2013 – Another Year In MAME

**Note: 25th Feb 2014 – First Public version – this still needs proof reading, some of it was written in a rush and could be improved, hopefully nothing major is actually missing tho**

I think it’s fair to say even before embarking on this article that I have a gut feeling 2013 has been a slower year than 2012 was when it comes to MAME progress.

You only have to look at the lower levels of activity from some of the key driver developers like Luca Elia, Phil Bennett, Ville Linde, and Roberto Fresca to get an idea of why I feel there is going to be less to write about this year.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been groundbreaking work done this year, plenty comes to mind immediately so trying to make such a claim would be a lie; the people who have been involved have contributed a tremendous amount to the project and when the aforementioned developers have found time to make contributions they have been as significant as ever.

When I asked for comments to help build this article it was suggested that 2013 was ‘Year of Haze’ and if anything I’d like to disprove that with the actual article here; there has been plenty done outside of my realm of work, and plenty I have done simply wouldn’t have been possible without work (past or present) from others. While this article doesn’t exist to mention names, but instead focus on the actual changes made this is something I will be keeping in mind while writing it, and something I will revisit in the conclusion.

Like last year I’m covering the MAME project as a whole with this article, that includes all the work done on home systems that we currently release as MESS but in reality is still part of the same overall project. If you prefer to think of it as ‘A Year in UME’ then feel free to do so. I feel this approach also gives the best chance of being able to highlight areas I haven’t been involved in.

Anyway that’s enough introduction, to start this write-up I’m going to look first at a couple of the things that will likely be of most interest to the people reading this, a selection of the new additions from the year, things that were previously not even known about, or had not yet been emulated.

New Additions – Old and/or Rare

Old and rare is a combination that often sends PCB prices through the roof, especially for Japanese PCBs, but outside of Japan that isn’t always the case, PCBs often end up being found, dumped and repaired by enthusiastic collectors who are more than happy to help MAME.

Early Period games

Italy, as is so often the case, proved to be the source of two of the most significant finds made this year in ‘Attack Force’ and ‘Long Beach’ Both of these games are Italian products, and it is likely neither saw high levels of distribution either within Italy, or as exports to other regions.

These games both help to show that the prevalence of arcades in Italy even in the early days was significant enough that local developers thought it a worthwhile investment to create their own CPU based games to compete in the marketplace.







(Attack Force is a very rare game with unique gameplay, it was developed in Italy)



(Long Beach is another very rare Italian game)







(Sea Battle challenges you to shoot as many targets as you can within the allotted time, it is one of the earlier original Zaccaraia titles)







(Nobody even remembered Desert Dan until a PCB turned up)







(Stunt Air was also all but forgotten, the gameplay mimics that of Sega’s Star Jacker)



Even better known Italian manufacturers had rare games too, another one that surfaced this year was ‘Sea Battle’ by Zaccaraia. This fits neatly with the two games previously mentioned hailing from a similar era.Jumping to 1982 a game called ‘Desert Dan’ was released, this runs on the same hardware as ‘The Pit’ but comes from the previously unknown ‘Video Optics’. Very little is known about the history of this game, until it was discovered it was completely unknown.Fast forward another year to 1983 and you have Stunt Air, another all but forgotten classic era game from Italy. This one, while clearly influenced by Sega’s Star Jacker is an original production.

Compared to 2012 there wasn’t really much activity with things like the Deco Cassette system, 2012 was a fruitful year when it came to new dumps on that platform but 2013 saw just one new addition, the ’18 Hole’ version of Pro Golf. Technically this was already supported in MAME due to it being the same version that exists on the ROM boards, but it gets a mention up here because these Deco Cassettes are important and do need dumping while they’re still in good enough condition to dump them.







(The DECO Cassette version of 18 Hole Pro Golf was the only DECO Cassette dumped in 2013)



Other than those it has been a quiet year when it comes to discovery of rare games from the late 70s / early 80s, not entirely unexpected, there are only a finite number of them and inevitably we’re never going to find them all and the number of people searching or with something to offer drops all the time.

Arcadia

There are titles we have a pretty good idea exist either due to flyers existing, people reporting that they played them, or actual reports of them still being on location somewhere obscure and a number of Arcadia Systems titles fell into this bracket. While these aren’t as old as the titles mentioned above they are still rare and interesting to see supported.

Luckily along with the Unigame prototype stash which will be mentioned later were a number of these titles. Delta Command, Blastaball, and Pharaoh’s Match. Rockford is still missing, but almost certainly exists due to the Amiga release, but it was good to have 2 known games, and one previously unknown one confirmed and now supported. Our Amiga emulation could be a lot better, but having these discovered and documented also means that WinUAE can now emulate them if you want a higher quality of emulation.











(From top to bottom, Blastaball, Pharaohs Match and Delta Command, all previously undumped Arcadia titles)



More ‘NEW WORKING’ titles

A board for Aaargh! was also located, but this wasn’t actually dumped until 2014 so will feature in the next write-up instead.

Not everything is as rare or old as the above, although some of the things I’ll cover in this section could easily be move to the above section. Keep in mind that this section and the one above don’t cover all the ‘NEW WORKING’ drivers either, there are important additions mentioned in other sections like ‘Driver Maturity’ later in this write-up, I’ve tried to keep things spread out to keep it interesting!

PGM developments

As one of the more often name-checked arcade systems PGM is one of interest to a large demographic of MAME users. Consider it if you will a bit of an underdog, a late arriving system designed to compete with the 1997+ era SNK from a Taiwanese company far better known for their video-based gambling & mahjong games as well as the odd obscure puzzle game.

For the final few original games on the platform IGS really upped the quality of the games being put out, but also repeatedly evolved the protection schemes they used throughout the life of the system, creating custom per-game systems which did a formidable job of slowing down (and for many games, outright preventing) bootlegs at the time.

The Gladiator (known as Road of the Sword in Japan) is considered the pinnacle of their output on the system, and like so many IGS games it didn’t see any kind of release outside of the arcades. Getting it working was definitely one of the highlights of the year.









(The Gladiator was the PGM title the most people have been requesting we emulate for a long time)







(Spectral vs. Generation was made by Idea Factory, a company founded by former Data East staff)







(The Killing Blade Ex played an important role in getting the above titles emulated)









(Out of all the PGM titles Puzzli 2 required the most hard work to emulate)











(Emulation of a number of other PGM titles improved to varying degrees too, although there are still significant issues)







(Knights of Valor 2 Nine Dragons now uses the proper internal ROM making emulation more reliable)







(Happy 6-in-1 and the Cartridge version of SVG were made to boot, but emulation still wasn’t working by the end of the year)



The PCB version of Spectral vs. Generation also gained working status in the later weeks of the year, this was one of the few PGM games that was actually ported (in this case to the PS2 and PSP) but it’s good to see the arcade version running in MAME.The Killing Blade Ex / Plus was another of the later PGM titles to be promoted to working, and is worth mentioning because it’s actually a more significant evolution of the game than the name would suggest coming across as a much more polished product than the original release, it’s a shame it appears to have only been released in China (like many of the later re-releases were)While these games weren’t easy to emulate and for a long time I did wonder if it would even be possible I have to say that comparatively the work required to get PGM title ‘Puzzli 2’ working was actually much more involved than The Gladiator, because instead of being able to emulate the ARM CPU using the ROM it was necessary to study and simulate it’s every feature. This meant studying all the command sequences, and even ended up with reverse engineering a small encryption table from the game data. In terms of memorable personal achievements for the year that one sits high in the list. Emulating this also allowed us to discover the differences between Puzzli 2 and the later released ‘Super’ verison, with the main addition being the Vs. CPU mode.The emulation of other PGM titles also quietly improved in the background, Oriental Legend Super has a much more complete protection simulation now and is actually playable to the end, although there’s definitely some room for better understanding / improvement left. The Dragon World 2 clones are now more stable, Dragon World 3 and Dragon World 3 Ex can be booted and coined up (although fails after a few rounds and on a continue) For the record, a number of people have suggested that there is also an undumped ‘Dragon World 3 Special’ I think this is just the Japanese name for the same game however, as when running as the Japanese version it uses an extra subtitle. Maybe there was an earlier non-special Japan release without the subtitle? There’s little evidence to suggest a later (c)2000 release at least.Less noticeable was games like Knights of Valor 2 Plus / Nine Dragons being moved to use a proper internal ROM from that game rather than a hacked copy of one from the regular Knights of Valor 2, if it makes an actual difference is debatable, but the emulation is cleaner that way.Groundwork was also done for the emulation of Happy 6-in-1, which would be made playable in early 2014 along with the cartridge release of Spectral Vs. Generation. These followed the pattern of The Gladiator and the PCB version of Spectral Vs. Generation and the test code required to help complete the data was actually finished in 2013, although the actual tests and working emulation was delayed by the Christmas and New Year period, so they’ll end up getting a mention next year too.

Some non-PGM IGS games also saw code improvement, for example cleaned up protection implementations in Alien Challenge and Lord of Gun, but these should have no visible impact.

Bigger Names

While IGS and their PGM system became one of the bigger arcade names fairly late on they were never one of the big players in the early days, here I’m going to look at cases where drivers for games from some of the better known manufacturers have ended up being promoted to working state.

It’s fair to say that at this point MAME covers the majority of the pre-3D era games from the main manufacturers comprehensively, not always with high quality emulation just yet but the number of games and pieces of hardware that aren’t understood at all sit in the minority.

For that reason one of the bits of work done in 2013 that gathered a large amount of attention was the work done on Sega’s Cool Riders. It was the only release on an ill-fated platform, yet at the same time the culmination of their famous ‘Sprite Scaler’ engine before such techniques were all but abandoned in favour of 3D platforms due to Daytona taking centre stage 2 years earlier.







