Charles MacDonald's MAME WIP News

[olaf]

Emu#dreams reports that Charles MacDonald has been working on MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Below is a quotation of his post from his homepage.

 

I've put together a brief tutorial on doing conversions of FD1094 based games to use decrypted ROM sets and a standard 68000. This explains the steps I went through when working on Alien Storm. I'll add more details and maybe some tools later:

 

- FD1094 Game Conversion

 

Also, I've tried to package and clean up all the CPS-2 related development stuff I have that was used for table dumping. Here is the current release:

 

- cpstool-v1.zip

 

This can be used for writing CPS-2 software, running tests on the system, and dumping table data so we can hopefully figure out the encryption at some point. I will definitely include more sample programs, documentation, and hardware information in future updates to the package, but I wanted to get this off my to-do list.

 

I recently purchased two Suzuka 8 Hours PCBs (Namco System 2) and will see what can be done about trojaning the M37702-based C68 custom chip used on it. This would be helpful for System 2 and System 21 games. Also I'd like to take a closer look at the alternate type of video hardware this game has, since there seem to be some minor emulation issues in MAME.

 

Progress on the C70 trojan has temporarily halted. After Guru had run a bunch of tests to help determine what was going on, it appears that the MCU commands used by the C69 trojan are implmented as do-nothing functions in the C70, so it isn't possible to simply upload code or do a memory transfer in the opposite direction to read the internal ROM out. Luckily, Guru has offered to send a NA-2 board for me to experiment with, and hopefully some methods for reading the internal ROM can be derived from the C69 BIOS which may apply to the C70.

You can visit Charles MacDonald's homepage here.