JOTEGO posts
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Poll: PGM or CPS3
Esperanza is done with Taito's Extermination schematics. Which system should she work on next?She will extract the schematics for the chosen system from a donated PCB. This is a step required for a precise FPGA core.
Development, System 16 and A. Pocket Update
Esperanza returned from holidays this week and she has resumed the work on Taito’s Extermination hardware. This was pretty much done before her holidays but as usual, small details take a long time to get done. She has been cleaning up the schematics and will be running electrical rule checks next week. The core for ...
Pocket: Ghosts’n Goblins
Sorry for the long wait, but this has been much harder than expected and you will see why soon! Today I proudly present a Pocketarcade core compatible with the Ghosts’n Goblins hardware. This core isthe same one working onthe other FPGA platforms. This means that JOTEGO supports now the same core running in seven pla...
Super Hang On beta
I stopped working on the Out Run core on the 18thof August after a frustrating debug week. The core was hanging up right at the start and I could not find the problem. I published the source code in the hope of another developer finding the problem. And open source worked its magic. Gyurco, who I have already mentioned...
NeoGeo Pocket CPU: Test Coverage
For the last two weeks, Samuel has kept working full time on the NGP CPU. I asked him to use a FOSS tool called covered to check the test bench converage. But, what is coverage? In the early days of digital electronics the engineer had to manually calculate all the digital functions and choose individual logic gates (A...
Karate Champ
The 80’s karate season starts today. Data East’s Karate Champ was an extremely popular game in the arcade and the home computer versions. I think we were all crazy about karate and ninjas back then. TV made it look normal to have a ninjagang in your neighbourhood. Karate Champ is a simple game in technical terms, e...
Extermination / NeoGeo Pocket
Español abajo / 日本語は下記Esperanza finished Taito’s Extermination schematics today before heading for her holidays after her first year working for JT. During this time she’s extracted schematics for Konami’s Kicker, Konami’s Ping Pong, Data East’s Sly Spy, Gun Bird 2, SEGA’s System 18, CAPCOM’s...
Roc'n Rope Beta
Although I had not planned to release a new game this week, I needed to work on something relaxing and chose to spend two days making an 8-bit Konami core: Roc’n Rope, designed by Tokuro Fujiwara. This is mix of a puzzle game and a platformer. You have to climb your way to the top where a phoenix waits for you. In or...
Update on the Pocket
Esperanza spent her week finishing the Renegade PCB schematics. Although we think that we understand everything now, we want to let the schematics as correct and neat as possible for maintenance of original equipment and historical documentation. She still has a couple more days to finish them. The plan is to present t...
Renegade Beta & Pang! Public Release
Update your jtbeta.zip key. Find it attached. The Pang! core has been promoted to public release.Renegade is a game I had wanted to work on for a long while. I bought the PCB and had it sitting in a cabinet until this month. Esperanza started working on it and has already completed the sound and game CPUs. She’s stil...
Out Run Jukebox
After three intense weeks, we haven’t been able to get Out Run to boot correctly. It boots to a halt but if you press F2, you can enter the service menu and play the tunes. So I suppose we have an Out Run jukebox core at this stage. The same goes for Turbo Out Run. With Super Hang On the situation is a bit better. Yo...
Support for Analogue Pocket
I saw an announcement by Analogue today talking about Open FPGA... I wonder if this means that they're finally going to open the platform to community developers.I was wondering if you would be interested in getting my cores working on the Pocket too. Supporting a new platform on JTFRAME takes some work, so I don&#...
Out Run Progress & Renegade
Short update this week to tell you that work on the Out Run system continues. The game currently boots to a halt, although the service menu works. Too bad the built-in checks cannot find any problems with the core. I have moved my attention to Super Hang On, which is like Out Run but shares the sprites chip with System...
Vigilante (public release) - SSF2T and other service releases
Español abajo - 日本語は下記Many items to announce this week:- Vigilante core promoted to public release. Source code here.- Pang (beta core) supports bus contention when accessing video memory (better time accuracy)- System 16: Dynamite Dux and Golden Axe slowdown fixed. Dynamite Dux wrong colours in second lev...
Block Block / Dokaben / CAPCOM World
Español abajo - 日本語は下記I was one to fall for the simplicity of Arkanoid in my 8-bit home computer. I thought with the first two Arkanoid games, the series was over and didn’t give credit to any other block game. Then I came across CAPCOM’s Block Block. This game brought fresh air to the genre five years...
