La Girl...

Tym razem dump z zasobów Guru - koreańska przeróbka Play Girls (kopia Taito L-System hardware zrobiona na trzech układach TPC1020 (FPGA Texasa)) . Zmieniono tytuł i wsadzono nową grafikę tła - soft anime (dlaczego nie tentacles z 'La Blue Girl' ?). Grywalność bez zmian ...

Kolejna gra ze SNESa w wersji arcade.

Pojawił się nowy dump (sygnowany przez Volkera Hann & Team Europe) gry działającej na pirackim hardware konsoli Super Nintendo. Prawdopodobnie to jedna z pierwszych gier przerobionych w ten sposób - brak skomplikowanych zabezpieczeń i wymyślnego szyfrowania. Twórcy hardware przemieszali jedynie linie szyny danych ROM - "bruteforce" (8! permutacji do przetestowania ) i po krzyku.
Z ciekawostek - tekst (copyright) znajdujący się na początku ROMu został lekko zmieniony - poniżej wersja ocenzurowana.



Gra o której piszę to Iron znana na platformie SNES jako Iron Commando.
Zmieniono screen tytułowy, dołożono obsługę coin slotów oraz DSW. I.. to tyle :)

オセロ

Another game made by Success. And yes - another Othello.

This time from 1984 running on a bit weird hardware (only 20% of pcb is filled with ICs):

- two Z80 (main and audio)
- two AY-8910
- D7751C Nec MCU (sample player ??)
- HD46505SP Crt controller (6x16 pix tiles in 16 colors)

Few preliminary pics (colors are wrong):





PCB pics courtesy of Stefan Lindberg:

Parent Jack

A few improvements to Parent Jack driver.
Game runs on Taito H System hardware.

More Culture, Please ...

I'm still alive. Just busy (work, real life)....
A tiny update - small fix to "Jibun wo Migaku Culture School Mahjong Hen" driver - colors!.

Back to '80

Guess what was my first computer ? Yeah, Speccy.. gazillion years ago.
I have used it to play (cool) games and coding (not so cool) programs.
In early '90 i have got my first 16 bit machine - Amiga.
But ZX Spectrum is still my fav machine ;)

Also, i can call myself "sunday speccy coder". Once a year i'm trying to make
something fun for small demo party - Raww Orgy .

Made so far three 256 bytes intros. Here are some brief info about them. Full videos are available in "My Videos" section:


Brainwasher (2nd at Raww Orgy 2009) - weird intro.It displays (and plays) own code (as data) on the screen... In fact it's trying to take control of your brain ;)




RGB (5th at Raww Orgy 2009) - three rgb balls jumping on screen. Border is (or rather - should be) synced with the background.




Blister Sisters (6th at Raww Orgy 2008) - last year entry. Three blobs flying around. There's also special feature - terrible long precalc time at start (perfect for make a coffee) ;)

Super Othello.. again.

Oh no! Another Super Othello WIP screenshots?
Someone probably remember the screenshots i have published a couple of months ago on my old Mame WIP page. Everythign was almost ok. But due to weird behaviour of the sub cpu (the system consist of three cpus : main Z80, sub 6809 and sound z80) game wasn't playable.
I have decided to take another look at the pcb. It was a good idea, because finally i've found what was wrong / missing. Game is now playble with full sound (ym2203 music / sfx + m5205 voices).

The art of rippping.

New board arrived. "Spinkick" by Seojin/Heasung (notice the big epoxy block with "HEC" logo). PCB is 'almost' working, but there's no way to insert coin(s) and start the game (probably one of the input buffer chips is broken... very common).



And yes, it's rip-off of the Sega's "Free Kick" game, running on really weird korean hardware based on MSX2 home computer ( plus additional sound cpu (Z80) and extra logic to handle a bit different (than in MSX2) rom banking ). Game ROMs contains hacked MSX2 bios - they removed all (c) texts, blanked font area and added few mods here and there to skip boot sequence. Also, for some unknown reason, Yamaha v9938 VDP is hidden in big and heavy epoxy block. Probably to make a fake impression of being orginal, not stolen piece of hardware.

