Heihachi_73

The only problem with electric cars is that they arrived a hundred years too late, the oil industry made sure they couldn't compete since the early 20th century and now they are only just becoming popular again.

Bump.

 

The MK6 games since been added to MAME along with the older MK5 games, and should be in the regular MAME torrents these days. MK6 doesn't work at all in MAME (POST screen only) and MK5 is preliminary, runs way too fast, has bad sound (on games where it even works at all) and most games hang after a while. There are a number of bad dumps in both MK5 and MK6, these will not boot at all. If anyone knows anything about emulating the Acorn Archimedes A3000 computer we need your help, as the MK5 is basically identical!

 

You can only run the NSW games in mk6emu, all other regions (e.g. USA) do not work due to differences in hardware/firmware. Some games might need their ROM extensions renamed to *.000, *.001 etc. as mk6emu is picky with the extensions and doesn't support the IC numbers used on storage expansion board (u21/u11 etc.)

u86 = u21 = 000

u73 = u11 = 001

u85 = u22 = 002

u72 = u12 = 003

u84 = u23 = 004

u71 = u13 = 005

u83 = u24 = 006 (note: u83 and u70 are only ever used for system chips on a real board*)

u70 = u14 = 007

u25 = 008

u15 = 009

u26 = 010

u16 = 011

u27 = 012

u17 = 013 (you need a storage expansion board to play larger games in a real MK6 machine, these support up to 14 game chips)

 

* As of MAME 0.187, there are a few 8-chip games which have wrong extensions (they should be u2x/u1x instead of u8x/u7x). This mainly affects Outback Jack and the Player's Choice games (the other game is Eagle Strike, which is USA platform and not playable in mk6emu). This was an oversight at the time and will be fixed ASAP, however for mk6emu they will still need to be renamed to *.000 etc.

 

There are still two "emulated" games which are not actually dumped at all, these are Atlantis and Orchid Magic, which were both standalone 32-bit Windows programs and not ROMs. The other two games originally released with those games, 50 Lions and Indian Dreaming (Cash Express), have been dumped and are 50lions and indremce respectively in MAME, these two are playable in mk6emu so the original standalone versions of these are redundant.

 

Lastly, a number of newer NSW games (mostly 2006+ with the newer style interface) do not run at all in mk6emu, or they hang when you get a big win with the coin animation (e.g. Lucky 88), this is because the emulated system (base) firmware is too old for these games; these games don't work on a real board with old system chips either. The emulator is from circa 2004 which is also why it only works properly under Windows XP and requires compatibility mode or a VM to be playable on anything newer (even in compatibility mode the sound has a slight lag).

Not dead, just nothing newsworthy to post, at least for the MK5 hardware. I think just about everyone has moved on, owing to the lack of support from people who could probably get these games running in mere minutes but don't want to since they're nasty old gambling games, not Sega NAOMI, MESS drivers or anything else that seems to be the current trend in the scene. Granted, there has been an absolute ton of work put into emulating PC compatibles and game consoles this year, despite MESS being years behind the world with that, at least they're doing it the right way instead of hacking the emulator to work with games like other emulators tend to do (Nintendo 64 and PlayStation for example).

 

In other news, Caribbean Gold (as in, Caribbean Gold "1") has been dumped and will be in the next major MAME release. Preliminary work for now, needs a bit of fiddling to get in-game, although it does work once it's set up and a Logic Door error is cleared (this is tied in with the coin input, so somewhere along the line this was changed compared to other games). A couple of its graphics ROMs have been donated to Caribbean Gold 2 as well, so this game should look a lot better than a garbled mess that it currently is now. Unfortunately, the PROM chip could not be read, so the palette (basically just the background colour) isn't correct until it can be dumped. Once the game is officially in MAME, one of our good friends will probably get it sorted in no time. Messing with one of the HOPCO2 inputs seems to insert 4 credits (US $1 banknote), which also doesn't happen on any other game.

 

Nash: If it ends up acquired and dumped, it will be in MAME, however the MK5 hardware is not fully emulated at this point (also noticed your post on NLG a while ago) so don't get your hopes up for a working version of this game. Personally, I have never seen a MK5 video poker (or MK6 for that matter), only MK2.5/MK4 '540' poker and VLC Winning Touch poker games, so it would be an interesting find if one did turn up.

Small MAME MK6 update: 50lions and 50lionsa sets are now swapped, and Crystal Springs is now correctly named; 'cristals' changed to 'crystals'. These changes will take effect in the upcoming release (146u4 or 147, whichever is next). All internal names have been changed to game_id.location (e.g. all files look like 12345678.u90, which will match the ID numbers on each label).

It doesn't work like that, there aren't specific shared ROMs like you'd find on old arcade boards (or MK2.5/MKIV). Each game basically uses the EPROMs like a flash drive as opposed to using a bunch of chips for every single part. The only way to fix that set would be to redump the bad EPROM from another identical set - in this case, it has to be U72 from the set labelled 30127721, no other EPROM will work, even if it's from the same game but a different region or set (this is also true for MK5 dumps).