Working on Sharp MZ-2500 (Super MZ), a Japanese computer system of the mid-80. It appears to be a sort of follow-up of the Sharp X1 system, with the same basic characteristic plus (attempts to) remove bottlenecks of that system (color limitations, PCG uploading etc.). I’ve seriously started to work on this system in these few days:

I’ve lately started to emulate the NEC PC-6001 Mk2, that is a modified version of the regular PC-6001. Unlike the latter, this one adds some decent video capabilities, a 40 x 25 character tilemap and a 4bpp bitmap mode, banked in two parts. It’s still nowhere near the capabilities of other PCs of that time (namely Sharp X1), but at least here games looks like … games and not a bunch of random Hunter S. Thompson-esque colors :P.

Started to work at the Sony SMC-70 / SMC-777, that is a pretty powerful (for the time) 1983 japanese computer. Basic spechs includes 16 colors with RAMDAC, PCG graphics, a bitmap layer and 3.5″ floppy drives (it’s the real first system that uses them). After some basic hooking, I’ve managed to get basic CP/M OS to work on it:

Charles MacDonald extracted the internal ROM on the Eagle 909 HW games (Janshi, Ron Jan and Pinkiri 8). Me and Haze recently did some efforts to emulate this HW, that is a Z180 with a fancy video emulation (that isn’t yet fully working).

Janshi and Ron Jan have an original thought of the mahjong game, on which you can see what type of tile is with different tilesets for the back.

Janshi

Pinkiri 8

Charles MacDonald recently did some nice researches to the not too much hatred Night Gal HW. I’ve taken a look to these docs and, after that I’ve figured out that there was an undocumented protection / open bus thing (!) I’ve got Royal Queen to work without the major graphic artifacts, unlike all the other games in the HW.

I just need to figure out why inputs doesn’t work, I guess that it should be something simple & different. Then I’ll move on to the other games on this HW …

EDIT1: fixed inputs, just a stupid mistake from my part. ^^U

EDIT2: Figured out that Night Gal, Royal Night and Night Bunny doesn’t have any real difference with Royal Queen, they now works them all: