• ▲ Best Of Best

A beat'em up for a change! This "masterpiece" by SunA is titled Best Of Best (1994):

It runs on the suna16.cpp hardware, with a 68000 as main CPU, a Z80 for the music, and a slave Z80 driving 4 DAC's as sample player. Interestingly, the program run by the sample player is so simple, that there is no RAM connected to this CPU, and its job can be carried out by keeping the current state in the two set of registers of the Z80.

There is also some protection, but it's light, fortunateley (SunA is known for some hideous encryption / protection, see my suna8.cpp driver). This PCB differs from the others in the driver for having two sprites chips instead of one: one renders the background, the other draws the players and foreground.

Thanks to Guru / gp-lee.

• ▲ Touch Master

I rewrote the skeleton driver for the Touch Master games by Midway. These are bartop arcade games, featuring many different mini-games.

I emulated the older titles, with a 68000 CPU, where the graphics are drawn by a blitter with access to a double buffered display. Later on (I'm told) they switched over to PC's.

Player input is through a pressure sensitive touch screen (you can hover as well as press). That is not emulated correctly at the moment: the touch screen controller is declared not working at the boot. It then usually works well in game, but tends to go haywire for a while and sometimes it does not recover at all (you have to reset).

Let's start off with the original, Touch Master (1996):

Then we have the third installment of the series, Touch Master 3000 (1997):

Notice the graphics corruption, due to a bad rom.

The fourth chapter, Touch Master 4000 (1998), is protected and does not work yet. It goes this far:

Thanks to ANY and NAZ.

• ▲ Japanese Galore (Part 3)

Here we go again, some new japanese games :)

We have two hanafuda games, running on the dynax.cpp driver. First up is Hanafuda Hana Tengoku (1992):

This one requires a bit more work to be faithfully emulated, since it uses the older dynax.cpp blitter with the layers mixer chip usually found on ddenlovr.cpp class boards.

Next one is Hana wo Yaraneba! (1991):

A third hanafuda game, Hanajingi, was also dumped. Alas, I couldn't find any code roms, so it's added as not working.

Finally, a Jaleco quiz game, called Hayaoshi Quiz Ouza Ketteisen (1993):

Priorities are currently wrong since, as I write, we're missing the dump of a 512 byte prom.

This game runs on the megasys1.cpp driver (which, incidentally, I wrote some 9 years ago!). The later games on this driver use a light form of protection, whereby the inputs are accessed by sending a series of codes to a "device", and reading back the result. The codes are game specific, and prevent any rom swapping.

Interestingly, for the first time the dumper identified what appears to be an 8-bit microcontroller, that must be involved. We will need the code from in there, for this and a handful of others games, in order to achieve a faithful emulation.

As for this game, it's the first episode of a series. The other two episodes are Hayaoshi Quiz Grand Champion Taikai (already in mame) and Hayaoshi Quiz Nettou Namahousou (recently dumped). Though they run on a later platform, Jaleco Mega System 32 (ms32.c by Haze).

Thanks to Dyq, Bnathan, Guru / Team Japump, sayu.

• ▲ Japanese Galore (Part 2)

More japanese games added to the ddenlovr.cpp driver. Fancy some Hanafuda? Here is Super Hana Paradise (1994):

then Hanafuda Hana Gokou (1995):

Finally, a clone of a puzzle game, the japanese version of Rong Rong:

Thanks to Dyq, Bnathan, Guru / Team Japump, sayu, Chackn.

• ▲ Japanese Galore

As you may have noticed, a hefty number of typically japanese games have surfaced. I will try and add them, as time permits. Here are two more.

Mahjong Fantasic Love (1996), running on ddenlovr.cpp hardware:

This got me puzzled for a bit, until I figured out that the commands in the graphics roms, for the blitter, had been mixed around.

Then, on royalmah.cpp hardware, we have Mahjong Shinkirou Deja Vu (1989):

I've added a couple of non-working games as well, Mahjong Vegas (undumped TLCS-90 internal rom) and Jan Oh by Toaplan (alas, there appears to be a missing code rom).

Thanks to Dyq, Bnathan and Guru.

• ▲ Japanese Chess

A Shogi game (aka Japanese Chess) by Visco, running on ssv.cpp hardware. It's Joryuu Syougi Kyoushitsu:

In other news, I've added the japanese version of Don Den Lover to ddenlovr.cpp, and Ippatsu Gyakuten to royalmah.cpp.

Thanks to Team Japump.

• ▲ Japanese Quiz Game

A cute japanese quiz game, titled Panel & Variety Akamaru Q Jousyou Dont-R (1996), that runs on ddenlovr.cpp hardware:

This title was appearently produced by Jas, developed by Dynax and licensed to Nakanihon.

Thanks to Team Japump.

• ▲ Sammy Outdoor Shooting

Some WIP images (from me and Brian Troha) of a series of hunting simulations by Sammy.
What you see here are the earlier titles, running on seta2.cpp hardware with light guns as inputs.

Deer Hunting USA (2000):

Wing Shooting Championship (2001):

Trophy Hunting - Bear & Moose (2002):

Another game in the series, Turkey Hunting USA, is also working but needs a redump of the graphics roms.

There are still a few graphical glitches here and there, and the zoom effect is not yet implemented.

• ▲ Three Dynax Mahjongs

Here is Mahjong Comic Gekijou Vol.1 (1991), with rather explict illustrations by Tenho Iwatani, added to dynax.cpp:

The same artist is featured by Mahjong Cafe Time (1992), a game using the TLCS-90 CPU and added to royalmah.cpp:

Finally, on the same driver is Almond Pinky (1988), originally added by Roberto Fresca, but now working:

• ▲ Subsino (part 2)

Things went smoother than expected with the second Subsino game I mentioned, Last Fighting:

The video hardware is based on a blitter, that also supports zooming. The initial problems I had with figuring it out were actually due to one additional CPU core bug, causing some wrong values to be fed to the chip.

• ▲ Subsino

I've been working on two games by Taiwanese Subsino. They use the Hitachi H8/3044 CPU, which features an undumped internal ROM, and whose emulation in MAME is somewhat incomplete.

Add to that a bit of protection, and the prospects of getting the games to work were limited. Fortunately, though, it looks like the internal ROM is not critical, as I got Bishou Jan (Smiling Jan) to work, albeit with some issues:

The video hardware is tilemap based. At the moment there is no sound: the sound chip is unknown, nor do I see sound related writes. Furthermore I had to slightly patch the interrupt routines, and skip what appears to be protection checks. I also had to fix/add the emulation of several instructions in the CPU core.

The other Subsino game is Last Fighting, a Bomberman clone currently in MAME as non-working. Same CPU but different, blitter based, video hardware. I'm starting to implement that and, even if much work is still needed, I'm now hopeful to get it to run :)

• ▲ A Chinese Mahjong

Here are a few screen shots from Mahjong Dunhuang (1995 by Spirit):

I rewrote the skeleton driver dunhuang.cpp (it used to only decode the graphics) and the hardware turned out to be pretty straightforward, just tilemaps, but with a few interesting bits:

most notably, it's able to draw a block of tiles with a single command, and to stream the tile indexes from the graphics roms.

This explains why some tiles seem bad when shown by MAME's built-in tile viewer (those are data segments, not pixels).

• ▲ Two more Dynax games

Screen shots from Mahjong The Mysterious Universe (1994):

and Mahjong The Mysterious Orient (1994):

Both added to ddenlovr.cpp.

• ▲ Another Dynax game

Screen shots from Hanafuda Hana Ginga (1994), added to ddenlovr.cpp:

• ▲ Year 2006

Read posts from last year