JOTEGO

(Español abajo, 日本語は以下) We visit this week a hardware from Data East that preceds Robocop and Dragon Ninja. The board is similar to those games in the main CPU, the sound subsystem and some of the glue logic but the graphics subsystem is more primitive. It uses three layers: characters, scroll and s

(español abajo) I started on FPGA retro developments with a Yamaha YM2151 module: the most important chip for arcade games. I made hundreds of measurements, and I designed the FPGA counterpart -JT51- to match those measurements. But there were two things I couldn't measure: the noise channel and the

NVRAM After some headache and too many debugging hours, we finally have NVRAM support for MiSTer CPS1 and CPS1.5 cores. All CPS1.5 cores use NVRAM instead of DIPs to keep the configuration. From the CPS1 set, Pang! 3 uses NVRAM too, although it seems that not all versions do. NVRAM requires both the

Happy new year and please, run the update script (update_all). Two weeks ago, the memory poll results were that 20% of users of 128MB modules had issues with the CPS1.5 core. That was too many people. I spent many hours testing the memory modules, and I summarized most of my findings here. I know th

(español abajo) One week after publishing the release candidate version, I am finally bringing CPS to the light. Code source is available here. Binary files are now in the jtbin repository and can be obtained with my update script (MiSTer) or manually downloading them for MiST/SiDi users. MRA files

FILES ATTACHED. We're finally here. The last beta file brings suppot to what was the first CPS game: Forgotten Worlds. This title uses a rotary control which needs a specific interface that took some work to implement. Although I have not connected the dial inputs to MiSTer pins yet, all the real ha

FILES HERE Smooth animations, new game elements and a full art gallery, that's Pang! 3. This game has copy protection, an EEPROM chip and the ROM dump is a bit special so it took a while to have it ready. But, here it is! DMA timing is better adjusted in this release. You will see that many of the s

See attached files. Remember to delete old MRA files. MiSTer files: mra zip and RBF zip for MiSTer MiST/Sidi files: arc zip and RBF zip for your platform Updated on May 2nd to fix mapper problem in Willow Updated on May 3rd: MRA files for Mercs and some others replaced by the fix provided by termina

(español abajo) New MRA files again. Please delete the old ones. You have the link to download in the first CPS post. Please read the post to find it. The files for today's update are marked 20200417 for today's date. This week most of the work has been focused on getting the DIP switches in and fix

(español abajo) What you need to know: -New MRAs. Delete old ones so buttons get recognized properly. -I have only tested the main ROM MRA versions. I know many of the alternative versions will fail. Please report them here. -Files are in the location indicated in the first CPS beta post. I have spe

Welcome back to one technical article. This time I'm going to talk about DMA (Direct Memory Access) in the CPS system. This aspect is completely ignored in emulators and has a large effect in the effective processor performance because if the DMA is active the CPU is stopped. The result is that emul

(español abajo) IMPORTANT -Google Drive location is shown in the first beta post here. -MiSTer: All MRA files are new. Old ones won't work delete them -MiST/SiDi: All ROM files need be re-generated. Use the -A option to generate the ARC file too. mra file.mra -A -z zip-folder -MiST and SiDi now use

(español abajo) As I have spent the week working on the Double Dragon public releases; I have only had time to test MRA files. Today's CPS update is only of MRA files, the RBF is the same one as last week's. The rest of the titles do need core changes so we will have a new RBF next week. This week's

(español abajo) Hi all! Thank you for being there one more week. I have prepared a new set of games. This time the common theme is manga games! Important -Old MRA files are not compatible at all. Delete them -RBF files for MiST(er) and SiDi are in the same shared folder. The timestamp is 20200313. R

UPDATE: after many reports of SDRAM problems and particularly Elexor reporting that his SDRAM would work if he touched it with his finger; I had an idea to fix it and applied it this morning. The new core is in Google Drive now jtcps1_20200223.rbf. (please delete the old RBF file). We have tested it

Bionic Commando and CPS1 systems feature brightness control. Let's see how that works. Most arcade games have four bits for each colour component: red, green and blue. These four bits are each a digital signal which can be either 5 Volt or 0 Volt. Arcade boards connect resistors to these signals to