I said I planned on giving a status update, and here I am delivering! First of all, look over to the sidebar, where you’ll notice there’s now a donate link. All the money for that will be split between austere and I, where it will be used for UberMAME related purposes ONLY. This means we’ll use it to buy EEPROMs for on-board testing, EEPROM programmers to write the EEPROMs, PCBs, supergun materials, etc. Your donation makes the bit of difference! But please note, these donations will not be going towards a decap of the COPX on Raiden II. The reason for this is that we (along with MAMEdev) have determined that it is most likely a Programmable Logic Device, and decapping would do nothing. The only thing similar that would be effective is a layer-by-layer stripping, which is extremely expensive (think 10000USD…) and just out of the question for us.
Ok, now onto driver developments so far! I’m sure we’ve all at least attempted to run Raiden II in MAME at least once, just to find it utterly broken and unplayable. Thanks to our hard work (and a little bit of assistance from good ol’ R. Belmont for the sound) we now have it looking prettier than ever, and with sound emulation! The now functioning portions that were broken before are:
- Sound emulation (Thanks RB for finding the error!)
- Background, Midground, Foreground, and Text layer scrolling
- Layer disable
- Several portions of the COPX-D2 instruction handling
- Several other portions of the COPX-D2 emulation
- Credits (although still slightly broken. You need to insert 2 credits for every 1)
- Background, Midground, and Foreground banking are all slightly fixed (intro looks nice!)
- Collision detection (barely noticeable, but it is there!)
- Probably some other stuff I forgot
- Unfortunately, actual gameplay is not on this list. Enemies still don’t appear
Some other stuff we’ve been working on is a trojaner for the COPX-D2 that needs to be loaded onto a real PCB for testing the real functionality of the COPX-D2 (it has been added to the UberMAME builds as seicop, it’s a child of Raiden II, only requiring a code.bin with the trojan placed there)
I think that’s all to say for now. Oh yeah, both austere and I have acquired PCBs for Raiden II, so we’ll both be able to do testing of our progress. So… Have a wonderful day!
EDIT: austere says he’s rich enough already, and that I can take all of it. Still, it will be used exclusively for UberMAME purposes, nothing else!
