Author Topic: dink's FBN Development & Fixes thread  (Read 761492 times)

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1200 on: December 22, 2016, 07:09:08 PM »
FireShark, Teki Paki and Vimana's MCU has been finally dumped - here's a nice little blog on how it was done: http://caps0ff.blogspot.com/

So far I hooked it up in FireShark and removed the samples hack :)  Others shall follow shortly.
tip to emucoders: the FireShark MCU is a Hitachi HD647180, with is basically a Z180 processor with rom+ram.  The code in this MCU is 100% Z80 code, though, and will work fine with any Z80 core. It doesn't use any Z180 extensions (opcode or peripheral). Big thanks to gamezfan for testing this before I went ahead with the code in FBA :)  I suppose they used this chip because of its ability to protect the internally programmed rom from being read or dumped.  Its a good time for emulation, we got some really awesome games in the past couple years - Wing Force, Hammer Away (amongst many others), and now a Toaplan mcu's finally dumped - I thought I'd never see the day :)

best regards,
- dink

Offline synnchan

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1201 on: December 23, 2016, 01:30:24 PM »
Awesome news about the Toaplan stuff! Now we can finally listen to the music while playing those great shooters. :)

Offline barbudreadmon

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1202 on: December 26, 2016, 01:41:55 AM »
While speaking about samples being removed, any hope to see mario with full sound support ?

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1203 on: December 26, 2016, 09:26:06 AM »
I wish it was as simple as removing samples :)
The 3 toaplan games mentioned (fireshark, tekipaki, vimana) were written to the mcu chip with the protection bit set, that means you can program the chip and the chip can execute the program, but you can't read out the data externally for an anti-copy/bootlegging measure.  The chip itself is a beefed up z80(really z180) with ram & rom.  Recently the chip was decapped (caps0ff.blogspot.com) and the protection bit was erased so the program code could be read out.  It took under an hour to get all 3 games up and running with the new soundcpu code, because the drivers themselves were very similar to other toaplan drivers of the era.

On the other hand, Mario uses discrete / analog circuitry to generate its sounds.  Mame has discrete and now netlist emulation, which allows for emulation of such analog circuitry.  Even the simplest discrete and netlist stuff won't run on my mighty 3ghz p4 computer, so emulating it on the more compact devices such as the rpi is probably out of the question.  On top of that, it would probably take a week and a half to graft such code into fbalpha for mario..  On the bright side, if you want to, you can sample mame or a real circuit board and add more samples to the game that are missing, using one of the first versions of mame as a guideline for the memory addresses where the samples are triggered. 
The first versions of mame played the game fine with all the samples, but they were recorded so badly (hiss+static) they were removed over the years, then finally replaced with netlist or discrete.  but thats a good starting point if you wanted to do such a thing.

best regards,
- dink

Offline Arcadez

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1204 on: December 26, 2016, 10:32:57 AM »
On the other hand, Mario uses discrete / analog circuitry to generate its sounds.  Mame has discrete and now netlist emulation, which allows for emulation of such analog circuitry.  Even the simplest discrete and netlist stuff won't run on my mighty 3ghz p4 computer, so emulating it on the more compact devices such as the rpi is probably out of the question..

Just a heads up i've just noticed that in older MAME builds Mario Bros has full sound by way of a Dac/Samples combo the discrete sound was only added from this build onwards.....

Quote
- 0.122u5: Mario driver improvements [Couriersud]: Discrete sound. Hooked up Z80DMA. Combined memory maps. Statics in mario_state struct. Fixed save state issues. Combine sh_* writes into one routine. Replaced Samples/DAC sound with Discrete.

Maybe an older Mario driver and Mario Audio could be ported and hooked up to the Dac sound core in FBA..?? Anyway failing that there's always the Masio Bros Bootleg which has full sound already.

