Raiden II Project Team
YOUR MISSIONS!

I’ve just acquired another PCB on behalf of the project. I’m currently in Hong Kong and I’m trying to get time in a “chip characterisation laboratory”. I have confirmed that I can get help decapping some of the chips. More news to come.

I’ve been playing around with Raiden II some more, and I have come to a startling conclusion: support for Raiden II has regressed. That’s right, the Raiden II driver is currently less functional than it was earlier in the project. It’s still more functional than it was in MAME when we started this project, but it’s quite a good deal worse than it used to be. I have a hunch that the issue is when we re-based to MAME 136, but I need to examine further. I will update this post as I learn more.

UPDATE: I have checked, and the issue is indeed the re-base to 136. I’ll examine the actual diff and attempt to understand where the issue occurred.

Lately I’ve been working on our trojan for the Raiden II board. Support for the trojan is in the latest UberMAME commits, under the name seicop. That name comes from what it does, it probes the SEIbu COPx-d2. It’s not specifically different from the Raiden II driver, the only change is how it handles the loading of the program ROMs (on Raiden II it has 2 interlaced ROMs. By interlaced, I mean, one ROM has the even bytes, the other has the odd bytes. The seicop driver merely changes this to be a single ROM with no modification.). Also, somewhat interesting to note, it appears MAME doesn’t fully reset the system, as the trojan currently keeps its state completely intact after hitting reset. Well, aside from the state of the sound CPU. Anyways, I’m a bit off topic, back to stuff about the trojan. The name of the trojan is COPper (interpret that either as the metal copper, or a policeman copper, but make sure you pronounce it like that!) and is written completely in V30 assembler (V30 is just NECs take on the 8086, nothing really of note there) and the code currently takes a mere 301 bytes! At present it contains a full setup for 12 different modes of operation, with 3 of them currently defined.

We have mode 1 for Memory Viewing. It allows you to view the first 0×20000 bytes in a nice easy format. Mode 2 is for Memory Writing. It will support writing an arbitrary amount of data in sequence, for things that require quick multiple modifications. As you could probably tell, mode 2 isn’t done yet. Mode 3 is a BGM music box (it’s actually mapped to the last mode, mode 12) that plays all the games background music (actually, if you replace the sound data, you can get your own music, but they have to have the same music indices).

This trojan should eventually be able to test most, if not all, the features of the Raiden II board. Specifically the COPX-D2, but it will probably test other parts too.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc., please post a comment, and we’ll get back to you ASAP

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!