Home Page Forums MAME MAME The Newer All-Singing, All-Dancing 2023 WIP Thread

Please PM Heihachi with your favorite SDCard recovery recipes, do not derail this thread with them. Thanks!

Something different: Suppport for the HP8231A Basic Language Coprocessor found in HP Vectra PC's back in the 90ies (http://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=681)
These cards emulate the HP9000/300 System to run HP BASIC programs either in foreground or in backgroud while MSDOS is running. Common usecase was controlling Test equipment.
The implementation requires new68k, because it needs restartable memory accesses.

The 020 version is fun.
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/pc/measurement_coprocessor/82324/

Yes, had such a card a few years ago, but never got it to work. Selftest was always failing. I'm looking for a while now for another one, but looks like they are getting rare. And it has a '030 on it, not sure whether there's some way to get it emulated with the current '030 we have in mame. Not that it would be easier with a '020 though...

020+ don't have the restartability property yet.

It does, but it's done by a sort of state rewind. That's sufficient to run several flavors of UNIX though.

Another random VME board, this time it's Tadpole Technology's TP881V.

This thing consists of a base I/O card with serial and dual SCSI controllers, and then one or two CPU boards which can have between 1 and 4 20MHz MC88100 CPU's, each with a pair of MC88200 CMMUs.

Unusual is the extensive use of Zilog Z8036 Z-CIO devices for various I/O port and interrupt control.



The main task required to get this doing something more impressive will be emulating the MC68440 DMA controller, and figuring out what prevents Plamen's real hardware SCSI from working so we can get a disk image of TPIX.

Hammy dumped Konami's "Golden Region", a combination video and mechanical pachislot game on a previously unseen board with yet another arrangement of the usual System GX suspects (56832 tilemaps, 53246 sprites, 55555 priority controller). As usual the Konami POST makes getting something out of it not too hard, but it looks like it breaks the tilemaps in an interesting way.

Fixed SUBQ stop handling in PC Engine CD, which fixes hangs in at least following games, along with other things (namely a regression with pregap BGM play/repeat).

Mad Stalker



Final Zone 2 (current SW list dumps are bad, really ought to use the redump version instead)



Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego

After building a very, very pricise 68000 core and with some invaluable help from ijor (Jorge Cwik), who reversed-engineered all the st chips from die shots (also know as our kind of person), the ST driver is slowly starting to look like how it should. Still a bunch of problems with in particular the mmu and the 68901, but it's getting somewhere.

But I hear people like screenshots? Ok, then let's have some. What I think was the first megademo on the ST was called the Union Demo, because it was done by a bunch of demomakers (also known as crackers that found more fun in writing the intros they put in front of the cracked games that actually doing the cracking) and not just one. It was also I think once of the first demos with a menu to choose between different screens, which became the norm on the atari for a while.



So here is the intro to the demo. It's moving all over the place, but it's reasonably done with raster-interrupt driven palette-changes. What one usually doesn't know is that demomakers wanted to make it a little difficult to steal their methods, and ex-crackers tend to be decent at protection. So reaching that screen requires making 14 sectors dedicated to protection be happy. So I'm happy to say that our current emulation is good enough to convince the Union demo protection. Sadly the 68901 fails at convincing the Ventura Demo or Punish your machine.

But while the idea of a menu was something new, or at least not usual at the time (we're talking 1988 here)...



... it was amusing to move "charlie" with the joystick to choose a door. You may notice there is something strange going on with the sides of the scrolltext. But one of the two things that really sealed the Union Demo's reputation is the Level 16 screen.



You'll notice that the Level 16 screen looks bigger than the others. That's because it is. It's considered the first stable overscan on the ST. Overscan has a interesting history, it's not something that's supported by the hardware of the st. But due to the fact that the circuit which decides whether to start or stop the display works with equality comparisons and the values compared to depend on the screen frequency (50, 60 or 70Hz) it is possible to mess up with them by perfectly timed changes without breaking the global screen syncs. And the interesting thing is that it was 100% experimental. They built models of how things seemed to work which were incorrect but useful, but what really happens wasn't understood until 2015 with ijor's decapping and analysis. Which ended up with the release of Sync's Closure demo which very much needed that perfect understanding. I haven't even dared trying it yet, I know where the current emulation breaks already.

More posts when more things work :-)