emulation number 9 reports that Aurex2, an open source Japanese Ruputer/OnHand emulator for Microsoft Windows, has been updated today. It appears that there is no log for what is new in this build.

You can visit the official homepage here, or simply download it here.

Emu#dreams reports that MAME CENTER, the brand new graphical MAME32 Plus! front-end (Japanese/English), has been updated to version 0.01. Below are the changes in this version (quoted from Emu#dreams).

- If it is going to go to the left of the top stage and is going to go to the left further, it will correct that an error comes out.

- It is except the right-hand side bottom, and if it is going to go to the right further, it will correct that a character sits down.

- After pushing [Z] or one button of a joy pad in front of a money-changing machine and displaying a message, if [Z] or one button of a joy pad is pushed further, it will correct that an error comes out.

You can visit the official homepage of MAME CENTER here, or simply download it here.

Emu#dreams reports that MagicEngineFX, the NEC PC-FX emulator for Microsoft Windows, has had work done on it. Today, work-in-progress news of the emulator was released on its official homepage. Below is what was posted today.

We have just finished the last round of PC-FX games testing:

 

Aa! Megami Sama - work (missing graphics layer)

Akazukin Cha Cha - GOOD

Angelique Special - GOOD

Anime Freak FX 2 - GOOD

Aruberea's Maiden - work (missing graphics layer)

Blue Chicago Blues - GOOD

Boundary Gate Daughter of Kingdom - does not work

Chip Chan Kick - work (graphics problem)

Comic Road - GOOD

Dragon Knight IV - work (menu problem)

Fire Woman Matoi-Gumi - GOOD

Fushigi no Kuni no Angelique - does not work

Queens of Queens - does not work

Yuna FX - GOOD

 

Total

 

61% are emulated perfectly or near perfectly.

16% work but have important graphics glitches.

23% do not work.

 

For a first release this won't be too bad I think.

You can visit the official homepage of MagicEngineFX here.

Emu#dreams reports that Charles MacDonald has been working on support for new hardware in MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Below is a quotation of what he's posted on his homepage about his work-in-progress.

Great news to report. I've been running tests on the Namco NA-1 hardware over the last few days, and figured out how to dump the internal ROM of the M37702 MCU used in Super World Court.

 

The BIOS has a function where code can be copied from the 68000 side over to MCU RAM and executed, making it quite insecure. I wrote a program that copies a portion of the M37702 memory to shared RAM, and the 68000 can change and run the program in a loop to read any part of the MCU address space.

 

I think the same technique will work for other NA-1 games; at least what I've seen in MAME is that a number of them also upload code fragments for the MCU to use. For other types of Namco hardware that use the M37702, it's highly dependant on what services the MCU makes available.

 

Also, now that the BIOS can be examined and user code can be executed on the MCU side for testing, maybe the NA-1 sound hardware (integrated in the multiple purpose 219 chip) will get figured out. Though the existing simulation of the NA-1 sound hardware is remarkably good.

You can visit Charles MacDonald's homepage here.