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A few more games powered by the TMP91C640 CPU now work, like the much requested Mahjong Tenkaigen:
These screenshots are actually from one of several bootlegs that where dumped, the original is protected and does not work yet.
Another one running on pretty much the same hardware, dynax.c, is Mahjong Reach:
This is a bootleg as well, and the only dumped version.
I've emulated the TMP90C840/TMP91C640 microcontrollers, some of the few CPU's still unsupported in MAME. They belong to
the TLCS-90 family, introduced by Toshiba
in the early nineties, the ancestor of the TLCS-900 that powers the Neo Geo Pocket.
This 8-bit CPU is essentially a Z80 on steroids: different binary encoding, 20 bit address bus, more opcodes
and addressing modes, interrupt controller, 6 timers, A/D conversion, serial interface, 53 I/O lines,
48 internal registers plus optional internal RAM and ROM:
Now for the games:
a TMP90C841 (ROM-less '840), with external program rom, drives the music in Rapid Hero:
which is no longer silent.
The TMP91C640 was used in a number of Dynax mahjong games of that era, like Mahjong If (1990) ..
.. and Mahjong Tensinhai (1995):
There are a couple more mahjong games for which the internal rom has been dumped, through an expensive adapter,
that I'm now working on, as well as a few bugs to fix before I'm done with this.
I've been working on this 1999 korean quiz game from Andamiro.
It runs on their own hardware platform named Midas:
In reality, the board is a reengineered Neo-Geo, with a few differences: no Z80, better
sound chip, serial eeprom and 256 color tiles. Plus a PIC12C508A microcontroller, probably for the protection checks (I've patched them out for now).
P.S. I'm on holidays for a few weeks.
I've added Janputer '96 to the royalmah.c driver:
In the same driver I've fixed the interrupts mechanism in Watashiha Suzumechan, so that it's now playable (you could not coin up before):
Finally, I've added Mahjong X-Tal 7 / Mahjong Diamond 7 to the dynax.c driver:
A 1996 game for kids, by taiwanese Subsino. It's similar to Monkey Mole Panic or The First Funky Fighter, where you have to bang on six buttons like mad.
It runs on the good old seta.c driver, with additional protection that was preventing it to boot in Mame before.
- Lord of Gun (preliminary)
I've rewritten the skeleton driver in Mame (showing a black screen) for this 1994 light guns game by IGS.
It was already decrypted but hitting the protection.
That was easy to circumvent, so I could concentrate on the rest of the hardware:
Z80 + oki + fm for sound, eeprom, light guns, inputs through 2 x 8255, 4 tilemaps, sprites, line scroll.
At the moment priorities are all wrong. They should work somewhat similarly to those in the igs_blit.c driver, in that there is some priority ram filled with layers indexes.
Only, this time there are 64k of values with two indexes per word.
Elsemi, master of the later IGS games,
among many other things, points out there is at least another game running on this hardware, Huang Fei Hong,
of which a partial dump exists (without graphics roms). So I may look at that one next.
I've added a 1994 arm wrestling game to the cischeat.c driver.
It's Jaleco's Arm Champs II, a dedicated machine with a real mechanical arm to
battle against:
This kind of games are Jaleco's specialty (see the hilarious Scud Hammer) and not quite the same in MAME.
A prequel also exists, but it's a most wanted rom.
Then there's this game from korean Afega, that I've added as non working to the afega.c driver.
Only the attract mode works, while playing you are invisible and off screen (last screenshot):
(Haze correctly points out this must be a bootleg of US AAF Mustang, which is also protected and not working).
Finally, a couple of Dynax mahjong games added to ddenlovr.c for good measure.
They are Mahjong The Dai Chuuka Ken ..
.. and Mahjong The Mysterious World:
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