(Medium Resolution screens, Big news, emulation of this unique Sega platform was a major acomplishment)



As far as emulation goes it was one of the bigger challenges, that shouldn’t be surprising, the driver has been sitting in a non-working state for a long time. Many aspects of the hardware are unique and it was necessary to figure out a lot of unknowns, during what was easily the most involved piece of work I was involved in over the course of the year.

There were multiple factors that made this work interesting, not only figuring out the hardware, but optimizing it to a point where it runs at an acceptable speed on current hardware, despite the simple appearance the game is driving 2 medium resolution screens with a very high fillrate sprite chip from a compressed data source with borderline 3d capabilities so getting it as good as it is was a challenge.

We never did fix the sound in the end but maybe that’s one for next year.

Coverage of some of the big names in the MESS side of the project is weaker, there are still entire systems from known manufacturers not emulated at all, often due to a complete lack of dumps. Nichibutsu were a big player in the early arcades, with unforgettable offerings like Moon Cresta and Crazy Climber in addition to countless Mahjong titles for the Japanese market the majority of which have been well represented in MAME for many years.

What was less clear from the MAME / MESS projects is that Nichibutsu were also active in the early Japanese computer / console market, and 2013 provided some insight into that through the emulation of the previously unemlated ‘My Vision’ console. Like most early systems that didn’t really succeed it’s a bit slow, klunky and lacks a decent software library but having it emulated is an important piece of the ‘documentation’ puzzle and shows how Nichibutsu were involved not only in producing a number of iconic 80s titles, but also ventured into markets where they were mostly forgotten.













(The Nichibutsu My Vision was an early home system from the arcade mahjong specialists)



Taito are another big name and one of thing they were famous for were the arcade ‘simulation’ games they produced. Many of these are not yet emulated properly because the hardware is not easy to understand with additional DSPs and the like bolted on to base systems to make up for the lack of base CPU power.

If you look at Midnight Landing you probably wouldn’t have guessed this. In all honesty this early Taito effort looks barely above what you’d see on some 8-bit home systems, presenting you with a landscape of sparse dots against a black backdrop with a framerate that can’t really be described as spectacular. Emulation of this did however present a challenge for the developers involved, looks turned out to be very deceptive with a number of the hardware features proving to be obtuse.

2013 did however see the game emulated to a degree where it can now be considered working, prior to this it would pop up sound errors and the controls were mostly non-functional. The later Air System releases by Taito still need significant work, but at least we can say this earlier effort now works.







(Midnight Landing has deceptively complex hardware considering how simple it looks)







(Panic Road was the only Seibu game to gain ‘working’ state in 2013)



Seibu is a name on the lips of many when it comes to emulation, mainly because they’re one of the few manufacturers where key parts of their library are simply unplayable and when it comes to the often name-checked titles nothing has really changed in 2013. Progress was however made on one of the lesser known Seibu titles, a game utilizing pinball mechanics released under the title ‘Panic Road’ and distributed mainly by Taito.

I’ve got a whole section on improvements to Data East drivers later in the article where I talk about improvements to the protection emulation, however one Data East game required a different kind of work, actual video emulation improvements (including bits of the video code being significantly rewritten) That game is Stadium Hero ’96, which runs on the MLC system but abuses ‘raster effects’ to give the pseudo 3D look.







(Getting Stadium Hero ’96 working required rewriting large parts of the Deco MLC video code)



Various improvements in MAME saw Konami’s Five-A-Side Soccer improve to the point where it can now be considered properly ‘playable’ This one is rather interesting because the majority of systems using a PowerPC processor are 3D capable systems, and thus the emulation core doesn’t really get tested that often due to the system requirements for running such games. Five-A-Side soccer instead has a PowerPC chip, but the video hardware is pure 2D hardware.







(Five-A-Side Soccer isn’t the most well known game from Konami, and is an odd case of an entirely 2D platform being driven by a PowerPC chip)



Not so exciting.. but still significant





(Brixian is an early effort from the developer later known as Semicom)







(Dolmen, an early AFEGA game, really wants to be Puzzle Bobble!)



One-off titles

Brixian, as a game is nothing more than a simple copy of Taito’s Puzznic. It’s an original piece of code, but unless you really love Puzznic it’s not something overly exciting. It is significant however because it’s the earliest known development by what would later become ‘Semicom’ (Cheil at the time)Dolmen fills a similar position in the history of Afega; the earliest supported Afega game was Twin Action which was simply a graphic / sound hack of USAAF Mustang but Dolmen uses the same board to present an ‘original’ game (if you can call a game that simply takes the Puzzle Bobble mechanics and fails to really innovate on it original) It’s a significant part of Afega’s history because it spawned the ‘Bubble 2000’ and ‘Hot Bubble’ games which were surprisingly popular in Europe after being licensed by Tuning and Pandora.Both games mentioned also show just what a heavy influence Taito had on the industry, and how many Korean manufacturers saw the games Taito made as a perfect model for how to create a popular game on a tight budget.Some names are far less common in the arcades but at the same time it’s not unheard of for those manufacturers / developers to put out interesting and unique hardware, that is often a challenge to emulate. Progress on systems like this is an important part of MAME because often it takes a lot of work to make just the one title run, and when it’s not from a big name developer it’s very easy to overlook that progress and the sheer amount of hard work that was required to understand the hardware.

Turret Tower, made by ‘Dell Electronics’ (not THAT Dell) was a game licensed by Namco. From a hardware perspective this is one of the more unique pieces of hardware to be emulated during the year with a complex custom blitter driving the graphics, most of which are streamed from a Hard Disk.





(Turret Tower is very interesting from a hardware point of view, and also a polished and rather manic game)



Tap-A-Tune was a music game released in 1994, before music games really became popular. CES went on to be involved with Midway’s Touchmaster games, as well as their own ‘Galaxy Games’ creation.







(Tap-a-Tune is a music game from before music games were popular…)







(…and Touchstar Bonanza is a touchscreen game from before touchscreen games were popular!)



Not So Interesting?..

Touchscreens are all the rage these days, with some people even thinking they’re new technology, but you can rewind a long way and still find games based on Touchscreen technology. Touchstar Bonanza is one such game, from 1994. Merit were making Touchscreen titles around the same period so it wasn’t a completely original concept, but it does show that even 20 years ago people were experimenting with touchscreen technology and it never really caught on outside of a handful of genres and use cases compared to the vast number of games that still used regular controls. The hardware is basically a PC, but that doesn’t make it any easier to emulate!

Casanova is the prime example of a game that really shouldn’t exist. The market was not short of basic tile matching games and it adds nothing to the table at all. Interesting only because it turned out to be running on the same hardware as the equally uninspired 3×3 Puzzle with some really nasty looking manual modifications to the PCB. It’s an example of a company trying to cash in on the market after the market was almost dead, it serves as a lesson in what NOT to do.







(Casanova has no redeeming features)



A number of ‘bad’ games were just fronts for gambling games, to hide the fact that a gambling game was being operated. Even larger manufacturers like Subsino employed this practice with games like X-Plan where they even boasted the ‘feature’ on their advertising flyers. With games like this it isn’t always clear how to switch them from ‘regular’ game mode to ‘gambling’ mode and in several cases as a result it isn’t clear if a game is just bad, or actually contains a ‘stealth’ gambling game. I’d say that Casanova mentioned above was just a bad game, but for another one of the additions from last year it is less obvious.

Fruit Land is an arcade conversion of the freeware PC game of the same name, which in turn is based off an MSX game. It has been sold as a ‘gambling’ title on eBay before, but it isn’t clear if this is true, or if it is true what kind of key combination or dipswitch setting is needed to boot it in gambling mode. Truth be told it isn’t a terrible game, but there’s no real reason you’d want to operate it in an arcade so with that in mind it’s easy to believe it could be harbouring a different payload just we haven’t found it yet.. There is the 2nd possibility, that the dump we have contains nothing awry and was simply sold this way so that the supplier could then also sell media cards containing gambling games as some way to bypass laws / checks.







(Fruit Land might be hiding a gambling game, but if it is we haven’t found it)











(The Super Game series was one of several ways NES games appeared in arcades without a license from Nintendo)



Super Game Mega Type 1 is yet another NES based multi-game of the type that was produced before MAME and MAME boxes became the common way for unscrupulous operators to try and operate multiple games in a cabinet. It contains a decent selection of 7 NES games, but the selection menu is unintuitive and looks like it was written in the space of an hour at most. (at least one of the games also seems to highlight timing issues in our NES emulation)

Hidden Catch 2000 doesn’t really fit anywhere else, so I’m mentioning it here. Until it surfaced it we didn’t know about it. It’s very similar to the other Hidden Catch games and even shares the introduction sequence with one of the earlier titles, so it’s a bit of a strange release.







(Hidden Catch 2000 seems like a minor update to the Hidden Catch ’98 codebase)







(Popo Bear is the only game we’ve seen from BMC where there is real gameplay rather than it being a gambling game)



New and Taboo

Popo Bear is another odd case. BMC are better known for gambling / redemption games created for the Asian market so the game is unusual in the sense that it isn’t, it’s actually a real game, simplistic given the release date, but still a real game, and not even a bad one at that. Popo Bear is also a game I highlighted in the 2012 write-up as ‘potential’ because the driver just needed a little more attention and work to bring it into the realm of ‘working’ so I’m glad to see that happened

The final change of 2013, or first change of 2014 depending on your time zone was the reintroduction of support for the SH3 based games produced by CAVE. While this isn’t really new progress and most of the unofficial MAME builds have been carrying these for years (so re-adding them makes little difference to the end user) it does mean we can start to better document the hardware, and hopefully make strides in improving the driver.

