Home Page Forums MAME MAME TMS-09xx/1xxx thread (was New Dumps)

Also, April's graphics were significantly improved. It may not be a good idea to rely on the patents for getting these graphics, although perhaps those (sometimes) different ROMs and graphics could be added to MAME as alternate "(patent)" sets?

For reference:
From the patent:

With black shading:

Final:

Yes, April is significantly hotter in the real game

Where did you get the 2nd and 3rd pics?

I expect that we will eventually be able to get high quality scans of the actual LCD panels to replace these.

Did you try Madrigal's process:
http://www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/tutorial.php

The segments on his simulators seem to be pretty accurate.

I just happened to stumble across the second picture when looking for "tmnt konami lcd" on Google Images. It seems to have originated from this patent, but the images don't seem to be available anymore for some reason, so I got it from a random topic at handheldmuseum.com where it was stolen from somewhere else.

The third one is just the screen from the back of the blister which, by the way, seems to have April placed properly on top of that round shadow in the floor like in the magazine ad:


In the released version, she seems to be "floating" further to the right as you can see in the posted video. Not sure if it's because the graphics layer was incorrectly trimmed or if the final graphics ended up looking bigger (or the background smaller) than originally intended.


EDIT: On second thought and after looking at the actual handheld rather than relying on pictures, those shadows may be actually cast by the metal pipes that come from the wall, so it would be kinda irrelevant to have April sitting on top of them...

ssj: With the caveat that MADrigal's advice about 800x600 and not exceeding 150 dpi seems pretty quaint, reading it on my 4k monitor

ssj- That's what I was going to try, so it's good news that it's a tried-and-true method! I think I'll try to modify the case a bit so I don't have to scan through the plastic window; the ones I have are pretty scratched up.

ICEknight- I thought maybe it came from the patent wrapper. I'll have to look up some other Canadian patents and see if they have more info than the US ones.
The backgrounds in the games I have weren't cut very accurately- some of them aren't even cut straight. So it's very likely the backgrounds can wiggle around a bit.

RB: The traces will need to be vectorized later so the lower original resolution doesn't really matter much as long as the quality is good enough to vectorize.

Sean: Yeah, you'll need a scanner with a good depth of field for that to work well, you'll definitely need a CCD scanner instead of a CIS one.
Of course if the plastic is scratched that won't really help much and if you can get to scan the LCD directly will certainly render better results.

TMNT leonardo can walk around and wave his arms at April "where's the pizza, i'm hungry!", but not any gameplay action going on otherwise. I'll have to doublecheck the romdump and look for MCU emu bugs.

The MAME artwork I post here is for testing only. Someone much better than me at this will need to do the proper artwork.

Sean: for the baddie rows, element num-1 is rightmost, yes?
*edit* another thing: The ACL "button", is it connected to one of the MCU pins or does it simply cut off battery power while held down?

Hmm, I wonder if it's a timer or interrupt issue. TMNT is SM511 vs Top Gun's SM510, but I think the opcodes are all the same. Maybe the reset vector's different?

I transcribed the ROM from the patent and visually dumped it, but did not electronically dump it, so there could well be some bad bits.

Sorry, I numbered the baddies opposite the digits: baddies have #1 on the left, digits have #1 on the right.

The All Clear button grounds the ACL input to do a hardware reset.

Oh yeah, scanning them might be hard, I was thinking of using a high-end camera to just photograph them.

I just tried it really quick with Garfield:
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/_Temp/GarfieldLCD.jpg

That's half the resolution of the photo, and I can even increase that by moving the camera closer. Obviously opening the game would make it clearer, and even replacing the background with white if the polarizing filter isn't part of the insert with the art on it... (If the front filter is loose, maybe use one from another game over white paper or something).

Not sure how easily that will be to vector though... (And, it seems my game is missing a row of graphics... Look like I'll be opening it anyway. )
And, from what I can tell, they pretty much look like the package art in this case...