CAPCOM Bowling Schematics Ready
We have completed the schematics extraction of this track ball game. It is a very interesting piece of hardware because it comes from CAPCOM but uses only standard devices. Unlike the Pang! hardware, where you could see some CAPCOM custom chips shared with 1943 and other games, this bowling game seems to have been engi...
Super Pang (support added to JTPANG core)
Super PangAfter the warm receiving Pang! got last week, I am very glad to bring Super Pang today. The game runs on the same board with small configuration changes so it wasn’t too hard to make it work. The core itself supports the hardware better but there are still a couple of things to iron out. There will one more...
Pang!
This game, with no large demons, no hero plot and not even screen scroll, is one of the most enjoyable arcade titles ever. Show it to any kid and they’ll love it too. Pang! is also an interesting title because the hardware was developed by CAPCOM, and they also published games for this 8-bit platform. As I have done ...
NeoGeo Pocket Update
I have been working exclusively on the NeoGeo Pocket for the last two weeks. I have the instruction set implemented for the CPU now, with the exception of the three instructions related to interrupt and micro-DMA processing. The CPU logic takes at the moment over 3.7k lines of code. This is surprisingly less than the Z...
Vigilante (beta)
NB: The files are available in JTBIN via update_all or in the #betafiles Discord channelVigilante is a game that goes with no presentation. Everyone remembers the satisfying sound that kicking and punching produced in this title. But let me talk to you about some technical curiosities:- The game still useda Z80 as the ...
The Speed Rumbler/Twin Cobra/Robocop…
The Speed Rumbler- Extracted layer priority circuit from PCB and fixed the FPGA core with it- The screen had an 8-line offset, which is corrected now- The sprites position was slightly offset too- There was a noisy line when the game was in flip mode- The default sound balance had the FX too loudAfter this, there are n...
Ghosts’n Goblins Color Flash
A couple of years ago, someone wrote me asking about yellow flashes in Ghosts’n Goblins game PCBs. I thought it was due to some timing problem in the aged hardware, which probably just got worse with temperature as the board got powered for longer time. However, this week I came across a video from an original PCB th...
Track & Field (beta)
This is the original button smasher: Track & Field. We have already seen a sequel to it: Hyper Sports, and we visit the original this week. This board was donated by Gyrrus about a year ago along other ones. He was worried it was taking too long to deliver the core, but it’s finally here. These things just take time....
Rastan Saga
Important note: Road Fighter, Konami’s Ping Pong and Hyper Sports are promoted to public releases today. For the other games in beta phase, you will need a new beta key (jtbeta-zip). The new key is attached to this post, copy to MiSTerFPGA’s games/mame folder. Do not unzip it.We come back to the 16-bit arcade world...
Konami's Ping Pong
Following on the Konami series of games before Contra, we have done an in-depth research on Konami’s Ping Pong (GX555). Super Crow provided us with an original PCB. We extracted the full schematics for it, measured the custom chips and wrote a custom firmware to execute on the board to test some assumptions. Please s...
Hyper Sports (1984)
As you may know, I’ve spent most of the week working on the NeoGeo Pocket core. I’ve been implementing the video subsystem before hooking it to the CPU. The CPU module is not complete yet but it’s good enough to try connecting it.There was also time to add support for Hyper Sports to the Road Fighter core. Althou...
Road Fighter Files
Find the Road Fighter beta files attached. Remember that you can get them easily by using the update_all script. They are also available in the #betafiles channel in our Discord server.
Road Fighter
Konami knew what made a great arcade: a short introduction, clear rules and fast gameplay. Road Fighter is a clear example of that recipe and it worked well in home ports too. The NES and MSX version are dearly remembered by many users.There’s an interesting technical quirk about this game. The game field is vertical...
Sly Spy & Boulder Dash 2
Sly SpyThis secret agent was due to visit us last week, but apparently he had a sabotage mission to do first! It took me four days of debugging to find out why the game wasn’t booting up. In the end, it was a single line missing. Once added, the game run without any need for more edits. That’s the world of digital ...
Research & Development
We spent the week purely on research & development activites. Esperanza got quite far with the Sly Spy schematics (see the attached file) and I implemented 15 more instructions in the NeoGeo Pocket CPU. The CPU has now about 80% of its instructions implemented. I think the CPU needs two more weeks, and then I can start...