Right now you probably won’t want to run any of the shooters using the driver as it is, while the games are considered working the delays caused by the video hardware drawing the graphics aren’t emulated, this results in the games having very little slowdown where slowdown would be present on the real PCB and thus makes many of the later patterns in the game (or the GOD modes) much more difficult than they could be because the games would be running in slow motion on the real PCB at points where the screen was full of bullets, but in MAME the action still flies by at 60fps (assuming you have a good enough system anyway)

So yes, don’t actually expect to be playing these games in MAME, the ports are cheap and will give you a far better experience at a far lower cost!

What this does mean is we can start to tidy things up, it has been observed that many of the games were programmed onto defective flash roms, which have further decayed, it is important for the sake of documentation to establish what actually represents a good dump for each of these games *before* the situation gets any worse. Unfortunately for some of the flash based media out there the expected life seems no better than games with mechanical HDDs but doesn’t raise the same level of suspicions, nor really give any warning signs of failure.

Puzzle! Mushihime-Tama is interesting because it’s the only one that runs well (where lack of slowdowns and accurate blitter timing don’t matter) I’m not sure it was ever ported either strangely enough. The parent set in the new driver is actually a newer revision than the previous driver as well.







(Puzzle! Mushihime-Tama is the most accurately emulated game in the Cave driver because it doesn’t rely on slowdowns)







(Uopoko was the prequel to Puzzle! Mushihime-Tama, surprisingly few people realise unless they’re already familiar with both titles)



The game is the sequel to the popular Puzzle Uopoko for those not in the know. (nothing new with Uopoko emulation, just thought I’d picture it here for easy comparison!)

I say these are ‘new’ but the actual platform is 10 years old now, and the first ports of the games were on home systems 2 generations old, so in reality the system isn’t really that new, even if it has the odd more recent release, but then again so does the NeoGeo (NGDevTeam have a commercial game out this year) and we’ve been supporting that platform for years, just not the newer games, so the same logic will be applied here.

DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu was added when the driver was restored; this is the first DoDOnPachi game to be released since DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou on the single board PGM hardware. The new purpose built hardware offers significantly more CPU power, and a higher fill rate with more flashy blending effects but oddly runs at a significantly lower resolution than the PGM board resulting in less detailed graphics, the sound hardware is also quite limited so most music sounds like low bitrate MP3s (because it essentially isn’t far off that) rather than the carefully sequenced music present on the PGM platform.







(first there was DonPachi, then DoDonPachi, then DoDonPachi II Bee Storm, then DoDonPachi Dai-Ou-Jou, and now DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu has been emulated)









(Mushihime-Sama Futari Ver 1.0,Ver 1.5, Black Label, Espgaluda II, Mushihime-Sama)



(Deathsmiles, a more accessible horizontal effort)





(Ibara, Ibara Kuro Black Label, Pink Sweets: Ibara Sorekara, Muchi Muchi Pork!)



Diversity

All the stuff from the old driver is there too, there have been sound fixes and the like applied to the sound cores since it was last officially in the source, so there are definitely some improvements to be heard.

Last year I highlighted the diversity we were seeing as one of the big positives, showing how the mindset of the team was becoming more open, and how our code and cores were applicable to many more areas than the original MAME vision.

While I can’t say this year has seen quite the same level of breaking into new territory it has seen continued improvements on some of the periphery areas of MAME, the Pinball drivers have seen a steady flow of work for example with many more now booting and responding to inputs.













(Some pinball displays were emulated)









(Some of the older ones didn’t use Dot Matrix displays)









(even more Pinball Displays)





















(This sure is a lot of pinball displays..)













































(I think that will do…as you can see, lots of Pinball displays were improved, even if they can’t hook up to anything yet)



Preliminary emulation of other coin operated arcade devices was also added, the CPU code for a 24 CD Jukebox happily runs, showing the manufacturer information (MIDCOIN) between flashing ‘Insert Coin’ at you should you choose to run that set and towards the close of the year we also saw preliminary emulation of the video section of a coin operated electronic darts board.











(Midcoin of Italy made this Jukebox for Arcade use)



Maybe this doesn’t belong here, but one system on which there was progress over the course of the year was the Microvision. In reality it’s just another handheld system but it is rather unique in that it used a display of only 16×16 pixels, that’s a similar size to the ‘favicon.ico’ some websites use although in this case there wasn’t even any colour. It’s a very early system as you might guess and all the cartridges use MCUs rather than traditional ROMs so getting dumps of any of them has been a huge challenge. The system is still considered non-working (progress at the start of 2014 has since improved things further) but you can boot them up, and get them to do a couple of things. Just make to use -video ddraw and a high level of prescale! These shots have all been zoomed from 16×16 to 128×128







(At 16×16 pixels the Microvision display could certainly be classed as low resolution, the games don’t quite work properly yet tho)



Again I’m not sure the following really counts as diversity, but it does demonstrate emulation of a system just as primitive as the Microvision. The RCA Studio 2 (made in 1977) has been in MESS for a while now, but last year saw a number of fresh dumps for the system including ‘Star Wars’, ‘Concentration Match’, ‘Bingo’ and ‘Pinball’ This isn’t the most obvious to use system, at first it looks broken but if you hit F3 then ‘Q’ the games start. The controls are a little weird too and it takes some imagination to work out what is going on!











(Back when the Studio 2 was released in the late 1970s games required a lot more imagination)







(The Visicom is very similar to the Studio 2)























(The Sega Visual Memory was a memory card that plugged into the Dreamcast controllers and allowed games to be uploaded for standalone play)



The Visicom is a very similar system, but in the case of the Visicom we saw actual emulation improvements during the year (corrected colours) as well as the addition of a Software List containing a single dumped game called ‘Sports Fan’ which appears to be a Baseball game (and possibly more, but I haven’t figured out how to use it fully) Without a cartridge the system acts as a (very) basic paint package.The Sega Visual Memory Unit (part of a Dreamcast Controller) is another system that shows how we can emulate some rather difference pieces of hardware within the project, and also shows how at times we can be open minded about what ends up in a software list in cases where it can be used to test the emulation. In the case of the SVMU all the game data is actually uploaded by the Dreamcast so if we were to enforce a ‘pure’ set of rules you’d have to create it yourself in the Dreamcast driver before trying it. Instead we’ve allowed the Software list to contain the ram dumps for a number of known games in order to facilitate easy testing. This means to run them you simply need to go through the VMU time/date setup then hit ‘M’ to change to game mode.

We also saw the computer part of an electronic dart board emulated, in this case the Arachnid 6000 – Super Six Plus II English Mark Darts system. I believe this marks a first. Emulating the rest of it should be possible in theory with the artwork system, although aiming will be a lot easier than the real thing! There are many other versions of this type of thing out there yet to be dumped at all.







(The computer part of an electronic darts board dictates the gameplay and keeps score)



Educational systems also show a different side to the project, there are a number supported now and 2013 saw the addition of an English language one known as IT Unlimited.







(These small learning computers teach people basic computer skills, including some programming)



The little work that did get done on Fruit Machines this year included hooking the Scorpion 5 platform up so that error messages can be seen, no real attempts were made to emulate it any further tho. These have definitely ended up on the backburner. There’s a lot of rewarding progress to be made should somebody pick them tho, it does however remain a monumental task due to the vast number of configurations, although I’m sure somebody armed with the CPU manuals could do a good job of implementing all the on board peripherals for the CPUs commonly used which would help get things moving again.







(We didn’t really see much progress on Fruit Machines, a few were made to boot a bit further tho)



Netlists

The vast majority of what MAME emulates is traditional driven by a CPU running code from ROMs. This however means it can’t easily cover a whole generation of games where the actual game logic was coded directly into the circuit design. The only exception to this in MAME for a while now has been Pong but until recently progress on that area, and associated areas like discrete sound emulation had stalled. The later part of 2013 saw significant efforts being made to get things moving again with such drivers, improving the framework used to support discrete systems with a goal of also allowing the discrete sound system emulations we have to make use of the same framework rather than their own one.

While MAME does still only support Pong (unlike other emulators such as Dice which support a number of other titles at this point) the actual framework and support code has improved significantly and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the list of non-CPU games supported by MAME extend beyond the simple ‘Pong’ case at some point in the new year, again showing how diverse MAME can be and how it’s starting to support things that weren’t even dreamed of when the project was started.







(Pong remains the only example of netlist use in MAME, it saw several improvements over the year)



More things I don’t understand..

This follows on from the topic of diversity very well. One of the ‘issues’ with having such a diverse library of supported platforms is that many of them are really difficult to figure out, or can’t really be used for anything interesting at all in an emulated environment (consider the possibility that we might one day emulate the firmware of a Microwave, MAME is never actually going to cook your food!).

One thing that has been evident throughout the year is that there is a lot of progress going on where it’s really difficult to know the scope and meaning of the changes being made unless you’re familiar with the systems in question. This is especially true when it comes to systems in MESS.

There has been a phenomenal amount of work done in the MESS part of our code over the past 12 months in addition to many changes made to our CPU and device emulations with specific systems in mind.

While sorting out things to definitely mention in this write-up and things that need more investigation to figure out if they’re going to spark the interest of the general readership here I found the latter pile growing very quickly.

Unfortunately if I was to actually go through each of those systems and changes, learning about each and every addition and what that meant then I’d never end up finishing this article, there has simply been so much work done. For this reason I’m sure there are many important, maybe even critical improvements to systems or add-on devices over the year that haven’t made it into this article, that’s not to say I don’t value them, they’re vital to the project and driving it forward, that’s why I’ve added this section, to acknowledge my coverage is going to have holes in it.

I will take this opportunity to look briefly at some of the changes that did end up on this list, this section is essentially a reflection of my attempts to make sense of some of them, but I give absolutely no guarantee I’ve picked good examples to demonstrate any of it!

