While doing deprecat.h clean-ups (basically conversion of irq systems in old drivers) I’ve stumbled across one of my oldest nemesis … Chequered Flag by Konami. After some grinding of my teeth and a LOT AND HALF of DASM code studying, I’ve finally nailed it down, it was mostly a rather silly bug with the protection device, checking that a check was true on a port by checking that all the bits were high instead of just one like one could imagine …

Note: I’m not entirely sure that the protection is COMPLETELY emulated, if you know the original game and notice something wrong just let me know via the public channels, thanks in advance.

Discovered and implemented sprite color cycling effects in Armed F driver. That’s a RAM-based clut table that look-ups via a byte in the sprite defs. As you can see from the YT vids, it’s used for doing neat effects such as explosions / bonus colors etc. in Terra Force …

… it’s even more useful in Kozure Ookami, since it’s used to differentiate the explosive red ninjas from the normal ones …

… and in Armed F, that is used to make the sprites to be a lot less static.

Currently working at the Nichibutsu 1414M4 emulation, that is a fancy MCU / blitter device used for copying text strings in various 1987/1988 games. Here’s Terra Force and Kodure Ookami with this hooked up:

Next up I’ll need to implement this for the other games, in particular for Ninja Emaki, that never worked properly due of this.

EDIT (23-apr-2011):

After some consolidation we got this (note that these two are WIP screens, they aren’t yet in official MAME build):

Also fixed the NB1414M4 priority bit, it mostly helps with Terra Force intro and title screen:

I’ve passed last few days into converting the Taito F3 video chip (TC0630FDP) from 32-bit to 16-bit parallelism. Why a masochistic task like that, you might ask? Because I’ve realized that by simply converting 2 Minutes Drill to tilemaps, and the HW really looked a bit too complex to my tastes … 2 days of coding later and this game shows huge improvements, mainly because it uses lots of zooming / rowscroll effects.
Game is still not playable mainly because it’s an half mechanical / half videogame, but oh well …

As for the other news – the rumors are true. Starting from this dev cycle I’m the new MAME lead coordinator, taking over duties for Aaron Giles. Some generic guidelines of regarding what I expect to do for the project will follow soon, but for now I’ll take the chance to thank Aaron for all the work he has done for the MAME project as a contributor and coordinator for so many years.