First off, thanks to "Just Desserts" for his hard work. I paid him the bounty this morning.
In a private message to me, "Just Desserts" said he has added these two items to the astrocade MAME driver to-do list:
1) Get 300-baud cassette saving working
2) Get the Perkins Engineering Blue Ram Keyboard working
He asked me if I could supply a list of other things that need updating and fixing. Here is a list of items that I can think off the top of my head:
3) Astrocade Colors in MAME require fixing - Most of the colors are close and it doesn't bother me that they aren't exactly right. However, some of the colors are completely wrong. But, I'm not sure which colors are wrong. It would be nice if there was a comparison showing real hardware against emulation and a video.
4) Interrupts - I think one of the interrupts in MAME's emulation isn't supported at all. I can't remember which one. I presume it is the light pen interrupt.
I asked this question to the Bally Alley Yahoo group and Lance Squire responded with the following:
5) Viper keyboard would be nice too. Paul has one.
As for color correction, wouldn't the HTML page be better than a video? Ok, video of the Bally on a tube tv could show the Neon like colours it could get, but modern tvs and monitors just can't do that. :P
Lance is referring to this comparison (which I'm not sure is up-to-date anymore). Also, these colors looks too accurate to me. I was using MAME a week or two ago and I noticed that some colors are just totally wrong now.
(Hmm... I don't see a way to insert in-line images and I can't seem to turn on html mode. Could a get a little help here, please?)
6) Also, although this could be done later, if you set VBLANK &(10) to 255
(Possibly lower...) you get a vertical over-scan effect. See this picture:
Although nobody had used it to any effect... yet. (This is a better image to show what is showing where on the over-scan.)
(Again, I can't insert the in-line image here.)
(I'm not sure what Lance is referring to here, but I'm including it anyway.)
These are the only updates that I can think of that the astrocade driver in MAME needs right now. Over the next few days I will give this more thought and see what I can come up with myself. It's also possible that other members of the Bally Alley community will come up with ideas too.
Adam