This is also why if you really have an avid interest in a system, or emulation in general you should also check all the SVN logs from the year for yourself, or at the very least all the whatsnew and messnew files to see if something you care about has been improved, or fixed because I’m only scratching the surface here.

One family of systems that I’d put into this class are the ‘Apollo’ ones. From a changelog point of view they look very interesting, abusing a number of 68K CPU features nothing else really requires, but running one of them (for example the Apollo DN3000) merely results in an uninteresting command prompt. There’s no software list attached to the system, so while it has drives I don’t really know what I should even be trying to run. I get the feeling it’s an important system to emulate, and certainly one where emulating it proves that our project has a great amount of scope, but I simply don’t know what I should be doing with it to best demonstrate the progress here!







(The Apollo has a beefy display and seems to abuse the M68000 more than any arcade game, but I can’t find anything fun way to demonstrate it to you)



The Casio FP-200 is an early Japanese home computer system with built in display..







(The FP-200 on the other hand had a tiny display)



The Softbox is one of many systems that can boot CP/M, but again beyond that I’m not sure what you can really do with it..







(The Softbox can boot CP/M, but CP/M doesn’t make for interesting screenshots)



The Olivetti L1 M20 is a unique system using a Z8000 series CPU (a Z8001) Improvements to that driver (still considered non-working) also allow it to boot the CP/M image contained in the software list.







(The Olivetti L1 M20 is interesting and unique hardware, but CP/M still isn’t that interesting to demonstrate!)







(The Attache can also boot CP/M)



The Attache will boot disks and has a Software List hooked up, but doesn’t seem too interesting otherwise, on of the listed disks is CP/M, so I can also boot CP/M here like with the above systems.

While the Chunichi ND-80Z is an early ‘computer’ with only 8 segment display parts, you can apparently enter simple programs and run them by programming memory addresses directly, but again learning how to use it for the purpose of this article is a bit beyond the scope of what I’m trying to do here. I couldn’t even write ‘Boobies’ on it like a calculator!







(The Chunichi ND-80Z is some kind of machine / CPU trainer system with not much in the way of a display)



The Canon ‘Cat’ also saw a bunch of work done to the driver. This actually boots and seems to be some kind of Word Processor, I’m not really sure it belongs in this section, but I’m not sure where else to put it either :-)









(The Canon Cat is some kind of Word Processor)



The SVN logs from the year seem to indicate that the MTX driver was improved and should now be capable of loading .MTX snapshot files, however after multiple attempts with various different games I was unable to get anything to load, so I’m not sure the fix was complete / working. The MTX looks like an interesting system with a decent software library but the scene surrounding it appears to want to support snapshot images ahead of real media images. Needless to say this is worrying. Apparently MESS used to be able to load proper Cassette images for the system but the code was an ugly hack and ended up being removed so I was unable to test with those either. I hope support improves again in the new year because I feel it is important to start documenting the software for this system properly.







(The MTX is meant to be able to load snapshot files now, but I couldn’t figure it out)



The Lola8A also ended up with a preliminary driver. Like many systems there is no software listed so my only tests have been with the built in BASIC.







(The Lola8A is one of several drivers with no listed Software, BASIC works quite wll tho)



The QX11 is a non-working system (inputs don’t respond) but it did gain a Software List at least making it obvious what Software you need to run to get it past the ‘insert disk’ prompt. Hopefully by having things like this listed it will be easier for somebody to fix / improve it later, as well as ensure it doesn’t regress.









(The QX11 driver doesn’t yet work, but does have floppies and Software List hooked up allowing it to boot to this)



I’ve been unable to get the BINBUG system to do anything except display an extra * each time I reset it, I might be missing something but it does not seem to want to respond to inputs







(The Bin Bug lived up to it’s name)







(Hallo, but what next?)







(The Cromemco CB-308 Single Card Computer drver does not appear to behave well)







(the TK85, no listed software to test it with)



.. and some I just haven’t had time to test or learn

Likewise I couldn’t really work out what to press to make the Ravensburger Selbstbaucomputer do anything interesting, although the initial screen is welcoming ;-)The Cromemco CB-308 Single Card Computer on the other hand just seemed to want to respond erratically to inputs with the Cromemco MCB-216 Single Card Computer being similar.Then there’s the TK85, some kind of ZX-80 / ZX-81 clone, although from my brief testing of the ZX-81 driver in the past I’d be pushed to say anything in that driver really works, I get the feeling it needs a much more accurate Z80 for any level of serious software compatibility.

Systems like the Apple II have had various additional peripherals emulated, but many of these are things like SCSI controllers, other storage devices like Zip Drives, or Sound boards. These are all definitely important improvements, but it’s incredibly difficult to show them in action without ‘goto’ example cases, and possibly some kind of automated scripting / setup so that everything gets correctly configured. If you’re making serious use of these platforms in the emulator you’ll no doubt appreciate some of these changes, but demonstrating them is a little outside the context of this write-up.

Many of the Commodore systems fall into a similar category, they’ve seen a lot of work done to them but I’ve found my efforts to make use of the changes fruitless, either because things have regressed (there are definitely some regressions with cassettes at the time of writing) or because I’m too unfamiliar with the systems to know what I should be showing.

I’ve tried my best to make sure all the screenshots used in this article have been created fresh, for this article, but then we’ve seen significant bug-fixes to things like the M68k FPU where the only real demonstrable case is Sim City 2000 for the Mac series of computers and I have no idea where to start with running that (which model to use, if it needs installing etc.) so all I can present is the same screenshot I presented at the time, taken from the official progress announcement. Rest assured however that every other screenshot you see on this page was made specifically for this article, that’s half the point, to show that I was able to use the things and they all worked as expected!







(The only screenshot in this article I didn’t capture while writing it!)



Year of the Clones?

This year has seen a large number of clone sets turn up, and while I don’t have statistics to back me up here it certainly feels like more than your average year, or at the very least it feels like the ones that have shown up are of more significance than usual. Thinking about it statistics would probably disagree due to the vast number of Fruit Machine clones last year, but those weren’t new findings, just documenting what was already out there.

Same Game.. Different Name

Clones can be interesting for a variety of reasons, one of those is challenging what we believe the correct ‘original’ title for a game is. That might sound like a strange concept, but often game titles get changed when they’re exported, and in some cases the export versions are much more common than the original releases, so a game ends up being better known by a different title than the one it was originally released under. Obviously this happens all the time when the original titles are in Japanese because most of the original Japanese titles have little meaning to an audience outside of Japan, but it does also happen sometimes when the original title were in English.

Take Arcadia as an example. Arcadia is best known in MAME as ‘Rapid Hero’ but the version we know as ‘Rapid Hero’ actually appears to be a licensed version of the original NMK game. You could argue that ‘Rapid Hero’ is a better title, with Arcadia being far too generic. You have the Bandai / Emerson Arcadia system (the actual ‘arcadia’ set in MAME/MESS/UME) as well as ‘Waga Seishun no Arcadia’ (a clone of New York New York) also commonly known as ‘Arcadia’ and the ‘Arcadia Systems’ machines based on the Amiga (already mentioned earlier in this very writeup) In addition to this there are also various Fruit Machines known as ‘Arcadia’ as well, so while it’s an ‘obvious’ choice for an arcade game, it’s also not a very good one and in that sense it’s unsurprising that the game ended up being better known by the Rapid Hero title. It’s worth a mention that in addition to this clone being added the sound emulation in both sets was also improved significantly.







(The original title of Rapid Hero was Arcadia, but Rapid Hero is more unique / memorable)



Semicom’s Wivern Wings is another example of this. In the case of Wivern Wings the name was changed to Wyvern Wings when Gamevision licensed it for distribution outside of Korea. The reason for this change is less clear, the original logo looks better than the revised one, and the title change is so minor you have to wonder why they bothered. I can only assume there was some legal issue with ‘Wivern’ in the title?







(I don’t understand why the name was changed for the GameVision release)



Ball Boy fits with the rest of the titles here too although the story is more complex. We know that Ball Boy is hacked from the original Snow Bros. game, we know that it was released in Mexico as Snow Brothers 3 by Syrmex, we also knew that the title Snow Brothers 3 was a bit strange when all the Snowballs had been replaced with Footballs. The game had clearly been developed for the 2002 World Cup in Korea (as were a number of other games apparently, few of which have surfaced!) but none of the versions we had were the original version that was released in Korea. Unfortunately I don’t think the ‘Ball Boy’ that showed up last year is either, is has a 2003 copyright (too late) and the title screen differs from other ‘Ball Boy’ screens we’ve seen online. It looks like the Syrmex ‘Snow Brothers 3’ was actually hacked back into a ‘Ball Boy’ rather than this being the first version of the hack. I guess there is still a mystery to solve and further evidence to uncover with this one!







(Ball Boy is a more appropriate title than Snow Brothers 3 considering the content of the game, even if it is a hack of Snow Bros)>



Different Hardware / Different Protection

Sometimes the most interesting difference with a clone is when the new set uses a different hardware configuration, or different protection. We found that with a clone of Night Slashers. All the already supported sets used a Z80 sound CPU, but interestingly the USA set that was dumped last year instead used a HuC6280 setup. Maybe this isn’t too surprising because we’d seen the same with Lock ‘n’ Loaded, where the USA version uses a HuC6280 and the others use a Z80, but it makes you wonder what the reasons for the change were.

Finding a version of Sega Tetris on Taito’s H-System was also a nice turn-up, this one being a conversion of a ‘Go For The Gold (Record Breaker)’ PCB to add to the already known versions B-System conversions for ‘Nastar’ and ‘Master of Weapon’ and the versions on Sega’s own System 16 A and B platforms. It’s exactly the same game of course, because it’s a fairly undemanding title that could easily have been converted the the vast majority of 68k based platforms of the period, but from a historical and completeness point of view it’s good to have it supported.

