I’ve convinced myself in looking the three GNW “Dec0 Pro” games series (a.k.a. 18 Holes Pro Golf, Pro Sport and Pro Soccer). The game with the worst condition was 18 Holes Pro Golf, so I’ve started to look at it for first. It’s basically a nightmare, with a background layer and a tilemap/bitmap framebuffer hybrid mess, with “tilemap cells” that are written to the resulting screen as-is, without any tilemap hook-up for it as you might expect…

And now the bad news: it has issues with the main program (for example hazards doesn’t do anything), that might be caused by a bad rom or a slightly bad decryption (service mode returns “rom bad error 6″ as well).

Thanks to the decryption aid from OG and Dox, we’ve finally got Mirax to the working state in the last couple of days:

The attentive people has noticed that me and Dox have slowly but steadily improved the Super Crowns Golf driver lately. Recently I’ve finally got results worth to be shown to the public about the framebuffer/blitter used for the background graphics.

As a trivia I should say that fixing the background vram data have “magically” fixed the banking bugs in the game as well, so I say: never underestimate the power of fixing stuff even if it doesn’t follow a priority scheme.

I’ve been passing these days to improve old drivers issues. One thing that always puzzled me out the most are Pro Yakyuu Nyuudan Test Tryout colors. I was almost sure that they were wrong (yellow baseball field isn’t exactly my standard for realism) but I’ve never seen any screen of the real thing so I’ve never tried seriously to fix them. Then I’ve seen something and here’s the results:

Now I should look forward to find a fix for the scrolling problems…

*edit* fixed the scrolling bugs:

By request, I’ve spent five minutes in looking at Kick N Run / Mexico ’86 comms for 4p mode. Actually got something…

…but the major problem is that this fix breaks the normal 2p mode. I wonder if I’ll find a solution for it…

*update* after trying everything I think that the most plausible option is that the reset line for the communication cpu is directly hard-wired with the dip-switch that controls the number of players, but I need to prove it…does anybody kind enough could send to me some high quality pics of this pcb, component and solder sides?