we were emulating) and added support for the bankswitch mechanism used
by the final revision. nw.
(some work is still needed before promoting the two carts to working state)
which allows to launch SMS games in the gamegear driver, with video chip
in SMS mode. You can try this by launching
mess.exe gamegear -cart mgear -cart2 your_sms_game
(the -cart2 switch becomes available when you mount "mgear" in the main
gamegear cart slot) [Fabio Priuli]
out of the whatsnew: for the moment only fullpath loading is supported, and it is not
ensured to work 100%. thanks to Enik Land for pointing me to the necessary info.
cartridges and implemented the IntelliVoice expansion and
the Entertainment Computer System expansion as passthru
devices. The official syntax to launch games requiring the
speech expansion is now
mess intv -cart voice -cart2 gamename
which corresponds to mounting the IntelliVoice and plugging
the game cart in its subslot. The official syntax to launch games
requiring the ECS expansion is now instead
mess intv -cart ecs -cart2 gamename
and
mess intv -cart ecs -cart2 voice -cart3 gamename
if the game requires both expansions at once. For additional user
friendliness, we also offer intvecs (which emulates an Intellivision
unit with both expansions added) and intvoice (which emulates
an Intellivision with Intellivoice expansion added) drivers, where
games can simply be mounted with the -cart media switch. [Fabio
Priuli]
cartridges, removed The Voice add-on from the main system
and emulated it as a passthru cart instead. Now, if you want to
enjoy speech in odyssey/videopac games, you must launch
emulation with
mess.exe odyssey2 -cart voice -cart2 gamename
(the -cart2 switch becomes available when "voice" is mounted
in the first cartslot) [Fabio Priuli]
(off by default) to skip BIOS checks at boot. This allows the
recently dumped Rockman World Prototype to be played,
and the Rocket Games pirate GBC carts too. [Fabio Priuli]
(MESS) gba: added a configuration setting (off by default)
to skip some BIOS checks at boot. This allows Tyrian 2000
Prototype to be played. [Fabio Priuli]
out of whatsnew: for the Rocket Games pirates it is currently unclear how real carts were bypassing
the BIOS checks on a real unit, and it would be nice to emulate it properly. however, this trick allows
to go on fixing the rest of mapper emulation until it's fully understood.
their carts. this allows to remove on-cart RAM from the driver class (since it
does not belong there). also added (partial) support for Channel F multicart.
nw.
slot options. you now mount these with the -cart media switch,
i.e. for instance
mess.exe saturn -cdrm ddsom -cart ram32
or
mess.exe saturn -cdrm draculax -cart bram16
and not anymore using the -exp option. [Fabio Priuli]
out of whatsnew: this prevents users from passing conflicting setups like
"-exp ram32 -cart kof95", etc. these would have lead to unpredictable effects,
depending on the order of the option (and whether they were set at command
line or inside ini files)
cart slot, added correct keyboard to cpc+ machines (with Fn keys
in place of the keypad number keys), added cpc+ system carts to
the softlist and converted driver to use io_port array for keyboard
input reads. nw.
fix CIA interrupts getting lost in certain situations. This fixes the
EmuTOS keyboard and potentially more. Also fix a possible issue with
blitter delays.
a general workbench list and an application list for testing. Images in
those lists are either verified good or best available currently. Many
images are still missing.
homebrew. Also allowed bankswitch writes to get to the TIA for this and
mapper 3F. Finally, included a couple of demos in the softlist so to be
able to test the code in future. nw.
in the softlist. The official syntax to launch disk games is now
mess famicom -cart disksys -flop gamename
which corresponds to inserting the RAM expansion cart with
connected the disk drive into the cartslot and the desired disk
in the disk drive (exactly like you would have done with the
real thing). In this way, you cannot mount anymore both a cart and
a disk in the Family Computer (as in a real unit).