So .. what's the point of use MSX2 as the base ? I have NO idea...
Imho it's way easier to start from scratch and design own, simple hardware (vdp, cpu, roms, rams) than modify msx one. Bios is used only at boot time (it req some sick logic chips (8255 + demultiplexers and buffers) to handle the msx "slot" memory banking scheme) - game is directly accessing the VDP and banked roms.

After a bit of pcb tracing and with help from #msxdev guys i got this:





Two different versions of the title screen.






WTF? Blind Superman ?

Meow!

Finally, after long break i'm working again on one of my old "afterwork" projects - a Gameboy Mono (DMG) game. The gfx (made by Adam ) is almost done. Also audio part (by ne7 ) is completed. The most important element - code - is (still ... ) missing. Only the basic skeleton is done.

A couple of level "rooms" :





And a first gameplay video:

More M.A.M.E. wip

I have finally figured out what was wrong with the gfx emulation in Sonic Blast Man 2 - OAM address wasn't correctly restored. RB pointed me to some interesting hardware docs with explanation of this behaviour. It was already implemented in the snes driver, but with major flaw. In fact - instead saved OAM address - the current one was restored (so ... there was no difference between old and new). After fixing the bug, game is fully playable.

Few weeks ago f205v has found "Little Robin" pcb for sale. Game is not working in MAME (video hardware is only partially emulated) - so i have decided to buy it. PCB arrived few days ago. Spanish pcb, with korean labels, found in Itally.



I'll try to run some trojan/test code on it. There's chance to make this weird 'Snow Bros' rip-off playable.

Btw, i'm still looking for the pcb of another unemulated TCH game - 'Wheels & Fire'. As well as other, undumped/unemulated arcade games from Spain.

Few pics from the game:





My monitor has some problems with displaying game gfx. There's weird gradient on the bg as well as missing blue color component here and there. Also the SYNC signals generated by PCB are out of range a bit.

There's also video from attract/gameplay in the My Videos section

Sonic Blast Man.

Few words about an arcade bootleg game called 'Sonic Blast Man 2 Special Turbo'.

The game is a slighty modified copy of Taito's 'Sonic Blast Man 2'.
It runs on hardware ( custom chinese, not the NSS ) "borrowed" from Super Nintendo home console. Just few eproms, rams, three custom QFP chips (there's also another, odler version of the hw, with 6 of them) and Lattice PLD - to handle the most annoying part, protection.

So... What's the point to encrypt/protect pirate game? To hide the 'real' (in fact - stolen ) game code and data? Or maybe to annoy other bootlegers? No idea.



Kold666 already dumped the ROMs while ago. Unfortunately the pcb is no longer available for additional testing or analysis. The data encryption is not as simple as in other arcade SNES hacks (Killer Instinct, Final Fight 2). But with great help from Andreas Naive it's finally broken. Also the in-game protection checks are now gone (took me a couple of hours to find what's going on and crack them). Ok. So... how the protection works ?

1. Encryption.
Four hardcoded lookup tables (16,16,64 and 48 bytes) are used to get the real data. Plus some extra bitswaps and bit negations at the end - or more fun.

2.Boot code relocation.
Original boot code (at $8000) is erased. There's also *special* message ;)
New boot code (and the custom coinage / game control stuff) is placed around $7xxx and MUST be visible there in memory map. In genuine snes console this area is marked as 'reserved', and afaik - not accessible. Also - like in the other arcade SNES bootlegs - ROM header contains fake boot vector.


3.Read-and-compare checks.
Few ( seven iirc ) data test in $6xxxxxx area (red mark = jmp executed when protection check fails).


4. Read-read-compare ;) check.
Just opposite to the above - two consecutive reads (almost , with 3 nop-s between) from the same address (in $7xxxxx range) must give different results. Otherwise - boom!


5. Few more mods - special data (including JAMMA coin inputs and DSW) reads in $7xxxxx area and usual game modifications (removed copyrights, etc).

Here are few screens from the MAME. Glitchy gfx ( mostly sprites ) is caused by bad emulation of the SNES hardware in MAME - the original SNES version of Sonic Blast Man 2 looks almost identical in MESS (has the same gfx problems).