Re: [新聞] (WIP) David Haywood's Homepage
2012.12.23
一次po兩則。
"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom…"
Charles MacDonald and The Dumping Union managed to get another one of
the rare Deco Cassette games secured, and dumped. This time it’s
‘Manhattan’
A video of the original game was uploaded to YouTube a few months back,
taken from a Japanese arcade where the game was actually still being
operated (the same place often have rare classic period games for a
short period of time) but beyond that sightings of the game had been
few and far between, it apparently did make the US shores back in the
day but was quickly replaced.
To be honest, it’s not hard to understand why, first of all the game
lacks any kind of attract mode, it just cycles the title logo sequence
over and over, something which I consider to be a deathwish for any
arcade title (surprisingly Nam1975 got away with it, although the CD
version oddly rectifies that for an environment where it doesn’t
matter) If you can’t see the gameplay, why would you risk playing the
game? At first I thought this might be an emulation glitch, but if you
look carefully at the video it does the same, just starts drawing the
title logo again after it does the colour cycle and has displayed the
DECO logo.
Then there is the secondary problem, it isn’t really obvious what
you’re meant to do, arcade games should be obvious without having to
read the instructions. In this case I managed to waste several attempts
simply dying because I didn’t understand that you had to press a button
when your character falls on the trampoline, failure to do so means you
get no height at all and results in near instant death and one life lost,
no second chances or prompts.
Finally, the actual game. Once you’ve been launched up to a certain
height, which depends on when you press the button, all you really do
is fall down while attempting to steer your character towards the bounce
pads (balconies..) at the side to gain points, and possibly a bit of
extra height depending on how fast you’re going, but losing most
control over your character each time you do so. To end a stage safely
you must always land on the bottom most pad, which generally means you
can’t be going too fast by the time you reach that point. Obviously
there are things to avoid too, a feat much trickier each time your
character goes spinning out of control; glancing the edge of a platform
also does you no good at all. Some of the pads also contain letters to
spell the word ‘DECO’ landing on the same one twice also seems to end
the stage. It’s an original concept, but I’m not convinced it works
as a game. I might be missing something, I’ve not quite understood the
meaning of the word ‘Bound’ which is displayed (maybe a target score
you have to reach to finish later levels?) but there really doesn’t
seem to be much more to it.
The final nail in the coffin has to be the sound, the whole thing sounds
like a cross between Galaxian and a fire alarm, it’s truly nauseating.
Of course, it’s good to see it emulated, these Deco Cassettes remain
some of the more fragile and ‘at risk’ of the arcade games, I think
they also gave Data East a cheap way experiment with ideas at a low
cost, hence the various evolutions of gaming concepts / code and alt
versions of the same things you find turning up (there are still missing
versions of Graplop / Cluster Buster / Flying Ball for example, which
just seems to be the evolution of a single game) (personal note,
cgraplop2 doesn’t seem to let you coin up / start at the moment,
investigate)
Currently the emulation has some issues, it’s most likely these are
down to incomplete emulation of the Deco Cassette video system, rather
than a bad dump, they affect the rendering of the building graphics at
the side of the playfield which is rather obvious in the screenshots
below compared to the video above, and even moreso in action. Several
other Deco Cassette games have similar issues, which is why I’m
inclined to think it’s a video issue, not a bad dump; the only
cassette game I’m rather suspicious of when it comes to the dump
is “Super Astro Fighter” due to it erasing the game palette, although
that could be a CPU or protection issue of some sort. Anyway, what this
means is I should take a look at the video emulation at some point in
the future if nobody beats me to it.
MAME screenshots
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/manhat_1.png
So thanks again to Charles MacDonald and The Dumping Union, the only
work I’ve put into this myself is translating their analysis of the
protection dongle scrambling into actual MAME code so that the cassette
loads in MAME, but because they’d already done all the hard work that
part was easy enough :-)
In other news Phil B. submitted his driver for Rise of the Robots, the
failed prototype of the overhyped pre-rendered piece of junk fighting
game from the 90s which was meant to sell computers / consoles and
change gaming forever, so this Christmas / New Year could well be an
enjoyable one if you like to witness rare train wrecks ;-)
--
"Man was born on his missions for performing to get peace of mind and
make harmonious surroundings"
One recent surprise was a previously unknown PGM multi-game cartridge
showing up with Smitdogg / The Dumping Union, containing Photo Y2k2 as
well as 2 poker games.
It’s an official release from 2004, the same year several other games
were re-released, probably as some kind of stock clearance exercise.
Being a 2004 release it does mean it’s almost certainly the fully
secured ARM / 027A type, so can’t be fully dumped, it also lacks
external ROM, so we have no way of running our own code on it directly
even if an exploit was found.
Being a game without an external ROM the protection routines are
typically weaker tho, more ‘functional’ than ‘most of the game runs
on the ARM’like several others which means it might be possible to
simulate it, although this builds on what already existed with the
Photo Y2k2 protection, and that hasn’t been done yet either!
In addition to the protection from Photo Y2k2 it appears to have some
extra bits to get the write offsets of the background tilemap (used in
the intro) which is exactly the same as Knights of Valor (PhotoY2k
doesn’t even have any background tilemap roms, so obviously it wasn’t
used on that) There is also protection controlling the movement of the
cards (not understood) for the poker game in both the attract demo,
gameplay, and game select screens. Selecting a game results in the same
value out of range crash as Photo Y2k2.
I’m hesitant to write ANYTHING about PGM here, because as soon as I do
I seem to get a flood of annoying SPAM to my email, but at the same time
I do like to keep people informed, I’ll just keep hoping the spammer
goes away for good.
I’m not sure of the exact title of the game, the internal string calls
it ‘Flash 3-in-1′ the way the letters have been decorated on the logo
makes me think another Logic / Puzzle King, but clearly the primary game
is Photo Y2k2 with this just being used to clear old stock mask roms of
that game. I say that because the PGM system has a max capacity of ’
16MB’ for the bitmap (sprite) shape data, PhotoY2k2 was already using
the full 16-meg area with 2 MASK roms (2x8MB) Instead of making new mask
roms to add the data needed for the extra poker games they’ve instead
used the original pairing, and used an additional rom to act as a patch
/ overlay over the last 1MB of those roms. This to me indicates they had
an excess stock of the original mask roms they needed to use it.
In terms of regions it looks like this was only released in China,
Taiwan and Hong Kong because the region warning screens for all other
possible regions are incomplete or just corrupt. As usual the region
is provided by the protection device tho.
Anyway, screenshots from the non-working emulation.
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2012/pgm3in1_1.png
I’ve also uploaded the original hardware reference video Smitdogg
provided (it would be nice if he threw all his vids on YouTube even
if the quality is lower than the direct downloads they complement them
well) Note how the cards get dealt out during the attract, then spin
around in a circle, all that movement is controlled by the protection
commands. I’m not embedding it, because it’s not an emulation video.
Smitdogg’s thread about it can be found here:
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Number=299960
______________________________________________________________________________
來源：http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/
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