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Midnight Resistance comes to the FPGA world this week. This game was ported to most home systems in the 90’s. It belongs to the run & gun genre, but it isn’t as hard as most titles. Unless you set the difficulty to hard, the game can be beat...
2022-02-18 17:15:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Hippodrome
We’re back to the Data East DEC0 system this week. This arcade hardware is built around two graphic chips called BAC06 and MXC06. The games using it come at least in three flavours from what I have seen so far:
1. A MOS6502 for audio and a i8751 for prote...
2022-02-11 15:55:59 +0000 UTC View Post
MiSTer Shadow Masks, Mikie Public Release, NGP and Bug Fixes
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If you haven’t heard of shadow masks, it is a way to make your HDMI look a bit closer to how a CRT looks like. It is a very nice feature and it was recently accomo...
2022-02-04 15:30:27 +0000 UTC View PostEspañol abajo - 日本語は下記
The core compatible with SEGA System 16 still has some pending work so I went back to it this week. Bay Route, a very nice run and gun, was freezing soon after the game started. The unencrypted version (bayroute1) was just a blank screen. As the une...
2022-01-28 19:21:28 +0000 UTC View PostEspañol abajo - 日本語は下記
This week we visit another Konami 8-bit arcade: Mikie. This game has an interesting story as the original Japanese one had place in an office and you played as a new employee whereas the western counterpart was about a high school student. This a si...
2022-01-21 14:58:35 +0000 UTC View PostEspañol abajo - 日本語は下記
This week comes with two public releases. The 8-bit Konami titles based around the chips 082, 085, etc. is ready for prime time. We will see more of these 8-bit titles soon, as they are as classic as arcade gaming can get! The ti...
2022-01-14 20:29:39 +0000 UTC View Post
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Each year, in the night of the 5th of January the Three Wise Men bring presents to the children. They must have been checking your twitter repl...
2022-01-06 04:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
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I love Konami's basketball games. They know how to make vibrant, dynamic games using the technology available at the time. To close 2021, we are visiting the first basketball game they made. I bring you an FPGA core compatible with Super ...
2021-12-31 15:03:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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Yie Ar Kungfu is an old Konami title, very popular among 8-bit users -both console and microcomputers. It'...
2021-12-24 14:54:15 +0000 UTC View Post
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Although probably not easy to spot, the starfield in Side Arms was wrong. And it was driving me crazy. I had the schematics for it, so in principle, I should have been able to replicate it perfectly. However, when people sent me photos of their cabinets, I ...
2021-12-17 19:41:50 +0000 UTC View Post
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After fixing the reported bugs for Kicker (a couple of mild things), the core is ready for the public and is now out in JTBIN. I have also reported the discrepancies I found between MAME and the actual PCB hard...
2021-12-10 16:41:30 +0000 UTC View Post
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I miss releasing new games on Fridays, but don't think we're not busy here! This is what's going on:
-NeoGeo Pocket CPU design for FPGA is at the architecture stage, with a few options already discarded. The design has now the indexed memory controller, the r...
2021-12-03 17:38:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Finally, it's here, the beta for Kicker. Extracting the full schematics was not the full story. For a specific custom chip, I had to write a small custom code to run in the original board to check what it was doing. 2021-11-19 16:47:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Using first-hand sources for information is vital for our preservation and reproduction purposes. Arcade schematics contain all the connectivity information of the devices on the PCB. For some games, that's all you need to know. But this information is not available for most games. And even when ...
2021-11-18 12:19:06 +0000 UTC View PostAnother System 16 week, the following new titles are supported now:
-Sonic Boom, a 1987 vertical shooter
-Dunk Shot, use the analogue stick to control the player
-MVP, a baseball game
-Excite League, another baseba...
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SEGA surprised us with a new System 16 title in 2008! It was a sequel to Fantasy Zone, and it was designed to run on a System 16 board expanded to 256kB of RAM. This week's core update gives support to this variation, also known as System 16C. If y...
