcard.jpg
http://www.msxvillage.fr/upload/pippols_et_hyper_rally_softcard.jpg
Even the Gamate Soft Cards appear to have been made by at least 2 different manufacturers:
http://i1071.photobucket.com/albums/u503/bitcorp/gw4.png
are you sure they’re standard? they’d only need to have swapped a few bits around and you could send the whole thing up in smoke ;-)
they do LOOK the same, I’ll give you that (the article incog linked even mentioned this) so it would be one avenue to explore. I don’t know if soft cards for any of the other systems have been dumped mind you. I wasn’t familiar with them for all these systems until you posted about them.
I have a few carts too, but they are stored pretty far away, at my parents place
Sega used Soft Cards too, on the SG-1000 and the Master System:
http://www.videogameden.com/articles/hu/hu_seg2.jpg
http://i39.tinypic.com/2lpawn.jpg
I’ve been told before that the Master Systems Soft Cards are dumped, the MESS driver however just has a single cart slot and is missing the Soft Card slot.
http://www.smspower.org/uploads/Manuals/SuperTennis-SMS-AU-sms1.png
to my knowledge, data is stored in the same way in the card and in the cart, so apart from being anal with the media definition, current emulation in MESS handles data in an accurate way
Hi Master Haze! I think that you have forgotten to include Konami M2 miss developments.
Unfortunately from several years.
Yeah M2 would be an interesting one, and I believe there are videos I can use too, I’ll probably add that to the pages in the next few days (I’m still deciding on if to include a few other things)
(basically I’ll be doing small updates to this throughout the month)
Raiden II not on the list? Bawwww :P
Reading through this and I kind of regret getting rid of this one piece of cheap tech: a green mobile phone-looking device that had Snake and a few other games on it, with real basic music. No idea what it was, probably a cheap Chinese thing, but one of the devices you listed reminded me of it.
Taito G-net driver music should marked the article…
I wish you the greatest of success, much more so with the NeoGeo games.
My greatest wish would be to see Cool Riders 100% finished!
About F1 Super Blast – did you mean “F1 Super Battle”? I got some stuff from TAFA:
http://flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=5607&image=1
That has the most clear screenshot of F1 Super Battle. (P.S. Am I the only guy finding the crash part “too soon?” It has Senna’s helmet and we know he died in a crash in Imola 1994)
Yes, I did mean Super Battle, I keep calling it Blast for some reason, maybe that’s just because my thoughts when looking at it usually end with ‘Blast, that makes no sense’
There are a number of ‘missing’ Jaleco games from that era too, Super Strong Warriors is mentioned often, but we’ve never seen a trace of it beyond screenshots / flyers.
The way things stand… what if F1SB was a mere prototype that failed location test[s]? [/conspiracy]
honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of things we’ve emulated were, ie they made enough for some location tests, but they didn’t do well enough to make any more, but weren’t recalled (because they were of no real value when offset against the recall costs)