Different hardware can make things tricky however, one thing that turned up during the year was a ‘Rev 3.00’ of the 25th Pacman Anniversary, running on a different board to the Rev 2.00 (which ran on the same board as the 20th Anniversary sets). The new board uses a Flash rom (and saves settings directly to that) instead of an EEPROM, but also has different palette hardware (the look-up ROM is gone) and different sound hardware. For original Pacman hardware colours and some sound related bits are stored in PROMS, for the Rev 2.00 sets of the Anniversary it was easy enough to see how writes corresponded to these, with the 3.00 set it seems a lot less obvious, to get any colours at all we’re having to cheat and load the lookup ROM from the 2.00 set, while sound and sprites remain a mystery. The 3.00 set (being newer) is now the parent which has mistakenly led some people to think the driver has regressed, the 2.00 clone still works fine, as it always does.









(Rev 3.00 of Pacman 25th Anniversary runs on significantly changed hardware compared to Rev 2.00)



The seemingly endless number of different variations of the Afega shooters is another where more work than you’d expect is required for each new clone. On the surface they mostly look the same, but each one has a different lineswapping encryption to figure out; nothing too complex, but enough to make them too difficult for the people dumping them to add without assistance. The clones are also quite odd, for example in most sets the title logo is drawn with sprites, in the middle one shown here it’s done with the text tilemap (hence the different colours) The games were also released in both horizontal and vertical configurations, although all the new sets were Vertical. The Yona Tech ‘Spectrum 2000’ which is clearly based on these was also released as a vertical game, a copy did show up during the year but the seller wanted about $300 for the PCB when these are $30 games at most.











(The Guardian Storm clones might look like simple additions but each one had a different ROM scrambling, used as protection, to figure out)



The Timeline

Another thing that can distinguish new clones and make them significantly more interesting is where they fit in terms of game revision. Discovering that a game had a much newer release than anything we were previously aware of, or even a much older release before various bugs had been fixed is always interesting.

Street Fighter II is one of the most famous and influential arcade games of all time, what we didn’t know until last year is that there was one final Japanese release of the game put out just one day before the earliest known release of the ‘Champion Edition’. Interestingly we’ve only seen World and USA releases of the earliest Champion Edition, but I suspect the Japanese one is just yet to show up. You can see the date screens below. This is significant because it shows that the original Street Fighter 2 was still being improved even at the point where the Champion Edition was being worked on.









(The new Street Fighter II World Warrior set was released the day before the first Champion Edition revision)



Not all games give clear indication of the actual date of a revision, but instead provide a version number. Mission Craft is one such example, support for a newer ‘2.7’ version was added.







(Even some Korean manufacturers clearly marked the version number on the title screen!)



Of course there are hundreds of games that give no indication of revision number at all, so we have no idea if they’re newer or older, sometimes the ROM stickers can give some indication, but even those aren’t foolproof. For cases like that it requires somebody to analyze the changes made in the ROM in order to establish what fixes have been made, and nobody has really spent any time doing that recently.

It’s always worth checking older / less known boards if you own the PCBs too, the recent dump of Who Dunit is ‘version 9’ when the only previously supported version was ‘version 8’









(Newer versions of less popular games turn up and get supported too)



Cave use an odd way to mark revisions, usually not changing the date at all but adding additional periods to the date string, for this reason we knew a new DOJ Black revision that was discovered last year was newer than the existing parent set.







(Cave used subtle ways to mark their revisions, not usually changing the date but adding punctuation)



The Taito Side By Side set that was added was a new revision of the game too! It’s hard to say what’s new, but with games of this era Taito clearly list the build dates in the service mode.







(The new Side-by-side set is a more recent build)



As already noted, the Cave driver was restored on the turn of the year, and with it there were one or two clones worth mentioning. The Pink Sweets 2006/xx/xx release is interesting, there are various rumours that it’s an unfinished version of the game, hence not having a date string at all, it also lacks the polish of the final versions, and boots straight to Free Play mode (with continues disabled) and contains a whole bunch of additional debug code and debug menus to support this theory. It’s quite a well known revision, but at the same time it isn’t really clear where it fits in! You can change this one to accept coins, so unlike the dedicated ‘Collector’ release of one of Cave’s later games this one does belong in MAME (rather than the MESS side) but it’s definitely an odd one.







(There is a lot of mystery surrounding the ‘2006/xx/xx’ version of Pink Sweets)



Sometimes clones aren’t really clones at all, but later re-releases of games with significantly modified gameplay. Death Smiles Megablack label is such a release, and isn’t really a clone at all despite initially looking like one. These days MAME tends to treat these as unique releases, with things like Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition and Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting being a good examples (they aren’t set as a clone of Street Fighter II World Warrior on purpose, they’re unique games despite sharing most of the assets) Anyway, Megablack label adds the much harder ‘Level 999’ difficult in addition to extra characters and an extra stage.







(Deathsmiles Megablack Label isn’t really a clone at all, but a re-released version of the game with extra content and modes)



As already mentioned the Puzzle! Mushihime-Tama set that’s now the parent is a newer revision too, with the old set becoming a clone.

The new clone of Konami’s Martial Champion sports a version string of UAE, Konami use the last letter to indicate the game revision so that makes it the newest set there too. (The first letter is the region, and the 2nd I believe is the game type in cases where there were versions for different cabinet types)







(Version UAE of Martial Champion is newer than any other set we support)



Naturally plenty of clones have turned up that are right in the middle of the existing revisions rather than being newer or older, this doesn’t make them less important, although they’re less likely to have any real surprises. There are also plenty that LOOK the same, but we only know are older or newer than existing sets because the dumper took care to note the ROM labels in both places – something else we’ve spent a lot of time fixing over the years in cases where they didn’t, or the labels on the boards they used were unreadable. An example of where the ROM labels we had helped is the Arcadia title “Magic Johnson’s Fast Break” where there doesn’t appear to be any indication in the ROM or on the screen, but the labels told us the new clone was from a version 2.7 set while the current parent is a 2.8. An example of where the labels are having to be corrected comes in the form of many of the Nintendo Vs. System games. There’s nothing really to show here in either case tho. MAME is a documentation project, so getting these things right is very important.

I’ve covered a lot of cases here where the newly found sets are more recent builds than the old ones, this is what causes a lot of the romset changes people often complain about. When a new set is found that is more recent than the existing ones things tend to get shuffled around because MAME likes to make the most recent builds the parent roms and the older sets the clone roms. This helps keep things organized, even if it might just seem annoying to end users.

Just … different

Some clones are actually just plain different. 2013 saw a ‘Ride on’ version of the original Hang On dumped, this version has 2 footpedals in addition to the usual controls, but maybe more importantly has a completely different track layout, one that we didn’t previously even know existed. For such a classic game and important piece of Sega history this was an outstanding discovery!









(The Ride On version of Hang On uses different tracks, we didn’t know that before it was dumped)



By pure coincidence another game where we found an interesting alt. version was the similarly titles Head On. In this case the new clone is most likely only a bootleg, but the new version uses a completely different maze compared to the regular versions of the game.







(This bootleg of Head On also has a different maze compared to the original)



Just … the same

Sometimes clones show up where there’s no real difference except the ROM configuration on the real hardware. In the past MAME tended to ignore alt board configurations, for example cases where sub-boards full of ROMs had been used before the MASK Roms were ready, but where the actual data was the same. These days, at least for original cases, we do try to document these alt configurations, doing so is useful to people with the hardware, and useful if people are looking at buying something because it documents that the same game existed with different sets of PCBs etc.

One example of this is the Zombie Raid prototype ROMs that turned up. The actual game data from the prototype is 100% identical to that used in the final game, but the prototype data is split across more roms. There was a small benefit in this case however, the set of prototype chips had ROMs for both the US and Japan versions so a new and different set also came out of it.

Another example of this is Back Street Soccer, we found a version, probably from a later production batch, using higher capacity ROMs but definitely also an original SunA board.

Having identical data doesn’t always make these straightforward additions tho, MAME’s Rom Loading gives for a number of possible ways to load and decode ROMs, sometimes when you find a board using higher capacity ROMs it’s necessary to rework the driver a bit so that the smaller ROMs load into memory the same way as the larger ones and a single decode function can be used.

On the edge..

One thing that is noticeable this year is the absolute flood of new Players Edge poker sets. I’m not sure how many of these are unique games and how many are clones because they all look practically the same, just with small adjustments to the game rules and different features. In all honesty I’m not sure exactly what’s new here myself, I think the alt cardsets are, so here are some pictures to demonstrate ‘The Oreleans’ card set vs. the other ones.









(Hundreds of new Players Edge Poker sets and games were added, I don’t know what differs between them)



I gave this it’s own subsection because it is without a doubt an important development, so I have to apologize for not knowing more about it. The init procedure for the games is listed in the driver if you want to do more research, needless to say it’s good to see MAME acting as a comprehensive reference for these things because it looks like they’d be an absolute nightmare to sort out without the dedication being shown!

Prototypes

Some of the most significant clones of the year have been prototypes, coming from various sources including the large ‘Unigame’ stash that I’ve covered a number of times here, but also other places, with both arcade and home titles showing up.

One of the interesting ones was the ‘Virus’ clone of Dr. Mario for the Playchoice 10 unit. This is an interesting clone because it shows that Nintendo used the Playchoice units to playtest games that were destined for the NES, there’s no other explaination for why Virus would exist on the Playchoice, the game had been completely reworked and rebranded as Dr. Mario by the time it hit retail shelves for the NES. Disappointingly the game doesn’t have instructions and simply gets identified by the Playchoice unit as ‘New Game 2’, the ‘Bases Loaded’ prototype that showed up at the same time likewise simply gets identified as ‘New Game 1’ without any instructions. I guess there’s a small chance these Playchoice versions were not created by Nintendo, but I don’t know why anybody would go to such an effort if they already had valuable prototypes on their hand. Technically Bases Loaded isn’t a ‘clone’ of anything in MAME, but it is just a clone of the NES game (it’s the same game code) if there was such a concept of cross-project, cross-platform clones.







