Charles MacDonald's MAME WIP News

[olaf]

Emu#dreams reports that Charles MacDonald has been working on support for new hardware in MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator. Below is a quotation of what he's posted on his homepage about his work-in-progress.

 

Great news to report. I've been running tests on the Namco NA-1 hardware over the last few days, and figured out how to dump the internal ROM of the M37702 MCU used in Super World Court.

 

The BIOS has a function where code can be copied from the 68000 side over to MCU RAM and executed, making it quite insecure. I wrote a program that copies a portion of the M37702 memory to shared RAM, and the 68000 can change and run the program in a loop to read any part of the MCU address space.

 

I think the same technique will work for other NA-1 games; at least what I've seen in MAME is that a number of them also upload code fragments for the MCU to use. For other types of Namco hardware that use the M37702, it's highly dependant on what services the MCU makes available.

 

Also, now that the BIOS can be examined and user code can be executed on the MCU side for testing, maybe the NA-1 sound hardware (integrated in the multiple purpose 219 chip) will get figured out. Though the existing simulation of the NA-1 sound hardware is remarkably good.

You can visit Charles MacDonald's homepage here.