Home Page Forums MAME MAME 2024: When Progress Comes Along, You Must WIP It

Awesome stuff! Glad this one can finally be fixed!

I have original and bootleg boards but not setup to do any testing at the moment

Now to make a copy of the bootleg "mcu replacement" board and then i can send a original MCU off to decap

The original Task Force Harrier MCU has a manufacturer's sticker covering its label, but I believe it's probably a Mitsubishi M50747, as on the Jaleco/NMK/UPL mahjong games from the same period.

Namco helped me debug some graphical issues that were affecting 500 GP, and to a lesser extent Race On! and Gunmen Wars.

[video:youtube][/video]

For real, though: After having fixed an issue with C361 IRQs, having some of the "Unknown" DIP switches flipped when starting Race On! causes it to drop into this menu instead:


Tamura's Menu is one of the more useful ones:


...Because of its Texture Viewer page. Before/after.

Oh yeah. This thing, too.

[video:youtube][/video]

If you can't beat Haze with the Plug-and-Plays, join him! Hammy dumped Chusenoh, a 1992 Konami plug-and-play mini-console with a small selection of gambling-adjacent mini games including a slot machine, a bingo randomizer, Rock-Paper-Scissors, fishing, and golf. It turns out to be lightly modified konmedal.cpp hardware (Z80 + GX tilemaps + SCC and OKI 6295 audio). If you had an EPROM emulator one of these units would be an entertaining way to run experiments on the K054156/K054157 pair, but that's a pie-in-the-sky idea.

[video:youtube][/video]

User-friendliness on this isn't the greatest - there's a dedicated button on the back that flips modes between a menu of the mini games and actually running them, plus a separate switch for a full arcade-style test menu with all the Konami favorites (even a sound test). And I have no idea what you're actually supposed to do in the fishing mini game, as you'll see in the video.

My understanding of these from what was said previously is that they weren't really designed or sold for home use, but for venues/hotels etc. to provide customers with entertainment devices if they rented out rooms for events etc. definitely a weird rabbithole.

Yes, they are "rental" systems that are available to go to party's etc. for gambling "events". There are still some places that will lease them out.
There is a few others including a PSX based one, they come up for sale from time to time but shipping on them is a killer from japan due to the weight.

Nice to see you have it up and running already

It should be easy to hook it up and run test roms and stuff... but i have no workshop at the moment to do anything like that for now...

What’s the UART for? Is that how the external keypad used for setup mode connects?

The keypad is only required to play the minigame with the treasure chests (unclear what game that actually is given the demo screen for it just plays music and the keypad isn't working yet). Setup mode is fully navigable with just the buttons on the unit as far as I can tell, but it's also 100% Japanese so I have no doubt I'm missing some things. Holding my phone up to the screen for machine translation is not optimal :-)

Modern "SCSI Emulators" like ZuluSCSI and BlueSCSI support custom SCSI commands that allow the machine to directly access files on their underlying media (usually an SD Card), rather than just seeing an HDD or CD-ROM image as an entire drive, which is how you usually use those devices. This lets you get files in and out of the machine easily, and now it can help you get files in and out of emulated systems in MAME. Software is available for the classic Mac OS, Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Windows 3.x and 9x, Windows NT 3.x and 4.x, SGI IRIX, and NeXTStep. As long as your emulated system uses nscsi for its SCSI interface you'll be able to use this.

This uses the shared folder I introduced a while back for the CH376 device. Any files you put into the share_directory you've configured in mame.ini will be visible to the software running inside the emulation and can be 'downloaded' right into the emulated system. Some clients also support uploading a file from inside the emulated machine to appear out in your share_directory.

Here's some example screens from the Mac, using an open source client called scuzEMU developed earlier this year.

The list of files in my share_directory:


Selecting one for download:


The transfer itself:


And then we un-stuff the file and hey, a new game inside the emulation in record time!


The closed source clients from BlueSCSI work fine too, because I made MAME return the ridiculous "BlueSCSI is the BEST STOLEN FROM BLUESCSI" magic string on the appropriate mode page. I think the BlueSCSI team doesn't entirely understand the F/OSS ethos given that they're a GPLv3 project that relies heavily on other GPLv3 projects, but what can you do.