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Development Update/Trick Trap beta (Pocket)
🕑 Added 2024-08-09 15:31:09 +0000 UTCNo big announcements for this summer week but plenty of items to report.
Legacy Cores for Analogue Pocket
Analogue Pocket cores JTSLYSPY and JTFLANE are promoted to public as not issues have been reported on them. JTLABRUN core, compatible with Trick Trap/Labyrinth Runner, enters beta phase.
Maintenance
Added support for screen flip to JTSHOUSE core. This is vital for tate CRT users and was a requested feature
Fixed music not stopping in Karate Champ VS after the fight started
Development Status
The plan for this week was to work on the NeoGeo Pocket color bug that prevents games from booting up but I started on Monday morning with what looked like one step away from having X-Men working on the JTRIDERS new core. That one step turned out to be more like a marathon.
X-Men is made of a M68000 CPU at 16MHz connected to same tile mapper chipset as TMNT, Aliens and Sunset Riders. Then, to the same sprite chipset as The Simpsons. It looked like it should be easy. Well it turned out that it plugs three RAM chips to the tile mapper, rather than two as all the other Konami games using the same chips. It took a couple of days to understand how the third RAM chip was used.
Then the sprites were equally confusing because the JT implementation of the chip is build to be compatible with a similar chipset used in Aliens and TMNT. One small detail of the implementation for Aliens was creating havoc for X-Men and it took another day to figure it out. Let apart all the usual shuffling of wires that Konami makes on each board, that adds more confusion.
Finally, the sound subsystem is different from all the other games. Apart from the usual YM2151 FM synthesizer, it has an 8-channel PCM sound generator that we had not worked on. Consulting with Furrtek, this IC is even more difficult to reverse engineer from die shots as the usual ones because it does not used a gate array approach. It is a regular ASIC with two layers of metal. This means that the digital cells inside cannot be looked up in a data sheet, but derived from the pictures. And the pictures are harder to make sense of because of the extra second metal layer. MAME has an implementation that has a few question marks in the source code. We will need to start from there and prepare for making chip measurements to solve the questions that will inevitably come up.
The good news is that X-Men is booting up correctly and it is even playable. Although PCM sounds are completely missing. The MRA files will not be published until PCM sound is ready. For MiST users, this game will not operate on the JTRIDERS core because of lack of enough internal RAM. The core will still be able to operate Sunset Riders and possibly Turtles in Time.
Turtles in Time currently boots up on JTRIDERS but sprites are not visible because one chip is still missing in the core. Furrtek is working on reverse engineering that chip. We may do a first version based on MAME documentation while we wait for Furrtek's work to be ready.
Schematics
Identified the pin names for Konami's 051962 in the Racing Force official schematics. JT schematics for X-Men, Vendetta and The Simpsons have been updated to use those pin names. X-Men schematics have also seen many small changes during the revision done for core development.
Remember that schematics are stored in:
source in KiCAD format located in the cores/corename/sch folder in jtcores repository
PDF format in the sch folder in JTBIN
Only schematics for published cores appear here. Other schematics may only be in the source code repository jtcores.
Comments
Michael Di Filippo
Labyrinth Runner looks amazing. Reminds me of Battlantis which came out around the same time from Konami.
Stephen R Price
When a core goes public do the beta files remain in Mister? I'm trying to clean up duplicates on my system. I use update all.
Brendon O'Donnell
Awesome! Thanks for the update.
OldManBog
It's working https://youtu.be/6nRr9MJLidE?si=AyYXyIrHXrmUwz9a
Brendon O'Donnell
So there is no hope of getting x-men on the Mister because of the internal ram issue? Or am I not reading that correctly?
Kevin Bunch
Glad for the flip support! My Mister spends a lot of time set up on a tate CRT so that'll be extremely nice for playing Galaga 88.
LL
Yay X-Men!! Thanx for all the hard work that goes into these cores.
Pixel Cherry Ninja
Thanks JT and Team. I hope you're all doing well.
VINSTER
Hello there, I really appreciate all your hard work and dedication so all of us can enjoy many cycle accurate historic games. JTYiear seems to not be loading, only shows all 0's on rom loading screen, thanks.
JOTEGO
Thank you for the report. We’ll review it.
JOTEGO
X-Men will work on MiSTer. The MiST is a different, smaller, platform, which originated the MiSTer project.
Scott Lanners
do i read this rite x-men will not work with mister
Adrien Duchemole
Thanks for the update I'm sorry to tell that, but sound in karate champ vs is still buggy (but a different way) If you win a match, time counter will go down to zero and you'll get some points The note of the time counter will get stuck for the rest of the fight Also, when watching title screen, you can often hear a stuck note, it's not supposed to do that ... Sorry 😞
Alexander Stieglmayr
thanks Jotego for flip screen support in splatterhouse great work as usual
Frank McDonald
Amazing, thanks. With the WWF Superstars schematics being worked on now, would you also consider porting Pram0d's WWF Wrestlefest core to MiSTer?
Tony Vo
This is off topic but anybody play alien syndrome getting no sound sometimes after 1st level .... completely no sound or music when entering 1st stage boss and after
PolloLoco
Thank you for the screen flip support to JTSHOUSE, us CRT folks really do appreciate it!
Big Al.
Thanks JT and team, have a good weekend as always..
JOTEGO
The files are on today’s release
Frank McDonald
Was meaning his YouTube channel
Bedwablackburn
Thank you as always for the insight. I only understand half of what I should, but the deep dives are always intriguing and fascinating to read. Thank you all for your hard work.
Matthew Belshan
In his channel look under the cores tab. Its in both the "mister-cores-and-files" and "openfpga-cores-and-files" with some tutorials
Frank McDonald
I'll have a look. There a link on his channel?
Commander Keen
Thank you for all the hard work that goes into these cores. So happy to see X-Men , that was one we always played as kids. NGPC is coming along too, thank you.
Rick S.
Thank you as always!
Rick S.
Pixel cherry ninja has a discord post all about getting the 2p going. It works great!
Frank McDonald
Any update on sunset riders 2p?
Dwight Davis
GGs