Users that cannot cope with this limitation and/or with the new
syntax can still use the famitwin driver (which offers both cart and
disk options) or the newly added driver fds which emulates a
famicom with the expansion always inserted: in both latter cases
the old syntax
mess famitwin -flop gamename
will launch the game, as previously. [Fabio Priuli]
(MESS) famicom: fixed disk system IRQ latch clear in Kaettekita
Mario Bros. based on investigations by FHorse. [Fabio Priuli]
Out of whatsnew: For the moment I gave up the original plan to
also modernize the floppy drive and the disk format. If anyone
wants to look into these, be my guest :-)
- Fixed YM2151 clock in XM expansion, thanks to info from
tep392 and GroovyBee
- Added support for homebrew boards MegaCart+ and
VersaBoard by CPUWIZ (ROM respectively up to 512K
and 256K + 32K of RAM)
- Misc cleanups
out of whatsnew: I have also added, for debugging purposes, a VersaBoard with SG 9banks + POKEY at 0x0450
in the hope to find out exactly what goes currently wrong in the emulation of some homebrew games... let's see...
and partially implemented the required mapper [Team Europe, Fabio Priuli]
after selecting a game, the CPU always points to the correct bank of the cart,
but some games don't work anyway (e.g. Duck Tales, PacMan, etc.)
I don't have time to further debug this, at the moment, so I leave it to whoever
wants to take a look
- Rewritten cart emulation to use slot devices (many
"mappers" do not fully work) and unified cart handling
among 8bit home computers, XEGS and Atari 5200
- Added support for loading carts with bankswitch to all XL/XE
models
- Added support for loading XEGS carts in Atari 8bits home
computers (XEGS instead will only load XEGS games until
support for the keyboard add-on is included)
- Big clean up of the driver, simplifying memory map, removing
writes to ROM, etc.
- Changed NOT_WORKING flag to IMPERFECT_GRAPHICS
in 600XL, 65XE, 800XE and XEGS since they should now be
working to the same extent of the 800XL, and bugs shall be
reported.
as a consequence of the above changes, the new softlists a800.xml, a5200.xml
and xegs.xml are not compatible anymore with 0.154: keep the old xmls until
0.155 if you don't compile your own exe
expansion board, thanks to info from tep392. nw.
Also removed from the softlist the Donkey Kong XM Enhanced
version which had been hacked to work on ProSystem emulator
and fails to save hiscores with correct HSC emulation
(it remains available the correct version which saves fine both
in MESS and in the real hardware).
- Rewritten cart emulation to use slot devices
- Removed POKEY chip from the main unit since it was inside
the carts (of course it gets enabled when you launch a game
who contained it in its cart)
- Added support for the High Score cart as a passthru cart: when
you mount hiscore, a -cart2 switch will become available to mount
the game you want to play
- Properly implemented XBoarD and XM expansions as
passthru carts as well, so that new syntax to run dkxm.a78 is
"mess a7800 -cart xm -cart2 path\to\games\dkxm.a78"
High Score support for XM shall work as well.
- Big clean up of the driver, simplifying memory map, removing
writes to ROM, etc.
Out of whatsnew: In conclusion, a7800.c has been brought into the new millennium ;-)
the implementation and removed Supercharger tapes from the main system.
The -cass media switch (to load the tape file) will become available only
when you mount the Supercharger cart. [Fabio Priuli]
Update neogeo.xml to take advantage of them.
For regular rom loading we try to autodetect the appropriate endianness and
width by matching the region tag to a device with a device_memory_interface;
this is generally not doable for software lists because the regions are
children of some slot device and thus not siblings of the devices in the root
driver (i.e. "cartslot1:maincpu" rather than "maincpu") So you have to
specify the width and endianness manually for now.
Anyone who has spare time, feel welcome to byteswap every single entry
in megadriv.xml and update them to use this :-)
Message that was posted to me
"Hi David
It was to my great disappointment that your work on the NeoGeo Multislot (Dec 2013) was not included in MAME. To aid the process I've taken your work and spent some hours addressing the concerns put forward by the developers. The code I'm sending to you converts Neo Geo to fully use slot devices for the cartridges and implements the multi-slot using techniques that have greater likelihood of being met with approval.
In some places the slot trampolines caused performance to drop below 100% so I've used methods to avoid them gathered by the study of other slot devices in MESS. Performance is the same as it was prior to this update.
I first sent this with the forms on the official site but received no reply so I'm turning to you directly.
(filehost link removed)
Credit to yourself and 'S. Smith'
"
(and Suikoden - Tenmei no Chikai) can be considered as working. Also fixed wrong
battery size for Aoki Ookami to Shiroki Mejika - Genchou Hishi in xml, which was causing
a "Memory Over" error message ingame. [Fabio Priuli]
out of whatsnew: apparently the current WRAM mirroring (based on nesdev wiki notes)
causes glitches in some of these games. I hope to improve this soonish.