(Virus, a prototype of Dr. Mario was one of two Playchoice 10 prototypes added)



(Bases loaded was the other Playchoice prototype)









(The Bubble Bobble 2 prototype was one of the most amazing finds of the year, it differs in so many ways and has gameplay a lot closer to the original Bubble Bobble)



The most significant of the prototype finds does however remain the Bubble Bobble 2 one discovered at Unigame. Bubble Bobble is an iconic game and the prototype that was discovered gives a unique insight into the development of the sequel to it and feels a lot closer to actually being a direct sequel of Bubble Bobble than the game that was eventually released. A prototype of the (buggy) unreleased Playstation port of the same game surfaced a couple of years ago (and oddly isn’t in the MESS Software List) but that was merely an unfinished and horrifically broken port of the final arcade game to the Playstation, the prototype that discovered here was instead a peek at the arcade game in an unfinished state with many gameplay features and design aspects not yet in their final form at all.

There were also prototypes for two of Taito’s 68020 based driving games, Super Chase & Chase Bombers. These prototypes differ in nature significantly. While I’ve never found Super Chase to be an especially polished game, or worthy sequel to the original Chase H.Q. games this prototype shows that it could have looked a lot worse. While the prototype does resemble a playable game many aspects were polished up before release, and for things like the introduction / attract sequel a large amount was redrawn / improved significantly. For some reason this prototype also has really dark Colours, but I think that is correct.







(The Super Chase prototype captures an earlier, but still mostly playable stage of development)







(The Chase Bombers prototype feels more like it’s still a proof of concept than a game)







(The Growl prototype appears to be closer to release, but things like the fonts changed significantly, and it lacks some polish of the final game)



The Chase Bombers prototype is something different altogether, it feels like a much earlier version of the game at a point where the code was undergoing a major overhaul. There are debug readings all over the screen, the sprite roms don’t seem to fully match up with what the game references and there are major visible differences in the presentation such as half the screen being used for a rear view mirror.A Growl prototype also showed up, this also has a lot of small changes compared to the final version, the most striking being the font used, but there are a number of other significant presentation tweaks at the very least. The gameplay appears to be generally unchanged, although I haven’t tested to see if it has all the levels complete.

The Cadash prototype is also fascinating, while the graphics and sound roms couldn’t be read from the board due to being under a heavy layer of epoxy it appears to function correctly with the same roms as the final game, however the English translation is completely different in places, and many game elements aren’t properly refined yet or are buggy. Even without being familiar with the game I was able to find countless differences in a 15 minute playthrough of each set so for anybody with a real passion for the game this prototype is a must-see.







(The Cadash prototype has a much rougher English translation and a number of unrefined / buggy gameplay elements)



It’s harder to write much about the Syvalion prototype, but at the same time it has the potential to be just as interesting. The main difference between this and the version that was already supported is that this is an English language prototype, actually all the Unigame prototypes appear to have the region bytes set to English, which is understandable because they showed up outside of Japan, but also a little odd because they’re in-development versions of Japanese games being developed in Japan so it’s surprising to see that localization work actually took place at the same time as development, not after the games were finished. The problem with comparing Syvalion apart from the obvious language differences exist for a number of reasons, first of all the game randomizes the tilesets used for each level, so the same levels look different for each playthrough despite having the same layouts, this makes direct comparisons more difficult. Secondly compared to Cadash it’s a very simple game and the gameplay does feel close to the final version. Most of the ROMs did differ tho, and the final version uses the proper ‘Taito ‘logo, so tweaks were definitely made between the two versions, but I can’t give a comprehensive list, definitely not as many as some of the prototypes!







(The Syvalion is in English, and has a different Taito logo, but I’m not sure it differs otherwise)



Sometimes it isn’t even clear if a clone is a prototype of a bootleg, this is the case with the Spy Hunter clone that turned up with the other prototypes (and has also been found in Spain). The PCB is produced by Recreativos Franco of Spain and has bold markings indicating that it is licensed, but the PCB is dated 1985 when the original release of the game was 1983. Furthermore the actual code is clearly hacked from a released version, and the hardware capabilities significantly reduced. The original game ran at an interlaced resolution with high resolution sprites, this PCB runs at a standard resolution instead, the sound system has also been replaced with a much cheaper one. It’s possible it’s a prototype of an approved ‘low cost’ board design, or just a very ambitious bootleg. The emulation isn’t quite complete yet (inputs aren’t working) but it definitely stands as one of the stranger discoveries of the year.













(If you compare similar scenes between the new set and the original you can see the lower resolution sprites and inferior palette)



Amazingly we discovered a VERY similar 1942 board with the Spy Hunter, which again appears to be an attempt to make a low cost version of the game, maybe they’re prototypes of bootlegs. This one is even stranger however, because it has gameplay bugs not presents in the original game and not ones you’d expect to be introduced based on the changes being made. The 1942 looks mostly the same from the outside (aside different colours) but the underlying hardware and code changes are significant and ugly!

There were a number of other boards dumped around the same time, and from the same source as many of these prototypes, it isn’t clear if they’re all prototypes, things like the new Earth Joker set have different code, but could just be an early production revision and games like Suna’s Brick Zone have earlier version strings but don’t work yet due to using different protection.

From other sources there was possibly prototype of Namco’s Knuckleheads but apart from the missing RAM checks at start up I can’t really observe any differences between it and what is considered the release version of the game. It would need more investigation from a dedicated fan of the game for me to have something to write about.

All Around The World.. Again!

Something I covered last year was how far reaching the project was, showing additions from many different corners of the globe. I already opened this article by mentioning a number of rare Italian games that showed up over the course of the year but we’ve also seen an incredible number of regional clones (some official, some bootleg) dumped and supported too.

The Korean clone of Gals Panic III is an interesting one because unlike the other sets it contains less explicit images, with the theme being ‘sexy’ rather than ‘adult’









(The Korean version of Gals Panic III, shown at the top has a less adult theme)



Time Fighter is a Brazilian ‘clone’ fitting with the ones added last year in the sense that it’s actually a completely rewritten game rather than a hack of the existing code. Unfortunately it still needs work because the hardware isn’t quite 100% Galaxian, I can only assume they had to extend the capabilities slightly to handle the game.







(Time Fighter is a rewritten version of Time Pilot on Galaxian hardware, released in Brazil)



We’ve known about the connection between Namco and Sidam of Italy for a while and seen a number of boards manufactured by Sidam with slightly different versions of regular Namco games. Most of the time you wouldn’t however know they were Italian releases unless you already know they came from the Sidam boards, so it was quite surprising to see the Sidam release of Phozon actually have complete Italian text.







(It was surprising to see the Sidam version of Phozon actually contain Italian strings)



A German version of Afterburner II instead only provides a minimal translation, you’d easily be excused for thinking it was just a bootleg, but the Test Mode version number is higher than the regular English release so maybe it has some hidden secrets in the form of bug fixes if somebody decides to pull the code apart?







(The German Afterburner II has a minimal amount of text translated)



Also possibly relating to the German market (despite being a Japan set) is the dump of P47 Freedom Fighter, the original game features a number of Nazi symbols on the aircraft, the new clone has them removed, possibly because Jaleco realized some markets would be sensitive to such things or flat out ban the product.







(The new P47 Freedom Fighter clone still claims it’s for use in Japan, but has Nazi symbols censored)







(Why does a Taiwan version of Pipe Dream have the same text as a Japan version?)



When dealing with the smaller markets it can be difficult to know if games are legitimate releases, or cheap hacks, especially in areas where bootlegging was prolific. Take for example the ‘Taiwan’ Pipe Dream clone that showed up, it looks legitimate enough, but none of the actual ingame text beyond the warning screen has been changed from the Japanese version we have supported. Was it actually released like this?

The Korean market is an especially difficult one to judge, we know a lot of PCBs were produced there, but it’s never clear if some of the Korean translations were real licensed releases, or ones done locally without a license but in order to better appeal to the customer base. We saw that happen a lot in Europe (and I’ll talk about some Spanish sets shortly) but it’s not easy to know for sure with these either. Many of these games change graphic roms in addition to the programs (in order to add the Korean characters) and in some cases (as with Prehistoric Isle added a previous year) it seems like either some bits got missed (corrupt characters) or the rom dumps were incomplete. Anyway, one such addition from last year was Ikari III,









(The Korean Ikari III provides a complete translation)



Staying with Korea there was a Korean version of WWF Wrestlefest located, with very similar attract screens as the Japanese version (including the Tecmo copyright) but showing a small ‘Korea Only’ text.







(Minimal changes indicate this Wrestlefest set was for the Korean market)



One thing we do know for sure from previous years (see the 2012 write-up) is that ‘Taito do Brasil’ operated far outside of what any kind of license agreements would have permitted, acting more like a bootlegger than any kind of official part of Taito. Old Space Invaders and Galaxian style boards were common in Brazil at the time but it was still surprising to see a Brazilian release of Taito’s Indian Battle show up. This game was incredibly rare, even in Japan and was one of the first really expensive PCBs that was purchased by people supporting the project so to find out a version, with fully translated text, was released in Brazil was definitely unexpected. The copyright date shown is 3 years later, which shows you that arcade technology in Brazil was lagging behind the rest of the world, the original game is from 1980.









(Indian Battle was a VERY rare Taito game, so seeing a version by Taito do Brasil was surprising)



Back to Taiwan, and we’ve got “Cheng Ba Shi Jie – Chao Shi Kong Guan Jun” which oddly displays a for use in Hong Kong only warning. Another hack? I don’t know.