« Last Edit: December 26, 2016, 10:37:16 AM by gamez fan »

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1205 on: December 27, 2016, 11:24:09 PM »
Caps0ff did it again, this time it was even more near-impossible-er than last time.  http://caps0ff.blogspot.com

Tatakae! Big Fighter / SkyRobo protection MCU dumped, making the games finally playable.  As soon as I got the new mcu code I was quite eager to get this in FBAlpha and play it in my favorite emulator as quickly as possible :)

Big Fighter starts out like more of a traditional shooter, whereas SkyRobo is a little harder and you need to be in your robot form right away at the beginning (kinda..).  Screencaps tell it best:
« Last Edit: December 27, 2016, 11:27:07 PM by dink »

Offline Arcadez

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1206 on: December 28, 2016, 05:35:10 PM »
Good Stuff!!!

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1207 on: January 02, 2017, 12:22:33 AM »
quick and dirty new FBA stuff & happenings for the past few days:
1: ported new i8051/i8751/ds5002fp core
2: hooked up heavy barrel's protection mcu with the above
3: iq_132 added Hangzo (!!!)
4: fixed some bugs in bigfighter/skyrobo emulation, which took me nearly forever.
5: iq_132 ported wrally, I helped hook up the ds5002fp.  there's still a quite bit left to be done before it's playable.
6: fixed crashyness/corruption when loading a game with missing roms.  this possibly won't affect you guys, just dev's who don't want to rescan their romsets each day when something is added or changed to the rom database.  basically it goes like this: precautions have been made to never try to exit/uninit a cpu or sound core which hasn't been initted in the first place.
7: added a hidden option in config/fba*.ini, "bSkipStartupCheck".  For devs or people who don't ever want to scan their romsets and just have the selection dialog show all roms available/unavailable.  This gets rid of that auto-romscan at startup.

best regards, bye for now and happy new year!
- dink

Offline Gab75

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1208 on: January 02, 2017, 01:06:05 AM »
The Devs' Team never goes on holiday! ;)
Happy new year to you and to the other devs, administrators and users! :)

Offline KaaMoS

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1209 on: January 02, 2017, 08:36:37 AM »
Thanks for the great news!
It seems to be that the word "tired" isn't in your dictionary!! (^_^)'

Have a happy new year, dear friends!!

Offline furiadeoso

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1210 on: January 05, 2017, 07:58:05 PM »
Have a happy new year!

When will be released the new version?. I'm excited!

Offline furiadeoso

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1211 on: January 06, 2017, 06:04:54 AM »
Another matter. Can you give me a beta version, so we could test kaillera online netplay? We have a 40 members arcade online players team. Thanks!

Offline Arcadez

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1212 on: January 07, 2017, 05:42:05 PM »
quick and dirty new FBA stuff & happenings for the past few days:
1: ported new i8051/i8751/ds5002fp core
2: hooked up heavy barrel's protection mcu with the above
3: iq_132 added Hangzo (!!!)
4: fixed some bugs in bigfighter/skyrobo emulation, which took me nearly forever.
5: iq_132 ported wrally, I helped hook up the ds5002fp.  there's still a quite bit left to be done before it's playable.


best regards, bye for now and happy new year!
- dink

Alotta graft in those 5 code changes above thanks guys for taking the time to work on it Cheers!!!

Offline dink

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1213 on: January 13, 2017, 12:22:31 AM »
Yesterday when I posted the news(vid) about Asura Buster, the problem was only halfway solved. So... I bring good news:

The horrible and fameous (or horribly fameous) fbalpha-68x020 bug has been squashed.  big thanks to iq_132 and myself for doing some amazingly awesome teamwork!  This time it took 4 days of intense research and data logging, and a couple late nite coding sessions.  If you add up all the other failed attempts over the past years at killing this bug, it probably adds up to a couple of weeks work total.  So - you can see why iq_132 and dink are beyond insanely happy and relieved to finally put a close on it. (yay!)

Since Asura Buster no longer freezes up at the jello-tentacle boss, I thought it would be worthwhile to fix the other small bugs
in this driver.  (This includes Asura Blade, too)
. Music is now properly synchronized to the attract mode (and other things),
. Sprite and tile glitches are fixed.

Now I think it's as good as it possibly can get :)

best regards,
- dink

Offline furiadeoso

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Re: dink's FBA Development & Fixes thread
« Reply #1214 on: January 13, 2017, 03:23:26 AM »
You are great! :biggrin: