Home Page Forums MAME MAME NES hidden Gameboy mode?!?

Did you know the Famicom had a Gameboy mode 6 years before the release of the handheld?



Ok, apologies for the clickbait-y idea I stole from YT. I just wanted to draw attention to the cool memory tap addition Vas made to the Lua system yesterday. I had wanted to intercept memory read/writes from Lua before but didn't know how to do it. Here's my newb Lua script to force the NES PPU to always be in "green-scale":

Thanks, I wanted to show a silly tap demo like this to demonstrate the new functionality, but hadn’t thought of a nice simple but visible example. You beat me to it. I’m working on addressing some pitfalls in the new Lua functionality so it’ll be easier to use by the time 0.241 is released (e.g. not crashing with a pure virtual function call if you don’t remember to explicitly remove your taps, and not having symbol tables garbage collected out from under you while you have expressions other symbol tables that depend on them).

Now people can make uninformed comments about it on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/sq4r61/new_mame_lua_scripting_feature_address_space_taps/

Yesterday I made a quick and dirty hack of the dummy plugin and combined it with the "gbmode" tap example to expose all the 0x2001 register bits. Here's SMB3's World 1 map screen (the gray background should match the monochrome yellow theme; it's a PPU bug with a pending PR):



I figure doing things like this and similarly being able to switch audio channels on and off from a plugin will be useful for testing purposes.

If it can speed up turnaround time for testing, that’s great. Hopefully it’ll also be useful for sophisticated cheat/hack applications, and other fun things. I build tools and hope people do cool things with them.