(Cheng Ba Shi Jie – Chao Shi Kong Guan Jun, is this for Taiwan of Hong Kong??)



Some clones we find end up making situations even more confusing, rather than clearing things up, we see that in full effect with the IGS PGM Knights of Valor Superheroes clones. The original Knights of Valor Superheroes saw an English language release, we know that, but after that what is official and what is not becomes very unclear.

A new clone “Sangoku Senki: Yi Tong Zhong Yuan” showed up last year (Sangoku Senki being the Chinese name for Knights of Valor) what is interesting is that it appears to be a version of Knights of Valor Superheroes PLUS, but was released before the known sets, and uses protection a lot closer to the regular Knights of Valor Superheroes. Let’s have a look at the mostly working versions and the header strings they contain.

Sangoku Senki Super Heroes kovsh SANGO EX V104 03/24/00 11:15:25 Sangoku Senki: Yi Tong Zhong Yuan kovytzy SANGO EX+ V201 03/05/04 15:16:08 Sangoku Senki Super Heroes Plus kovshp HERO V101 12/02/05 11:12:38 Sangoku Senki Super Heroes Plus kovshpa HERO V100 09/13/04 16:20:36 Sangoku Senki: Aoshi Sanguo kovshxas AOSHISANGUO V202CN 25/08/08 09:59:26 Sangoku Senki: Quan Huang San Guo Special kovqhsgs QHSGP EX V303CN 08/08/08 19:03:25 (Trying to establish where the new Knights of Valor set fits in)



Note, there are several obvious bootlegs too which don’t currently work because they have their own protection, I haven’t included them. The Quan Huang San Guo Special is also a bootleg, it has characters ripped from SNK’s King of Fighters series so is rather obvious. The Aoshi Sanguo set is almost certainly a bootleg too, the logo looks hacked in. The non-working bootlegs have WDF text in the headers, as can be seen on the title screen of other bootleg. Some of them might be the versions with Street Fighter characters that are known to exist.

What’s interesting here is where the new clone fits in, and the header it has been given. It has a string of “SANGO EX+” (which would be Superheroes Plus) whereas the actual Super Heroes Plus sets we recognize as Super Heroes Plus have a string of “HERO”.

Furthermore the new set retains the original copyright details (including the original 1999 year) on the title screen, whereas the ‘kovshp’ HERO set does away with them. However there are other significant changes to the presentation and the codebase + date codes suggest strongly that one isn’t a simple hack of the other. There’s a further problem however, the obvious bootlegs (such as the one with the King of Fighters characters) with their 2008 build dates also look like different code bases, rather than being hacked from any existing set, compounding the issue is that they have their own protection too, as if they’re based on something newer or were somehow actually made by somebody working at IGS with access to the original code. Needless to say this is a messy situation and there must be something going on that we don’t yet understand.

For certain types of games, usually Gambling, but sometimes just Gambling themed games you end up with an interesting legal situations meaning that you not only require versions for different countries, but also versions for different regions within those countries, or in the case of America, different states. We see this with some of the Touchmaster clones that were added during the year, with versions specific to Minnesota and New Jersey added, with clear legal exemptions to state laws shown on the boot screen. Maybe not fascinating if all you want to do is run them in MAME, but interesting because it helps provide evidence for how certain arcade games were regulated. I’m not sure it applies to these sets, but in some cases we even see specific games excluded from the collections in some regions because they simply can’t conform to legal requirements.









(Touchmaster even had different clones for different states in the US)



While on the subject of local laws, Subsino were one company who exported a large number of their titles to Italy, often under different localized names. Super Treasure Island is one such game, it was released in Italy as Tesorone Dell’Isola with the usual legal disclaimers you find on Italian gambling games.









(Subsino exported many games to Italy with modifications needed for the Italian market, this is Super Treasure Island)



Communities supporting MAME – The Spanish Sets

A big positive for the year was seeing the Spanish emulation community come together to provide dumps of many of the regional clones and bootlegs that populated the Spanish arcades back in the day. This was important for a number of reasons, firstly because it helps document their arcades, shows which games were popular enough there to be cloned and bootlegged many times over, but also because it shows that we do care about documenting these things, many people seem to be under the impression that we don’t! Names like Recreativos Franco (who made the Spy Hunter board) pop up frequently here and a number of their offerings are just as interesting as that Spy Hunter board because they use clearly different base code revisions, but others seem like nothing but cheap hacks!

Unsurprisingly Scramble was a popular game in Spain with many versions of it on the market. The Recreativos Franco version is the most clean looking version, while the Reben S.A. one has slightly modified graphics and new music.









(Scramble was a popular game to bootleg, the Spanish market was no exception to this)



Moon Cresta was also a popular game, much as it was elsewhere. I’m actually going to cheat and include a ‘Star Fighter’ bootleg here as well, it wasn’t sourced in Spain, but is clearly another interesting version, they redrew a lot of the graphics on that one.









(Moon Cresta also had countless bootlegs!)



Also no surprise is that there were regional versions of Pacman. Both of these are quite interesting, the Recreativos Franco version because all the code is shifted around a bit and the coinage is different so it could be based on a different original build (or be an actual licensed version) and the ‘Video Game’ bootleg because it has a high score name feature added. The Recreativos Franco version had full cabinet art with the title ‘Pacuman’. In addition to the ones mentioend here there was a regular MS Pacman bootleg running on the same board as the ‘Video Game’ bootleg of Pacman (the board has ‘Made in Greece’ markings and is a more modern looking production than official boards) I think the board was originally made to run that bootleg rather than this Pacman version, but the actual game looks identical to the regular MS Pacman so is less interesting.









(and naturally a game as Iconic as Pacman had local versions too, although I still wonder if Pacuman was actually a real license)



Phoenix also stands as one of the most bootlegged games of all time and there was no exception to that for the Spanish market with 2 versions showing up, and others rumored. We’ve already had a Spanish bootleg called ‘Next Fase’ supported for several years, so these are in addition to that.









(Phoenix, another popular target for bootleggers again saw Spain get several translated versions)



Uni War S couldn’t escape the bootleggers either, 2 very similar versions of that turned up as well, one is probably a bootleg of the bootleg.









(The number of bootlegs of Uni War S continues to be surprising because it’s a much lesser known game)



Those are all ‘expected’ bootlegs, so you might wonder why I’ve bothered to cover them, especially when I haven’t mentioned quite a lot of original clones that were dumped over the years. I guess in part it’s because I want to highlight the message that we do care about such things (as I already mentioned) and also because they were of interest to me, and unlike a lot of bootlegs you can see a significant amount of effort went into them. There were some more unusual Spanish clones / bootlegs too, for games you might not expect.

Battle Zone stands as one of the more interesting bootlegs, mainly because it’s a bootleg of ‘May Day’ but May Day itself is clearly derived from some kind of version of Defender, but doesn’t play like Defender at all; you have to wonder if they’re originally bootlegged from some unreleased prototype. This bootleg gives the ‘Video Game’ copyright, and like a number of the Spanish ones has a screen telling you that you’re on your last life. May Day itself lacks any kind of copyright message. It’s strange to see such an obscure title get this level of treatment hence why I class it as one of the more memorable bootlegs discovered. It could also have easily been overlooked due to sharing it’s name with the much more popular Atari vector game, a fate which has no doubt seen a number of other rare games either lost or not recognized as something that is needed.









(Battle Zone is a bootleg of May Day which is probably a bootleg of something else or derived from Defender)



Another bootleg that could easily have fallen victim to this, especially with both originating in Spain is ‘Speed Up’, a bootleg of Pole Position. Gaelco later used the very same name for a 3D Racing Game, often confusing people who grew up knowing ‘Pole Position’ by that name. It’s not the most interesting of bootlegs, some replaced billboards like the Italian bootlegs, but no real localization beyond that.







(This bootleg of Pole Position shares it’s name with a later release from Gaelco)







(A Spanish bootleg of Cosmic Guerilla makes me question the integrity of the ROM dumps we’re using for the original)



Cosmic Guerilla is an old, and apparently quite rare game so it was more surprising to see a bootleg of that. The bootleg also raises some important questions about the quality of the dump of the original set that MAME recognizes. Currently if you run the original set in MAME it get stuck during the attract mode, apparently there used to be a hack (ROM patch) to avoid this, but it was removed. The new bootleg set doesn’t do this, but does however have an issue of it’s own; the player ship (and a few other objects) leave unsightly trails. I have a feeling both sets could actually have bad roms, not due to a dumping error but simply due to the deterioration of the chips with old (the trails are confirmed to happen on the board the new bootleg set was dumped from) We could definitely do with the ROMs for the original version verifying against another original board.

In addition to Cosmic Guerilla Inder SA also put out a version of Satan of Saturn, it isn’t translated but does contain an extra ROM with additional code in it. I don’t know if the bootleg is based on an undumped original version or if the extra code is something specific to modifications made by Inder, it could do with some analysis!

Not all the Spanish sets found were bootlegs however. While it appears to have been popular to bootleg games imported from the US and Japan it also appears to have been popular for European manufacturers to actually work together on both production of the PCBs, distribution and development. A connection between Itisa of Spain and Valadon of France was already known about so it was good to see the version of Le Bagnard (Bagman) that was sold in Spain by Itisa dumped and added. We’re actually still missing the original version of ‘Botanic’ which was made by Itisa and sold in France by Valadon, hopefully one day it will show up.







(Itisa and Valadon worked closely together, licensing each others games)



Tecfri managed to license Bomb Jack from Tehkan for the Spanish market. There’s nothing especially interesting about the set but it’s worth mentioning because Tecfri did produce a few games of their own too.





(Bomb Jack was sold in Spain by Tecfri, Tecfri were responsible for a number of original Spanish games)



Home Sweet Home!

