nesdev.org

Okay, this is going to sound incredibly silly, (because it is) but has someone ever made at least a tech demo running on arcade board hardware? I'm talking about if someone at least made the screen turn red on the CPS1 or something. I just always figured that you would kind of need to know how the system operates in order to emulate it, which has been done before (I'm not talking about the CPS1 exclusively.) I looked up Irem M92 development (of couse I would ) and this is the closest thing it got me: http://arcadedev.wikidot.com/irem-m72 By the way, I know the Neo Geo is an arcade machine and it has a good amount of people working on it, but this is the only one I can think of. I'm sure that it being turned into a console helped. (Plus, I don't remember any Irem M92 promotional flyers. )

This person's done some work hacking the Namco Pac-Man hardware: http://umlautllama.com/projects/pacdocs/

Yeah, the pacman hardware is seven years more primitive... On the other hand, it feels a lot like the ColecoVision. A 28x32 tilemap of 8x8 tiles, with two bytes per tile: one selects the tile, the other selects one of 32 different fixed 4-color palettes. Each tile is 2bits per pixel. Eight sprites, each 16x16 in dimension (the size of pacman, natch?), four bytes per sprite, but only 6 bits of sprite character selection (the other two bits select X and Y mirroring). The three MSBs of the palette selection could probably be implemented, too, but it probably wouldn't help visually.

Only really weird thing is that the background tilemap is a weird rotated/folded not-exactly 32x36 tilemap.

[Did] someone at least [make] the screen turn red on the CPS1 or something

There's this old topic

lidnariq wrote:Yeah, the pacman hardware is seven years more primitive

7? It's 11 years more primitive. I'm talking about the Irem M92, not the M72. (I was showing that I only found information on the M72, which is actually the board R-Type 1 and 2 run on.)

lidnariq wrote:Eight sprites, each 16x16 in dimension

Wow, that's bad! (I though the NES's sprite situation wasn't very good until I saw this.)

Basically, what I want to know is if someone has ever made at least a register list or something, which, if it has been emulated before, has been done. If I know this and whatever weird hardware related things, I could just look up the processor, which I already did, and could use the information on that, because programing for one system with the same processor as another should be similar. Apparently though, The main CPU and the coprocessor are the NEC V33 and the NEC V30 respectively, which are based on Intel processors and use x86, which got me a bit concerned, as I heard it is a mess. I know it isn't the whole thing though, and I see that the V33 is pretty much like the 80286 and that the V30 is like the 80186, so I won't need to look at any instructions added past those. (Here's a useful thing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_instruction_listings)

You know, do the authors of MAME ever release any technical information regarding any of the systems?

The thing about the 8086 is that
1- The original ISA, before thirty years of evolution and grafting new functionality into it, is actually pretty kind for hand-writing assembly. (I enjoy it)
2- You can get compilers for a wide variety of higher-level languages to it. (Yeah, I know you've already recoiled from C, but the point stands)

I've always wanted to do something with Outrun/Afterburner/SpaceHarrier hardware, but don't have the necessary skill set to do it.

lidnariq wrote:1- The original ISA, before thirty years of evolution and grafting new functionality into it, is actually pretty kind for hand-writing assembly. (I enjoy it)

I can confirm this, old real mode code is actually very bearable. In fact this is true for pretty much all the hardware used in early PCs, for that matter.

djcouchycouch wrote:I've always wanted to do something with Outrun/Afterburner/SpaceHarrier hardware, but don't have the necessary skill set to do it.

Those aren't actually the same hardware though, but they are part of the same "series" I guess you could say. Space Harrier runs on the hardware called Sega Space Harrier (creative name, I know), Outrun runs on the Sega Outrun and After Burner, which is the most advanced, runs on the Sega X Board. However, If you want to see something really crazy, look at this, Sega's most advanced "Super Scaller" system (and quite possibly the most advanced 2D system I've seen so far, even if the games don't show it): http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=709 Honestly, the thing's practically an amusement park attraction, and I'm sure it cost just as much as one.

I think it's funny though how often new arcade boards are made when the game developed on the newer system could have been made on the older one just as easily. The example I always look at (Off course ) is the Irem M107. Apparently, it is pretty much the same thing as the M92, except that the V33 is now running at 14Mz instead of 9, There is an extra BG for a total of 4, and apparently twice as many sprites (which System 16 never even says the original amount...) and "colors". (What? Palettes or total?) Anyway, the games that use this are a vertical shooter (which never uses more than 3BGs and doesn't appear to use any more sprites than GunForce 2) and, you guessed it, 2 soccer games. Because you know, in a soccer game, you need all the BGs and sprites as you can get. I'm sure it's very strenuous on the CPU too, with all the bullets and explosions and what not. Like I was saying though, there was no need to develop the more powerful hardware. (And there are companies that are far more guilty of this, mostly Sega.)

Edit: What the heck! I looked all over the mame website, and I still haven't found anything. I guess emulating a system takes a lot less knowledge of said system than I thought?

One of my life goals is to design, build, and program an arcade game from scratch, but I haven't done much homebrew-worthy research on any singular arcade machines aside from my usual "oh wow this one uses an sn76489 and a simple DAC for video" dorky stuff.

Sik wrote:

lidnariq wrote:1- The original ISA, before thirty years of evolution and grafting new functionality into it, is actually pretty kind for hand-writing assembly. (I enjoy it)

I can confirm this, old real mode code is actually very bearable. In fact this is true for pretty much all the hardware used in early PCs, for that matter.

I agree with these things; the new stuff is a big mess. The very older x86 is a better design and work better, yes.

Espozo wrote:Edit: What the heck! I looked all over the mame website, and I still haven't found anything. I guess emulating a system takes a lot less knowledge of said system than I thought?

MAME is the documentation. Go digging through the source code, there's more than just code in there.

Is there a place where all the hardware based information in all of that is stored? It looks a bit overwhelming.

Nope. (Unfortunately.)

Well, I guess I'd better get busy... I'll probably make an information page about all the registers and whatnot if I even get there for the 2 other people in the entire world who are interested (and for myself, off course).

By the way, do you think you could search for a keyword to shift through all that? If I could type in Irem or something, I'm sure that would help. I looked through one folder, which led to set of folder, which led to another set of folders, which led to another set of folders, which led t- I think you get the point.

There's a search bar at the top of the page.