Home Page Forums MAME MAME unexpected benefit of the software list

This cart couldn't have been emulated accurately without the softlist.



Yes you read correctly, the first rom of the board is a patch over the first 32k bank of the second rom. Only mess can emulate this thanks to softlist mapping, other emulators will need a pre patched rom, which isn't accurate IMO.

In the future I also hope the sram will be mapped based on the softlist, instead of the current inaccurate header based mapping.

??

sram emulation is already based on softlist, in the sense that only the amount specified in the softlist gets allocated. nothing SRAM-related gets read from the header anymore, if you load by softlist

the only thing we still don't support yet is the inclusion of a pre-formatted SRAM content for games possibly needing it (iirc, Ken Griffey?)
but that just needs the loading procedure to be adapted and the softlist could already 'preserve' them (just add the <rom> inside the sram <dataarea>, like it's done in MAME with pre-formatted EEPROM settings)

Edit: I figured it out.

Okay, so it's a 1.1 to 1.2 revision patch. They probably had a bunch of 1.1 chips sitting around and figured it'd be easier to just use a cheap patch chip on top of the board.

Cost effective and better than wasting chips.

quite a few Neogeo carts do the same

there are several games in MAME that also have a socket on the board which allows the first part of the program to be overlayed, and we've seen other cases where roms have been piggybacked for similar effect (gals panic being the most common one)

but yes, this is exactly the kind of case where you see the benefits of the softlists when it comes to properly documenting what was in the carts and how it should load.

I miss the .rpk support.

Recently somebody acquired and dumped a bunch of random standalone chips from prototypes. I had no trouble to integrate these incomplete dumps into the list. I am interested in seeing how other databases are going to handle those ones. They will probably just ignore them, what else can they do? :-)