Home Page Forums MAME MAME SMS FM Chip support?

Hey everyone!
Hope im not intruding on your forum but i dont know where else to ask this question.

I've been fiddeling around with M.E.S.S's SMS emulation and i've been quite happy with the overall result so far but there is one thing i've been unable to do that other emulators such as Fusion can do and thats support the expanded FM Chip while keeping the region to EU Pal or NA NTSC (the issue isnt language as such, its difficulty difference between the regions, most notably here is Wonderboy in Monsterland)

Is it possible to make use of the FM chip while keeping the region to eighter of the non Japanese regions? and if so, then how?

Anyway, thanks!

the real SMS had no FM support outside Japan, and as such it's not possible to obtain in MAME/MESS, for accuracy sake.
sorry.

But still some outside Japan cart support the FM Chip…

so store the current system region in a byte accessible by the cheat system, and allow a cheat to region swap it. Then you could run the smsj driver (containing the extra hardware) with a cheat to think it's another region.

Question. Is the FM module a drop-in replacement for the PSG, or does the game needs to explicitly support it?

the games have to explicitly support it

Yes and the master system will do a region check before allowing the use of the FM chip in games that was realeased outside of the JP market with FM chip support and this is the primary reason i've been looking into it, as getting a japanese Master System (not a MarkIII) is quite difficult without paying a hefty price to get it sent from Japan.

And you spoke about a cheat system? are you referring to an internal one within MAME itself? or are you speaking off the pariphiral Pro Action Replay for the master system it self?

And again thank you for taking time to answer my questions, its much appriciated.

*thought about it some more:
From what i remember about whats stored in the rom header of each SMS rom it has two region settings for Export & Japan (and this is only accessed by the Export systems and not the Japanese Master System, that system will play any game you give it) but the rom for the japanese market and the other markets are the same, so using that information to trick the system would not do anything, as thats not what determains what version of the game it plays.

MAME has a built-in cheat system, that works similarly to an Action Replay. You enable it with the -cheat command line switch, but you'll need a cheat file (typically Pugsy's).

However MAME also supports a popular scripting language called Lua, which has some overlap in functionality with the built-in cheats system. The latest version provides a plugin designed to help create cheats.

Btw, currently the FM chip is permanently attached to the Mark III (sg1000m3) driver, what is wrong. For that driver, it needs to be included in a new device (FM Sound Unit), that is plugged to an expansion port, compatible with the SG1000, that isn't coded yet. But doing correctly requires sharing this new expansion port with the sg1000.c driver, and convert its keyboard code to also be a pluggable device. And the keyboard has its pluggable devices, too. Going on, there's a Mark III game that can use a link between keyboards of two consoles for a 2 player mode.

You should fix it.