Two new Konami games join the beta lineup this week: ’88 Games and Rollergames. One brings back the frantic button tapping; the other puts you on skates, with an opponent to knock down and a rolling background unseend on arcades before this title.

’88 Games takes the track-and-field formula into Konami's late-eighties hardware. Race down the track, time your jumps and throws, and chase the records. The core is based on the GX861 board schematics and GAL equations, with Konami chip reverse-engineering work by Furrtek helping bring the hardware back.

This title uses the same scaling and rotation chip than Ajax and it is used to create many of the zoom effects in the game backgrounds.

Rollergames turns the skating arena into a brawl. It mixes attacks, jumps and obstacles with the speed of a roller derby, all against the noisy backdrop of a Konami arcade crowd. This game also uses the same scaling chip to create the rolling backgrounds. The chip acts like a matrix transformer where you set how a tilemap image will be sampled, pixel by pixel. As the image is scanned with a given vertical and horizontal step for each new pixel, you can produce rotation and scaling effects. But, even understanding that, the kind of rolling effect produced in this game keeps amazing me.

Four Toaplan shooters

Flying Shark and Twin Cobra arrive in the new KTIGER core, contributed by Marc Emmerson (memmerson). These are two of Toaplan's 1987 vertical shooters. Well known by all of us, but just to mention: a propeller fighter threading its way past enemy formations, and an attack helicopter taking on tanks, ships and aircraft. I personally played Flying Shark on the Amstrad CPC as a kid. Loved it. We had originally worked and published the schematics for a Twin Cobra bootleg but never got down to finish the core. It's ready now. They enter beta on MiSTer and Analogue Pocket, and are also available on SiDi128.

Slap Fight and Tiger-Heli also join the lineup through the new SLAP core, released publicly for MiST, SiDi and SiDi128. We are keeping this release to those platforms so it does not interfere with Anton Gale’s work on MiSTer and Analogue Pocket. The JT SLAP core is not distributed for MiSTer or Pocket, although you can build it from source if curious. The core is based on Anton Gale's schematic work.

Other Updates

• Caliber 50 and Gals Panic have graduated from beta and are now public releases on MiSTer, Analogue Pocket and SiDi128.

• Alien Sector / Baraduke: the title-screen graphics glitch is fixed, thanks to Marc Emmerson (PR #1658).

• Gradius III: stage 4 timing adjustments from Chris Watson (niknakniknak) (PR #1661).

• The FairyLand Story: noise and channel 6 have been added to its sound implementation, thanks to Chris Watson (PR #1655).

• Wardner: the image is better centered on analog video output.

• Cores using Yamaha's YM2203 received further updates to volume scaling and envelope behavior. This includes plenty of 8-bit CAPCOM games, as well as Bubble Bobble, Combat School... The update is based on the die-shot work done by Nukeykt