12/29/2002: |
Whew! Back from Christmas holidays with the family, and looking forward to the new year.
Some exciting developments have been brewing, so the coming year should be an interesting one.
Hopefully I'll be back on New Year's with another update, including at least one New Year's
Resolution related to the site and the frequency with which I update certain sections of it. :-)
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12/16/2002: |
Well, the holidays are fast approaching, and this means little time leftover for
MAME
work. I am excited that a new Bally/Sente prototype turned up, so there's a slim chance I may
get that working before the end of the year. But the thing I'm most excited about is
this little news
story. If you're a fan of the adventure games released by
my previous employer, you should definitely
check it out!
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12/8/2002: |
You can see some of the good stuff I've been working on over at the
MAME WIP Page. And yes, Killer Instinct
is hella slow. What do you want, it runs on a 100MHz CPU! However, I should point out
that none of the new games has anything to do with my mystery pictures, sorry gregf!
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12/4/2002: |
Time to talk about somebody else's site for a change. If you haven't been there recently,
check out System 16: The Arcade Museum, which has just
had a big update. Toby runs a great site over there with lots of good and accurate information.
For this update, he added a Bally/Midway/Sente/Williams
section, which, if you look at my driver list, you'll see is near
and dear to my heart. So what are you waiting for? Check it out!
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12/2/2002: |
Rats! I really hate it when the sound subsystem is required to
work before the game will boot. Fortunately, it's the same sound system as War Gods, so
I guess I'll have to finish that one off first. Oh, and here's a little
something for you doubters out there (I mean, come on, what else would a 3DF/X test mean?).
I really want to have the slowest MAME driver, and was very disappointed to
see that Phil's Prop Cycle driver won this round. ;-)
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11/28/2002: |
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it! Hmmm, I wonder what this
could be....
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11/23/2002: |
Another new section comes to life. The new FAQ area is designed to
answer the most common questions I receive on email. Just a couple of (long-winded) answers there
so far, but I'll add questions as they come in. In emulation news, I'm putting off working on
the really slow drivers until my new computer arrives, hopefully in the next week or two. When
given the choice of debugging War Gods at 933MHz now or at 3GHz in just a couple weeks,
the decision is pretty clear. :-)
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11/16/2002: |
Due to the amount of email I receive, most of which goes instantly into the trash, there
is now a proper form-based email page that spells out explicitly the
types of questions and requests I will not waste my time on.
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11/11/2002: |
Call off the hounds. I managed to track down an Off Road Challenge PCB! Plus,
War Gods showed up this weekend, so I've got my hands full for the moment. :-)
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11/08/2002: |
Another new feature! The Atari GALlery is a collection of
JEDEC files that can be used to replace bad GALs on many Atari PCBs. It's just getting started,
but I hope to have most Atari PCBs covered by the time I'm through.
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11/06/2002: |
And you thought it would never happen! Yep, a new section in my
MAME Memories page. I promise I'll try to update that a little more frequently in the future!
A new feature this time around is actual quotes from the original posts I made to the MAME list
back in 1997. I even went back and added one to the previous part, just for fun.
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11/05/2002: |
Well, a new month means my bandwidth belt-tightening is over. In the meantime I've been
trying to get Driver's Edge up and running but it is baffling me at the moment. I've
also been playing with the CAGE audio system (used in Primal Rage and T-Mek),
and it too is causing me troubles. I'm suspecting there is another bug in the TMS32031 core
that's causing both of these to misbehave; we'll see. In other news, I've managed to track
down a War Gods PCB, but still no luck getting ahold of Off Road Challenge.
Again, please stay on the lookout for one. Finally, a very nice MAME contributer has offered
to send me his Ultimate Tennis PCB, which will hopefully be instrumental in figuring
out the graphics system used in the Art & Magic games.
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10/30/2002: |
Been busy recently, as you might
have noticed. Man it's nice to get these games off my plate! I'm still looking for
one more game that runs on the V-unit-style hardware, and that is Offroad Challenge.
If anyone can help me track down a PCB for that game, please let me know.
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10/25/2002: |
Finally tracked down the biggest bug haunting Cruis'n USA, and the game is now
playable! There's just a few small rounding errors to track down yet. After that, some time
for some optimization and adding the sounds and it should be good to go. :-)
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10/16/2002: |
Well, thanks to the friendly people over at MAMEFans,
I now have some more temporary bandwidth for pictures. I've put them on their own pages.
So check out the Cruis'n USA WIP and the
Cruis'n World WIP.
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10/14/2002: |
Wow, oops, sorry guys, you went way over my transfer limit. Hope it doesn't cost me
too much. The WIP page is image-less for the moment!
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10/13/2002: |
You might want to check my WIP page. It's still very
early, but I like to have tangible results. :-)
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10/9/2002: |
Well, it's a start.... Not too bad considering it's a
brand new CPU core with lots of stuff still to implement and debug. Hooking up interrupts
is the next step.
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10/6/2002: |
Went through the site today and converted it to be non-framed, using some PHP to
incorporate common elements. This means most of the icky Javascript hacks are gone and
direct-link URLs work much better now. :-) I've also made a few updates to the various
pages along the way, so it might be worth your while to browse through the site again
if you're curious about things I might be up to! Also, let me know if I broke any links
or screwed up any pages.
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10/4/2002: |
Well, I submitted the driver for the polygon games. They're not all perfect, but
both Race Drivin' and Steel Talons are fully playable now, and MAME 0.62
is coming soon, so it was time. I still have to wire up the sound in Hard Drivin's
Airborne and fix some glitches there, but even that game is playable. There were
three other games that I know of that ran on the same hardware. If anyone has leads on
where I can dig them up, please contact me. The games are: Hard Drivin' Panorama
(basically a 3-screen version of Hard Drivin'), BMX Heat (a cycle game),
and Police Trainer (NOT the shooting game).
