Slapping a Tiger would be a poor life choice

I’ve been doing a bit of work on the XaviX emulation in MAME (technology used by a number of Plug and Play TV Games) and in that time I’ve made some decent progress with the emulation. While still far from perfect (some graphical problems, no sound, poor performance) I feel there has been enough progress to show some of it here. Some of the most noteworthy things using the hardware are the Taito / Namco Nostalgia collections which were released in Japan in 2006.

Taito Nostalgia 1 contains “Slap Fight” and “KiKi KaiKai” and remixed versions of them.

Below is the remix version of Slap Fight which mixes Slap Fight with another classic, Tiger Heli, giving you the Tiger Heli ship instead of the regular Slap Fight one. Due to the compressed screen size this version of the game is very difficult. The KiKi KaiKai allows you to play as the main character from Bonze Adventure instead.







































Namco Nostalgia 2 contains “Gaplus” and “Dragon Buster” again with remixed versions.Below you can see the Gaplus remix “Gaplus Phalanx” where instead of shooting things you must capture the grey enemies while avoiding capturing the red ones (and not hitting anything in the process)Taito Nostalgia 1 contains “Legend of Kage” and “Gladiator” plus the usual remixes of them. Below is Amazones, the remix of Gladiator. Note, with current emulation missing the EEPROM support the key assignments are invalid by default and get lost every time you exit the game, but they can be assigned each time.

Namco Nostalgia 1 still doesn’t run properly, so no shots from that one at the moment.

Outside of Japan the XaviX technology was used mostly by games with novelty controllers. Progress has been made on the emulation of some of those too.

Graphics were much improved in Radica’s Play TV Boxing, menus now look solid, priorities are correct, sprites fill the screen properly etc.











Radica’s Bass Fishing game no longer crashes when you enter gameplay, and no longer has corrupt text in the menus. Inputs aren’t fully mapped yet tho.









Radica’s Card Night no longer crashes upon reaching the main menu, and has more correct graphics. The glitch where it rendered a corrupt menu over the startup screens is gone too.









The Radica Madden & Football games now show their startup screens (EA license screen on Madden, Farsight developer screen on Football) and also prompt the player to throw the ball (not emulated) to start, rather than crashing at that point.









The e-kara things now have a scrolling screen and colours that aren’t garbage (although no inputs exist to get past this screen) and the Fisher Price ‘Rescue Heroes’ shows a startup screen now before crashing. Excite Fishing DX moans about the EEPROM.











Wild Adventure Mini Golf shows some startup screens before getting to an animated display asking you to swing the club to start (not hooked up)







Radica’s Baseball 2 shows it’s secret test menu, and also a startup screen, but crashes after showing the Radica Logo







Radica’s Ping Pong now boots, although you can’t serve.









Radica’s Monster Truck has improved priorities (although controls still aren’t hooked up)









Snowboard has some minor improvements but still needs the raster interrupt hooking up for the ground







While many of these still aren’t playable the progress over the last few days has taken most of them from doing almost nothing to looking much more like what they’re meant to be, and a much better picture of the overall hardware.

None of this would have been possible without Sean Riddle dumping the majority of these titles and Peter Wilhelmsen purchasing many of them for that purpose.