The Japanese versions of games originally developed in Japan are usually the most important versions, in many senses those are the games in the form they were originally designed. When the games are exported difficulty levels often get changed without any extensive testing to make sure things are still balanced, story gets cut because it wasn’t translated, excess blood and violence is censored, and countless other minor changes are made, rarely for the better.

If you want a true reference for how a game was meant to be it’s vital that you look at the Japanese releases, or, for the case of games that weren’t developed in Japan, the release corresponding to where the game was developed because the same applies!

The newest Japan version of Street Fighter II was already highlighted in a previous part of this section, but we’ve seen support added for Japanese versions for a number of other titles too. SNK’s Mechanized Attack was one such title.







(There was previously no Japanese version of Mechanized Attack supported)









(Japanese versions of 2 Sega titles)



Sega’s Dynamite Dux got a Japanese set supported for the first time, as did Turbo Outrun. Further Japanese clones of Cotton, Eswat, D.D Crew were also added, often with unique encrypted CPUs that needed dumping too so always good to see those done, even if there’s nothing to really show here.

Looking at Taito instead a Japanese Chase Bombers is now supported, that makes it 2 additional variations of Chase Bombers supported because we also saw the prototype version dumped as I’ve already covered.

The Japanese release of Continental Circus was added too, although this appears to ONLY work with the deluxe ‘3D’ cabinet, and therefore flickers wildly under MAME. A Japanese release of Enforce also designed for the 3D cabinet (and more complex analog controls) as also added, although the controls haven’t yet been hooked up properly! While it’s a non-working game a fresh dump of Air Inferno coming from a Japanese board allowed an error to be corrected in the source (it was thought a ROM was missing from the other set, but that was an incorrect assumption)











(Lots of Japanese clones of Taito games, not all working drivers tho)



The Japanese version of Grand Striker contains the original team lineup, all the other versions use extra ROMs to replace the final 2 teams with different ones, the driver as a whole still needs work tho, the rotation layer used for the ground still makes as little sense as ever.







(The Japanese release of Grand Striker uses different teams, including, unsurprisingly Japan, this is the original lineup)



Sometimes Japanese versions can look strange tho, even if the games are developed in Japan they’re sometimes based heavily on American IP, as is the case for the WWF wrestling games. A proper complete dump of the Japanese WWF Superstars allowed that to run with full Japanese text.









(You associate the WWF more with America than Japan, but the games were developed in Japan)



An unusual one is ‘T.T. Fitter’ which turned up on what appeared to be a bootleg board, however Taito were known the use ‘T.T’ to describe some of their games (Table Top? Cocktail versions?) so it might actually be an original release of the game. The parent in MAME at the moment is Round Up, which seems wrong to me because that’s a licensed version.

I’ve already mentioned the Japanese Zombie Raid and Dragon Gun sets so no pictures of those here. Other Japanese releases like Punch Out!! and Suzuka 8 Hours 2 were added, but it’s hard to see any real difference.

I can understand that now!

I’ve talked about clones from all around the World, highlighted where we’ve found Japanese language sets, Korean language sets, as well as ones from a variety of European countries, but sometimes what interests people the most is when an English language version of a game is discovered when that game was previously only known to exist in Japanese.

Sometimes those English language versions are actually Asian releases, Korean releases were often released in English, and that might well be the case with Gallop Racer, a new set was added with full English texts, but the version number on startup has a ‘K’ appended to it, possibly indicating it was for the Korean market.









(An English version of Gallop Racer, possibly for the Korean market)



Shanghai III is another where an English language set (this time for the US market) was uncovered.







(We didn’t know there was a Shanghai III in English until it showed up)







(There really isn’t much different with Strike Fighter, just a few bits of text on the how to play screens)



Sega’s Strike Fighter was anotherEven a world version of Namco’s Star Blade was added, although there really is no visible difference apart from the startup warning being absent.

One recent source of bootlegs has been official online services offering games for playing on current day consoles, for example the Virtual Console service and official re-releases of games using emulators for ‘classic’ modes and such. Sometimes unreleased games, or at least unreleased versions of games end up on such services and are promptly ripped and used on bootleg boards. One such example of this is Wonder Boy in Monster Land. For a long time the only known arcade versions of the game with the text in English were bootlegs with questionable translations done by the bootleggers. What’s odd is the home versions were all said to be based on an official English translation, a translation that had actually been done by Sega, for the arcade version, but there was no trace of that arcade version at all. That version did end up being released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console platform, confirming it existed, at least in some form, and PCBs that ran the existing bootleg versions ended up being converted to this new version and sold.

Unfortunately these versions have a few bugs, for example trying to use your magic weapon will cause the game to pause and consume your entire stock, I suspect this is due to changes made to the game before it was released on Virtual Console in order to work around bugs in their emulator, but with the side-effect of introducing new bugs when running on real hardware or in an emulator doing a proper job. It is still unknown if a REAL, non-bootleg English language version will turn up, but for now it’s quite interesting to see how ‘modern bootleggers’ (eBay sellers etc.) made use of this version we were gifted in order to try and get better prices for their junk. Below are some screenshots of the various versions, this new version is shown in the middle.









(Current day bootleggers have seized upon Virtual Console releases to make new bootlegs, this one, center, has an interesting backstory)



All the other clones…

If you’ve contributed a clone to MAME and I’ve not mentioned it, don’t worry, there are many clones I haven’t mentioned but every single one that was included is worthwhile to our documentation efforts. The ones I’ve mentioned are typically the ones with more of a story behind them, or where I feel people are likely to want to investigate things a bit more. Random clones, even ones without a version numbers are important to support, as are alt. regions because they all help build up a more complete picture. This applies to both Arcade games and Home systems, although obviously it’s easier to tell if a ROM is the same as another ROM as opposed to dumps form CDs and cassette tapes where other factors come into play.

One thing I have continued to notice, especially with the home systems is the sheer number of missing originals. A lot of the collections like TOSEC only have trained, or hacked images, or worse, memory dump / snapshot files of certain games. It seems for a lot of original cassette and disk based systems no real effort is being put into dumping them. While as an end user you might also consider such things to be ‘clones’ I continue to feel it is important that original versions of games, as well as the pirate versions get documented.

So please, if I haven’t mentioned a clone here don’t be put off, it’s simply that I could write an article the size of this one on the clones alone so have to be selective in my coverage!

Console Improvements (where Arcade platforms have also improved)

There was a period earlier in the year when progress was being made blow for blow on improving the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation emulation. I think it’s fair to say the Playstation won out in the end because it’s a system much more amicable to the way MAME / MESS works than the multi-core beast that is the Saturn but it did lead to some worthwhile improvements both to the emulation of the consoles and emulation of arcade games using the hardware, although especially with the Saturn there is now a lot of room for optimization.

Part 1 : Sega Saturn

Specific fixes were mentioned for a number of Saturn titles, including ‘Heisei Tensai Bakabon Susume! Bakabons’ allowing the inputs to work.







(A fix made to the Saturn emulation allowed for functioning controls in Heisei Tensai Bakabon Susume! Bakabons)



and improvements to the Saturn DSP emulation (a criminally underused sub-CPU) allowing Magical Hoppers to run, although emulation of this is VERY slow, and a number of other titles using it appear to have regressed when it was converted to a real CPU core.







(Magical Hoppers makes use of the Saturn DSP, although it runs slowly as a result)



Fixes to the disc reading improved things like Zero Divide, although also started to reveal issues with the actual CHD images being used, and flaws in the conversion process from the original .cue / .bin files due to vagueness in the specification and a number of images breaking the rules and ending up being incorrectly converted (the whole Software List for this and the Playstation as well as any other CD systems really needs revisiting as a result)









(Other Saturn improvements saw Zero Divide start working)



Some VDP emulation fixes helped the Saturn version of Virtual On..







(Improvements to the Saturn video emulation helped the Saturn version of Virtual On)



One of the less common Sega Saturn setups was games utilizing a ROM cartridge in addition to the CD. Until last year the cartridge for “Ultraman – Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu” was not dumped and the game wasn’t playable. Once this situation was resolved the game started to run in our driver, although does still have stability problems due to emulation issues. Having a documented and verified ROM dump does of course help with running it in other Saturn emulators tho.









(The support cartridge for the Saturn game Ultraman was dumped and added to the Softare List making it clearer how to get the game to boot) /



Just for good measure I tried a bunch of other Saturn titles and made screenshots of them. Performance is also very poor on many of these tho, some of them definitely ran better around the time the fixes were made than they do now, especially things like PD Ultraman Link.













(A selection of Saturn games)



The Saturn improvements also fixed long-standing issues with the ST-V driver, most notably from my point of view the irritating issue that was causing a number of games to boot up with 2 credits already inserted. Some unique games also improved to the point of being playable “Zenkoku Seifuku Bishoujo Grand Prix Find Love” being one of them.









(Arcade title Zenkoku Seifuku Bishoujo Grand Prix Find Love was fixed by the Saturn improvements)



Video rendering for the modes used in Virtual Mahjong II – My Fair Lady was another fix made over the course of the year. The Saturn is a very flexible system, so a lot of screen modes and effect combinations are only used in a handful of places, this one was rather uncommon.









(Visuals in arcade title Virtual Mahjong II – My Fair Lady were also improved as a result of the Saturn console fixes)







(Protection was bypassed in Tecmo World Cup ’98, fixing the gameplay rules)



Part 2 : Sony Playstation

Unrelated to the console improvements was a fix for the game logic in Tecmo World Cup ’98. Unfortunately it’s more of a workaround than a fix, the game checks some values in the data it passes through the protection device when decrypting the title screen logos etc. so while the correct values to pass the protection check have been found the title logos are still corrupt because the encryption hasn’t been figured out.As you can gather from my constant mentions of performance issues and regressions throughout this sectio