Hang-On / Alien Sector
The JTTHUNDR core -Rolling Thunder- had the potential to run one more game: Alien Sector. But it had some GFX problems. I spent a couple of days on it, but the game software seemed to be expecting something else from the hardware. I assumed that the game was not very popular and moved on. But you never know with arcade games. Some games are so popular that everyone either wants them or at least likes them. Then there are a lot of lesser-known titles that have a public of their own.
In this case, Marc Emmerson came along and found the couple of pieces that needed a bit of tweaking. Alien Sector is now playable with just a small GFX glitch at the title screen.
We continue with more core expansion: JTHARIER -Space Harrier- receives Hang-On this week, courtesy of Chris Watson.
Some maintenance work (contributors' nicknames in parentheses):
Revisited the Thunder Hoop crash at level 4, finally fixing it for good. This showed a discrepancy between the expected CPU speed and the real one that we were achieving. Leaving the technical bits aside, this is now tuned much more tightly, and multiple games that are sensitive to this operate correctly. However, CPS2's SSF2X is still running a bit too fast. The CPU is now completely discarded as the culprit, and we need to look at other parts of the system next.
The Pac-Land GFX layer priority problem that appears intermittently is fixed too (by Asturur).
PacMania aspect ratio changed to 5:4 instead of 4:3 so PacMan looks round
Roc'n Rope and Gal's Panic now support screen flipping (by Asturur). This work included reporting a missing DIP switch to the MAME team.
The scan doubler got broken a while back. It has been restored for all cores.
Gradius 3: game speed and GFX glitches fixed (by niknakniknak).
GunSmoke and other CAPCOM games had the volume so high that even the minimum setting was too loud when playing with earphones on an Analogue Pocket. The volume has been taken down a bit.
Combat School FM/PSG sound balance was wrong, and it is accurate now. The PCM relative volume has been increased too.
Run'n Gun and other Konami games had left/right stereo output swapped
A lot of games that have action buttons for left and right, like attack left or attack right, have been modified to have a default gamepad mapping that makes more sense. Now the Y button maps to left actions and the A button to right actions. X and B are used for other actions. Turn left/right is now mapped by default to the left/right shoulder buttons. This affects 16 original titles in total such as Double Dragon 2, Renegade, etc. The default mapping is changed both for MiSTer and Pocket.
As more people are contributing to the repository now, the core team has been doing more review and test work. I have also kept fluent communication with the new contributors, including some whose work has not been merged into the project yet. Because of this, I made the files required to compile for the Analogue Pocket part of the public repository, instead of being accessible on demand. This will make it easier to contribute to Pocket-specific features.
Thanks for your support!
