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Inside Mac Games Volume 5 #8
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IMG 51 Vol 5-8.iso
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TEXT_147.txt
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1997-10-20
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117 lines
0.12
Program:
- Sound support in Burger Time. This is the first multiple CPU game supported
by MAME (two 6502, one for code, one for sound).
It's not perfect, but we're getting there.
Also, as you can guess, this is slow. A 486/100 cannot handle it at 60 fps.
Runs reasonably with -frameskip 1, though.
- I also set up the second CPU to emulate sound in Scramble, but the sound
that comes out is completely wrong. I don't know what I'm missing, anyone
can help?
- Since the 8910 emulator doesn't allow to set the clock frequency at runtime,
I temporarily switched to using the default one. This affects sound in Crazy
Climber, Crazy Kong and Bagman. Let me know whether it's better or worse
than before.
- Sound in Centipede, through Ron Fries' POKEY emulator.
- Fixed speed in Burger Time (was running at about half the real speed).
- Valerio Verrando provided 288x224 video modes to be used with Rally X.
WARNING: these video modes might be unstable (the noscanlines one hangs my
system). Any help to make them better would be appreciated.
As usual, if the default mode doesn't work on your system, try -noscanlines.
If that doesn't work as well, use -vesa.
- I finally found out what was causing slowdowns in Rally X and Bagman. It was
an interrupt related issue (see later). I hope I didn't break a dozen of
other games to fix this ;-)
- Thanks to Mike Cuddy and Mirko Buffoni, Pooyan colors are now MUCH better ;-)
I also fixed a bug in the dip switches.
MAKE SURE TO DELETE POOYAN\POOYAN.DSW, OTHERWISE IT WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY.
- I suddenly realized that Time Pilot runs on the same hardware as Pooyan, so
I made a driver for it. Colors come straight from Mike Cuddy's emulator.
- Gary Walton confirms that the colors in Moon Cresta and Moon Quasar are 100%
accurate. Very good!
- The background stars in Scramble / Super Cobra now blink. However I don't
know how close to the real thing it is.
- Ville Laitinen pointed out that The End runs on Scramble hardware, so it now
uses the same driver. He also fixed problems with the input controls and two
players modes.
IMPORTANT: MAKE SURE TO DELETE THE FILES SCRAMBLE\SCRAMBLE.DSW AND
THEEND\THEEND.DSW, OTHERWISE THE GAMES WILL NOT WORK CORRECTLY.
- Ville also fixed sprite priorities in Congo Bongo.
- Doug Jefferys provided the color PROMs for Crazy Kong, so colors are now 100%
accurate (with the possible exception of Kong itself, which uses a separate
palette).
- Support for Moon Ranger (bootleg version of Moon Patrol).
- Added support for Lost Tomb (Stern game running on Super Cobra hardware),
but it doesn't work well (crashes during the demo, and it's not playable) and
the graphics are garbled. I think some of the ROMs might be corrupted.
- Preliminary support for Jump Bug. It uses a modified Scramble driver, the
hardware seems to be similar. It's not playable (the input bits are not even
mapped), and resets after a few seconds.
I'm not particularly interested in this game, anyone volunteers to complete
the driver?
- Support for the version of Super Cobra with Stern copyright.
NOTE THAT I RENAMED THE OTHER ONE (Konami copyright) "scobrak".
- Ivan Mackintosh provided a Millipede driver (dip switches are not supported
yet). Sound doesn't work, I don't know why.
- Brad Oliver provided a preliminary version of the Mr. Do's Castle driver. Not
working yet!
- Mike Coates pointed out that Carnival uses a RAM for character generation
(like Nibbler) and provided a driver for it. It's still not playable, but
the graphics are now correct.
- Bernd Wiebelt suggested to add a new option: "-vesascan". It uses a VESA
800x600 screen to simulate scanlines. It is much slower than the other video
modes. Use this if you want scanlines and the default video mode doesn't
work.
Source:
- Multiple CPU support. All you have to do to setup multiple CPUs is add
entries to the cpu[] array in the MachineDriver definition. Each CPU can
have different type (currently Z80 and M6502 are supported), clock, address
space, memory/IO port hook, interrupt handlers, number of interrupts per
video frame.
- Sometimes interrupt requests happen while interrupts are disabled. Until now
I just ignored them, but some games need them to be processed as soon as
interrupts are reenabled. Rally X is an example of such a game. The Z80
engine has provision to do that, but it would make writing a driver more
complex (need to find the interrupt acknowledge register) so I slightly
modified the engine to automatically cache an interrupt request and execute
it as soon as interrupts are enabled. I had already done a similar change to
the 6502 engine, it was needed by Burger Time which wouldn't accept coins
otherwise.
- Since the functions xxx_vh_start(), xxx_vh_stop(), xxx_videoram_w(),
xxx_colorram_w() are the same for most video drivers, I moved them,
alongside with some variables, to vidhrdw/generic.c. This doesn't reduce
much the size of the executable, but greatly reduces the amount of code that
has to be put in a video driver (in many cases, you just have to write
xxx_vh_screenrefresh())
- Fixed bug in msdos.c/osd_play_streamed_sampled() which prevented it from
handling more than one audio stream. This part of the code still needs a
major cleanup.
- Fixed bug in drawgfx() which sometimes allowed transparent non remapped
copies to be drawn outside of the clip region.