MAMEWIP News
Dox and Phil Stroffolino have posted news about his developments for MAME:
Dox:
21.08.2007:
Domino block (Wonwoo System 1996)
Runs on modified arkanoid hardware (with extra bg layer and palette ram).
nd palette ram).
Phil Stroffolino
Monday, August 20th, 2007 I’ve made decent progress with Namco System21 hardware, particularly with the older titles. Findings include:
- Winning Run is the original prototype hardware, with significant differences from newer hardware (Starblade, Cybersled).
- Winning Run uses a single DSP, and has (apparently) no internal BIOS. The master 68k uploads 100% of the DSP code at boot time.
- Winning Run doesn’t use sprite hardware, but rather has an additional 68k processor whose sole function is to manage a 256 color bitmap layer.
- The most interesting discovery is use of Point RAM. A table of quad attributes is stored there, explicitly by the master 68k, that provide color and vertex indices relative to {x,y,z} coordinates in the Point ROMs. This same table is also used by the newer System21 games - games that were “mostly working” did so only because there similar information happens to be redundantly encoded in the Point ROMs themselves.
- winrun.zip is actually “Winning Run: Suzuka Grand Prix”
- Driver’s Eyes runs on transitional hardware - it replaces the bitmap layer and GPU with the more modern sprite hardware, but still uses the older DSP configuration.
- The point ram control registers have been more fully documented.