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9/24/2002: |
Two more weeks have passed, so I decided to give an update on the state of the
Atari Polygon games. That's all for now!
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9/12/2002: |
Whoa, another update! Well, just a small one. Updated my
MAME log and MAME to do pages, and added a small update
to my Slapstic FAQ, with information on a newly-discovered chip.
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9/10/2002: |
Ack, over a month gone again! We finally polished off
Virtual PC for Windows 5.0
at the end of July, and I've been taking it easy since then. Of course, I'm still
working on my secret side project, but in the meantime, I've had a chance to look
back at the early Atari polygon games and have finally made some good progress.
Check out the Atari Polygon WIP Page to see for yourself!
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7/20/2002: |
I've been meaning to do this since I first got my page up! Back when I was
working at LucasArts,
I went back and filled in two "holes" in the Mac lineup — games that had been
released for the PC before I got there, but which nobody had any plans to port
to the Mac. Well, I had other ideas. Those two games ended up being my two
favorite LucasArts games: Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the
Road. Apparently, there were other Mac fans of Sam & Max because shortly
after we released it, sales came to me with this piece
of fan art, which was sent in with an order. I've had it up on my office
walls ever since, and thought it would be amusing to share it with everyone. :-)
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7/09/2002: |
Well, it's been quite a while! Since finishing up the artwork support for
MAME 0.61, I've been
taking a bit of a MAME break. Apart from keeping busy with
real work, I have been busy
with another side project that will hopefully see the light of day in the
not-too-distant future. This also means no new updates to the
MAME Memories page. But, if you're in the mood
for hearing about classic game development, I highly recommend you head on over
to The International House of
Mojo, where you can read the
Wilmunder Memoirs, written by Aric Wilmunder, one of my coworkers from the
LucasArts days. Aric was
there in the early days, back when it was called LucasFilm Games, and was one of
the original programmers of the SCUMM adventure game system.
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6/05/2002: |
Added some more cool snapshots of the new
artwork system in action. |
5/25/2002: |
Another month, another lack of updates. Still a lot going on at work,
and the rest of my spare time has been spent adding generic artwork support
to the MAME core (and cleaning up a bunch of stuff in the process). The
number of bugs is finally going down, so it has been officially crossed
off my To-do list. You can check out some
snapshots here. Some exciting stuff is
happening in the near future, not all of it MAME-related, so keep checking
back every once and while and you might learn something new. My
MAME log page is updated for May. |
4/29/2002: |
Sorry, folks, work has picked up its pace a bit, and I haven't had any
large blocks of time to work on major projects like the CoJag driver or this
site. In the meantime, I've been tweaking some things, fixing a few bugs.
I've also been working on the new artwork handling system, which will
hopefully be ready in time for MAME 0.61. Updates to my usual pages:
MAME log and
MAME To-do list. |
3/31/2002: |
Added a new entry to the MAME Memories
page. Happy Easter (if that's something you celebrate!) |
3/30/2002: |
Some good things have been happening recently. As you might have heard,
the ROMset for Midway's prototype Judge Dredd showed up, and with
some effort, I was able to plug it into the T-unit driver. It runs on
hardware very similar to NBA Jam. Check out the
MAME WIP Page
for screenshots. Also, I finally fixed the missing shadows bug in the
Mortal Kombat II/III — one more thing off my
To Do List. |
3/19/2002: |
Updated a couple of pictures on my WIP page
to have proper colors. Man, those have been bugging me for years! I've made
a little bit of progress on getting Primal Rage working better, and
have been converting all the old Atari drivers I did to use tilemaps. One
side effect of this is that I've been trying to figure out ways of fixing
sprite/background priorities. To do this, I need to write special code to run
on the original PCBs. Fortunately, I own working boards of most of the Atari
games in question. Unfortunately, I don't have a working ThunderJaws or
Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters (found!).
So if you've got these, and would be willing to help out by burning some custom
game ROMs to run on your board, please
contact me. Thanks. |
3/11/2002: |
Wow, you guys can really suck bandwidth! I've removed a number of pictures
from the WIP page in the hopes of keeping under my monthly limit. If things
continue to go badly, I will have to remove more.... |
3/8/2002: |
Whew! Just scraped in an update before a whole month went by! Been keeping
my head down doing fun and interesting things. Check out my new and improved
MAME WIP Page to see all the fun and exciting
drivers I have in progress (note that some of them have been in progress for
years, so don't get too excited!) |
2/10/2002: |
A couple new interesting games showed up that were worth taking a look at.
First was Rapid Fire, which is another TMS34010 game. Since there are
relatively few TMS34010 games out there, it's interesting to tackle a new one.
The second is Police Trainer, which I recently discovered ran on an R3000.
Since I had been working on an R3000 core for other "secret" games, I figured
it was a good chance to put it through its paces. Just a couple of small updates
this time, to my MAME log and
MAME To-do list |
1/25/2002: |
I did it! At last, a new entry on the MAME
Memories page! I'm also happy to report that I've added a new prototype
Majoc Havoc prototype called Alpha One to MAME. This version of
the game ran on only one processor, and has some notable differences. Check
out The World of Owen Rubin
for more information ... and also for a great read in general! |
1/18/2002: |
Well, I added a new feature to the site: Fun Facts.
It's just a random collection of things I've come across or thought of. I've
been getting a lot of requests to add more to the MAME
Memories page, so I will try to make an effort to write a new chapter in the
saga over the next few weeks. Finally, a few Mac users have complained about not
being able to download some of my Old Mac Software,
due to there being spaces in the names. So I have removed them. Plus the usual
updates to the MAME log and
MAME To-do list. That's it for now! |