Side Arms (Public Release)

After a beta period of one month and no bugs reported, I am releasing Side Arms to the general public. The files are in JTBIN as usual and if you use MiSTer you can use the update_all script to get Side Arms updates from now on.

The week has been about QSound and CPS1.5. I have been working in defining the MRA file format for the new CPS1.5 titles and studying CPS 1.5 details. It turns out CPS 1.5 uses Kabuki CPU encryption for the Z80 code so I spent one day studying the available documentation on it. I think Kabuki will be easy to do (thanks to the work of MAME developers and Eduardo Cruz) so I am not worried about it.

CPS2 does not use Kabuki though, so it is something specific to CPS1.5. There a good number of Mitchell and CAPCOM titles using Kabuki outside CPS1.5 but most of these titles are not very popular. The best known of them is Super! Pang but I think it is not too popular anyway. You can let me know in the comments if you're interested. I do like Pang! games and have played them with my children, by the way.

If all goes well, I should get CPS1.5 games running with no sound over the weekend. Assuming the games can boot with no DSP connected -software may prevent it. We'll see. The DSP chip itself still has needs attention for a couple more weeks.

Have a nice retro weekend!