Coin-Op Collection Presents: DECO-16 (Boogie Wings / The Great Ragtime Show)

Today's release for the MiSTerFPGA platform is the next entry on the DECO-16 platform. Boogie Wings, known in Japan as The Great Ragtime Show, is an aircraft-based action game built on Data East's 16-bit custom hardware. An Analogue Pocket build will follow over the next week or so.

Kuhga / Vapor Trail (1989)
Crude Buster / Two Crude (1990)
Dark Seal / Gate of Doom (1990)
The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy (1990)
Super Burger Time (1990)
Death Brade / Mutant Fighter (1991)
Tatakae Genshijin: Joe & Mac / Caveman Ninja (1991)
Robocop 2 (1991)
Thunder Zone / Desert Assault (1991)
Wolf Fang: Kuhga 2001 / Rohga (1991)
Tumble Pop (1991)
Dark Seal II / Wizard Fire (1992)
Funky Jet (1992)
Gun Ball / Nitro Ball (1992)
Diet Go Go (1992)
The Great Ragtime Show / Boogie Wings (1992)

Boogie Wings is the closing entry of the DECO-16 line and the only board in the family to use the DECO 99 alpha-blending compositor, the chip Data East branded as "ACE". It pairs that compositor with two DECO 52 sprite engines and two DECO 141 tilemap generators, and runs the main CPU and sound CPU faster than any of the boards before it.

This post covers a technical overview of Boogie Wings on DECO-16, the work the board required, and the game itself.

Licensing:

Boogie Wings is distributed through the Coin-Op Collection licensing portal. Step-by-step instructions and the FAQ are available on the Help page. More information can be found by clicking here and here.

Overview:

Boogie Wings runs on Data East's DECO-16 hardware (PCB DE-0379-1), driven by a Motorola MC68000 at 14 MHz with no second processor on the main bus. The board ships the 68000 with encrypted instructions, packaged on the DECO 102 carrier so it boots from a bit-shuffled ROM and decrypts on the fly to the CPU. The sound system runs on a HuC6280 (DECO Custom 45) at 8.055 MHz driving a YM2151 (OPM) at 3.58 MHz for FM synthesis, and two OKI M6295 ADPCM samplers, one at 1.007 MHz and the other at 2.014 MHz with bank-switched sample ROM. Audio output is mono.

The video system outputs 320x240 at 57.999 Hz. Graphics are rendered by a chain of Data East custom ICs: a pair of DECO 141 tilemap generators drive four 16x16 playfields between them, a pair of DECO 52 sprite engines drive two independent sprite layers, and a DECO 113 and a DECO 99 sit at the end of the chain handling per-pixel alpha blending across all of them. The DECO 99 is the chip Data East branded as the ACE, and Boogie Wings is the only board in the DECO-16 family to use it. A DECO 104 device handles inputs and protection. The palette holds 2048 entries in 24-bit RGB, eight bits per channel.

Development Challenges:

The DECO 99, marketed as the ACE, is what makes Boogie Wings stand apart from the rest of the platform. The other DECO-16 boards composite their layers with a flat priority chain, where every visible pixel comes from exactly one tile or sprite layer. The ACE works alongside a DECO 113 alpha-blending companion to add per-pixel alpha blending on top of that.

The 113 handles the base alpha blend across the inputs and the 99 layers palette effects on top of it, with selected playfield and sprite pixels feeding an alpha lookup the ACE carries internally so the final image mixes them into the background instead of replacing it, which is what produces the smoke, water, and translucent-glass effects that show up throughout the game.

Standing the chips up meant implementing both the alpha lookup table and the compositor that drives it, then wiring the dual tilemap chips and the dual sprite chips into it in the right order. The DECO 200 sits at the end of the graphics path handling the final compositing, with the priority register the game writes selecting one of seven priority modes that determine which inputs participate in the blend on each scanline.

The tile path runs on two DECO 141 chips, the 8-bit-per-pixel variant of the DECO 55 and DECO 56 (Encryption) tilemap generator the rest of the DECO-16 library uses. The 141 keeps the same two playfields, per-scanline rowscroll, per-column colscroll, GFX ROM banking, and scanline-atomic control register shadowing that the 55 provides, plus on-chip ROM decryption and 8bpp output per layer. The extra precision is what lets the tilemap pixels feed the alpha blend, so the work already done on the 55 carries over to it directly, with the differences confined to the parts of the chip that feed the ACE.

The sprite path runs two DECO 52 engines. Each draws 16x16 sprites with multiple heights, double width, per-sprite flip, and a flash attribute, reading its own display list from its own DMA buffer once per frame. Each 52 is paired with a DECO 71, the sprite-RAM DMA controller that double-buffers the display list. The CPU writes one sprite-RAM set and the 71 copies it to the set the 52 reads each frame, so the sprite data the 52 latches is always a complete, stable frame.

The two chips produce independent sprite layers with their own pixel-priority and sprite-priority bits, and on Boogie Wings their outputs are routed into the ACE so the second chip's sprites can be alpha-blended against the first chip's output and against the playfields, which is what supports the layered explosion and translucent particle effects throughout the game.

