Mameinfo.dat v0.105u2 -> http://www.mameworld.net/mameinfo/

History.dat 1.06k -> http://www.arcade-history.com/

Info.dat.105u2 -> http://www.hawq.dsl.pipex.com/mame32Hp4.htm

Story.dat and Mamescore.ini -> http://www.arcadehits.net/mamescore/home.php?show=files

Wayder cheat file 0.105u2 -> http://wayder.hp.infoseek.co.jp/cheat/index.html

EasyMame 5.3.1 release info:

 

- Improved : Now also shows the roms path when scanning for roms.

- Improved : Optimised the realtime searching code.

- Changed : Mame option 'Priority' is now by default 0.

- Fixed : Small issue in the cycle screenshot mode.

- Fixed : When resetting the counters two times in a row EasyMame crashed.

- Fixed : Memoryleak in the realtime search code.

>> Get it HERE.

It’s About Friggin’ Time!

April 20th, 2006

A while back, I emulated a couple of the early Gaelco 3D games, Radikal Bikers and Surf Planet. I knew at the time that there was a third game on almost identical hardware, which was the racing game Speed Up, but unfortunately the dump of that game we had was incomplete. Over the past couple of years, I’ve managed to acquire two different board sets for Speed Up, yet getting a good dump of the 42-pin mask ROMs on the board has been challenging to say the least. Guru and I even manually mapped the address and data lines back to the ADSP-2105 that runs the sound, and confirmed that they matched the standard pinout of an ST 27C160/27C322, yet my programmer would always end up with garbage.

 

A couple weeks ago, I was given a tip that sometimes these mask ROMs have either the /CE or /OE signals inverted. Last night I finally got around to trying it out, and sure enough, if I tied the /OE signal to Vcc during the dump, I got a good read of the sound and polygon data ROMs. Seemingly victorious, I also dumped the texture ROMs in the same way, but discovered that I had another obstacle in my way in reading those.

 

With the texture ROMs, my programmer complained that pins 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25 and 27 weren’t providing good connections. Curious, I looked at the pinout and discovered that these were the D8-D14 lines on the chip. This is a good indication that these ROMs are intended to be read in BYTE mode, not WORD mode. Of course, my programmer only handles WORD mode, which makes things tricky but not impossible. I simply had to read the ROM twice, tying the A”-1″ pin alternately to GND and Vcc, and then merge the results, removing the bogus upper byte of each word.

 

And so, at last, we have Speed Up. It pretty much worked straight away, apart from some input port problems, and looks pretty nice. Reminds me a bit of Cruisin’ USA, except a bit smoother since the Gaelco hardware supports bilinear filtering.

>> View the pictures HERE.

MAME GP32 2.1

Featuring new Data East games including Robocop and Midnight Resistance!

 

* Minor optimizations to 1943, Ghost and Goblins, Black Tiger, Gunsmoke (and clones). Skip over non-drawn characters and sprites.

 

* Minor optimizations to Xain'd Sleena / Solar Warrior. Also activated hi-score save/load. Use old GFX core for this game.

 

* Change in control to Defender. Activate "cheat" mode which means you get to use joystick control to reverse and thrust. (If any one doesn't like this, I'll create a new driver).

 

* Fixed bug in Millipede. X-Axis trackball control was not correct.

 

* Bug fix to existing sound core. Duplication of some code! Slightly faster.

 

* New Data East 16-bit games implemented (MAME 0.35b5). New fully working games:

- Baddudes vs Dragonninja US (baddudes), Dragonninja Japan (drgnninja), Slyspy revision 2 (slyspy2) and Slyspy revision 3 (slyspy), Robocop bootleg (robocopp), Heavy Barrel US (hbarrel), Heavy Barrel Japan (hbarrelj), Hippodrome (hippodrm), Fighting Fantasy Japan (ffantasy), Midnight Resistance US (midres), Midnight Resistance Japan (midresj). All are fully playable with all sounds. All these run really well with no sound at FS=1, ie 100% speed and 30FPS. They all run at a playable speed with sound=accurate, FS

 

Quick note on Heavy Barrel and Midnight Resistance: These games originally featured an analog controller to rotate the players gun. MAME's default method of simulating this control is the mouse. On the GP32, this is hardcoded to use the joystick. Since the joystick is generally used to move the player, I have disabled this analog control for these games and mapped it to buttons 9 and 10 instead. Trivia: These two games are approaching the largest (in terms of memory used) ROMs that will fit in the GP32's 8MB of RAM.

 

What this means is that you should redefine these controls to (for example) START and SELECT to rotate your weapon.

 

Some of the keys may change function in the next release: the shoulder buttons may be better suited for this secondary control and move the screen rotation button to something else.

 

I also patched Heavy Barrel to version MAME 0.36b5 so that sprite and gun positions are correct (i8751 controller).

 

* New Data East 8-bit games implmented (MAME 0.35b3): - Breywood (breywood), Captain Silver (csilver), Gondomania (gondo), Last Mission (Rev 5) (lastmss2), Last Mission (Rev 6) (lastmiss), Mekyo Sensi (mekyosen), Shackled (shackled), Super Real Darwin (srdarwin). Improvements to existing Data East 8-bit games.

 

* Improved Gradius driver now also includes: - Lifeforce US (lifefrce), Lifeforce Japan (lifefrcj) and Salamander (salamand). Total ROMs now 753.

 

* New YM3812 sound core as per GP2X MAME: Snow Bros, Hellfire, Gemini Wing, Bubble Bobble, etc.

 

* New CPU - Hu6280 core. This is used by the Data East 16-bit games. The GP2X version of MAME should be able to benefit from this too. ie. full sound for the above games and others (inc. Dark Seal). Trivia: This is the CPU used by the PC-Engine, a modified 6502.

 

* Removed splash screen for additional memory. May add this back in a later release to load dynamically.

>> Get it HERE.