2021-11-05 11:35:14 +0000 UTC View Post
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A witch flying through a haunted forest, opening cauldrons and fighting zombies... the perfect plan for Halloween.
The new S16 beta now supports Cotton, which was plagued with bugs before (give it a go with the old RBF file for comparisons). There is still a ...
2021-10-29 18:27:02 +0000 UTC View Post
We have one more game working on the Dragon Ninja hardware this week: Heavy Barrel. This is an Ikari Warriors clone, so prepare for going around and around over yourself.
To make life easier, if you use MiSTer you can turn around using the right analogue stick. Set the game...
2021-10-22 16:31:02 +0000 UTC View PostI wonder if people would enjoy assembling an arcade PCB at home as a DIY project. There is the well known Harlequin ZX Spectrum clone, so this would be something similar.
Not all arcade games are good candidates for this. The ones better suited for a DIY project are from ~1986 and older, li...
2021-10-19 13:53:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Important: jtbeta.zip has changed. Copy the new file to games/mame in your MiSTer SD folder. Or simply unzip the jtninja_20211015.zip to the root of your SD card.
Directors asked to get a top arcade title out next, so there you go: Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja!
This game...
2021-10-15 15:30:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Run the updater or copy the files from JTBIN
Double Dragon is famous for its slowdowns. And they are not by design. The developers have said in interviews that they did not have the resources to prevent the slowdowns. So ever since I published the FPGA core for these games,...
2021-10-01 15:37:31 +0000 UTC View PostUnlike CPS, where a consistent protection system was used for all games, SEGA System16 had many hardware variations with different protection schemes. Some games have encryption in the M68000 of two possible types; others have it in the sound CPU, others have an MCU messing with the CPU. And a fe...
2021-09-24 14:57:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Summary:
-New Konami core: Fast Lane
-MiSTer: unzip the attached mister file directly on the root of your SD card, OR run update_all and copy jtbeta.zip to games/mame manually (only if you need to). jtbeta.zip is inside the mister zip file.
-All files are also s...
2021-09-10 18:04:36 +0000 UTC View Post
Summary:
-New Konami core: MX5000/Flak Attack
-MiSTer: unzip the attached mister file directly on the root of your SD card, OR run update_all and copy jtbeta.zip to games/mame manually (only if needed). jtbeta.zip is inside the mister zip file.
-All files are also sto...
As announced last Friday, here we have two of the most well known SEGA titles working on the FPGA core. These games had problems before that seemed fixed in last week's RBF, but we hadn't tested them fully. Now we have.
This week is only an MRA update. I was planning to improve compatibilit...
2021-08-27 06:01:29 +0000 UTC View Post
Important: copy the attached jtbeta.zip file to games/mame on MiSTer
After the Exed Exes detour, we come back to System16 to continue increasing compatibility. This week has been focused on solving strange flickering and palette issues with Dynamite Dux. The root cause was ...
2021-08-20 15:34:37 +0000 UTC View Post
On the 2nd of August, I took on the challenge of extracting the full schematics of an arcade PCB. I had normally worked on systems with schematics available, but that was a big limitation. Most arcade games don't have schematics published. Of course, you could check what emulators do, but w...
2021-08-13 08:14:57 +0000 UTC View PostIt's been three weeks since the last core update. I'm surprised at how hard it was to get the System 16B, once the 16A was done. But there's nothing constant work can't beat, so here we are at another update.
For technical reasons, System 16 games require four different RBF files now. I am ...
2021-07-30 17:43:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Work done this week:
-Sprite and background full support completed for all Altered Beast variations
-Miscellaneous sprite bits processed
-Tile ROM banking support
-Working MRA files for Golden Axe and E-Swat
-Object priority corrected (fixing Dynamite Dux map screen)
-Scroll ...
Another week well spent on SEGA System 16B development. One hardware feature I added this week is sprite scaling. This one is very interesting because it isn't that common but from a hardware point of view, it's rather "cheap" to implement.
S16B can only scale down as much as a 0.5 factor. ...
2021-07-16 16:47:15 +0000 UTC View Post