I’m recently working on the Legionnaire / Raiden 2 protection HW. If you didn’t lived on Mars until now, you should already know that is one if not THE most insane protection device ever created by an human being.

I’ve did many fixes so far (sound and working status for Denjin Makai, colour fixes for Legionnaire and many other things) … and then, today I’ve stumbled across X Se Dae Quiz …

X Se Dae Quiz … an obscure Korean quiz game … honestly this one is pretty forgettable as a game (to not say laughable), but it actually represents a MAME milestone since it’s the first real Raiden 2 HW working game. It currently have a sprite protection issue with the sprite map (similar to the other games), colour issues in some screens, and sprite ROMs are badly dumped (half size, hence the blobs of nothing), but it seems otherwise pretty much playable (provided that you know Korean)

Me, OG, Haze, Dox and the MAME team proudly (?) presents … X Se Dae Quiz

EDIT: Guru redumped the sprite roms, so updated the pics with the correct dump.

Irem M107 HW, a driver that indeed didn’t received much love in his life. The driver was a complete mess, with completely broken World PK Soccer, Dream Soccer ’94 with huge slowdowns and Fire Barrel … well, it was marked as working but imho it wasn’t really working, with that layer covering half the screen and completely missing sound, effectively making it a painful experience to play. After some study at the code, I’ve realized that the driver was continously triggering an unmapped line from the main CPU, directly correlated to some sound response r/w. Easy fix, that’s a reset line directly connected to the sound CPU.

Then the graphics. After some study at the code me and Haze realized that current rowscroll handling was entirely wrong, since that rowscroll is enabled thru a completely different bit (used by World PK Soccer gameplay) … we studied some videos of the real PCB floating around the net and realized it was actually enabling row select, a kind of effect also used in this game for stretching the tilemap in the vertical axis (effectively doing some pseudo zooming).

We have still to do rowscroll effects for Fire Barrel (used for the sea on level 2 and the canyon on level 6) and several sprite fixes, but I can safely assume that Fire Barrel is a lot more playable now that it ever was. My preliminary hook-up already makes World PK Soccer to have better gfxs than before, but it’s still not 100% right for Fire Barrel …

Haze recently discovered that Neo Print cartridges (a SNK photo booth system) doesn’t really have anything in common with Neo Geo other than the cart sizes and the sound system. After some preliminary work it started to show this:

Started a driver for Nichibutsu’s ‘High Rate DVD’ HW, the direct HW follow-up from Niyanpai HW. I/Os and bitmap video are mostly taken care of, this HW uses the V9958 MSX-2 VDP, and yes it’s quite shocking to know that a 200X-era HW uses an “outdated” video chip.

Game name is Cosplay Heaven 5, and, needless to say, DVD parts are still missing from this. 😉

More improvements to Sharp MZ-2500 in the last few days, almost every available game/software works just fine now hence I’ve promoted system to working:

In the other news, me and Dirk Best recently fixed a z80dma <-> wd17xx fdc communication issue that was causing several Sharp X1 Turbo games to not work.