Inputs and protection are handled by a DECO 104. The game routes controls, coins, and dip switches through the device's scrambled address space and reads them back through nibble-reordering, XOR, and mask stages before the data reaches the CPU. It is the same device family covered in earlier posts under different chip numbers, and the existing implementation extends to it directly, with the address scrambling adjusted for the Boogie Wings layout.

The audio section carries one small hardware quirk worth noting. The YM2151's CT1 and CT2 output pins are wired straight to the bank-select inputs on the two OKI M6295 samplers, with CT1 selecting the bank on the first OKI and CT2 selecting the bank on the second. The board uses the YM2151 to switch sample banks rather than dedicating an I/O port to it, I mirror that wiring and follow the CT pins out to the sampler bank registers.

The 68000 instruction stream is encrypted at the DECO 102 carrier, which scrambles the address lines into the program ROM so the bytes on disk are not the bytes the CPU fetches. The core handles the address descrambling at the loader, so the CPU runs against the correct instruction stream directly.

Core Options:

The MiSTer core includes video settings for aspect ratio, vertical scaling and cropping, scandoubler effects, and H/V positioning and sync adjustments.

Audio settings provide separate OPM and two M6295 PCM toggles, each with its own volume control, covering the full sound section. Arcade dip switches are directly accessible from the OSD. Game settings include per-player auto-fire with adjustable rates, mapping options for Player 1 and Player 2, and a synced mapping mode that mirrors Player 1's layout to Player 2.

Cheats are accessible from the OSD and include infinite credits and per-player infinite lives, invincibility, speed select with six levels, and shot power with sixteen levels.

History, Gameplay, and Regional Information:

Boogie Wings was developed and published by Data East, reaching Japanese arcades on November 26, 1992 as The Great Ragtime Show. A second build dated December 7, 1992 went out worldwide for Japan, Europe, and Asia, with a North American revision following a week later on December 14, 1992. It was directed by Naomi Susa, designed by Kazuyuki Kurata, and programmed by Takuya Haga, Shinji Hirao, and Ace Lida. The soundtrack was scored by Tatsuya Kiuchi, Tomoyoshi Sato, and Mihoko Ando, with Kiuchi and Ando both members of Data East's in-house sound team Gamadelic. Kiuchi had joined Data East in 1987 and had already scored a run of the company's boards leading up to this one, including Crude Buster.

The gameplay is a horizontally scrolling action game for one or two players at once, set in an alternate version of the early twentieth century in the years just after the First World War. The player flies a biplane fitted with a rear-mounted grappling hook, and the hook is the game's signature mechanic. Each stage starts with a sea mine hanging from the hook as a one-use bomb, and once the mine is dropped the hook can grab and hurl enemies, soldiers, scenery, and ground vehicles at anything in front of the plane. Rapid-tapping the shot button charges a power gauge that releases a screen-wide lightning attack when full. The biplane goes down after two hits, but the pilot parachutes out and continues on foot with a handgun, and from the ground can hop into motorcycles, jeeps, bicycles, pogo sticks, horses, giraffes, elephants, miniature tanks, fire engines, and missile-firing robots before climbing back into a fresh plane.

The game runs across five player-selectable stages plus a final encounter, taking the player through Konyi Island, an airborne transport, the Museum of Natural History, a Christmas-themed snowbound city, and a Detroit Rock City factory level on the way to the Professor's hideout and a time-machine showdown. The Japanese title sells the period angle directly: the soundtrack is unified in ragtime style throughout, and the in-game voice sample that yells "The Great Ragtime Show!" between stages was retained on the Western release rather than removed. Across regions the only differences are the title-screen art and the dialogue and instructional text in English, with the same game and the same soundtrack shipping in every territory.

The game leans heavily on visual gags and references. Each stage drops cameos and homages: a statue of Santos from Data East's Trio the Punch appears as a throwable object, a snowy-city boss is a robot Santa Claus whose head must be hooked back onto the body to silence him, the final boss's time machine is lifted from the 1960 film of the H.G. Wells novel, and the Detroit stage takes its name from the KISS song. The pilot-eject mechanic itself homages Data East's Wolf Fang from the previous year. The end-credits sequence is playable, with the biplane flying across an interactive parade of every sprite and character from the game.

Boogie Wings did not chart in its year of release. It is absent from the 1992 Gamest Awards top placings in Grand Prize, Best Shooting, Best VGM, and Best Graphics, where Wolf Fang was Data East's only entry in the top tier. The reception that did exist came later, with the game holding a strong cult reputation across both Japanese and English-language retro coverage as one of Data East's most colorful and inventive arcade releases. It has been called the best arcade game nobody played, and its inclusion in the 2025 Egret II Mini Arcade Collection was treated by Japanese fans as overdue recognition for a title that disappeared almost without notice on its first release.

Updates:

The next entries for the DECO-16 platform will be Dark Seal, Diet Go Go, RoboCop 2, Super Burger Time, Wolf Fang, Funky Jet, and Caveman Ninja. The tilemap, sprite, and protection work done across the platform up to and including Boogie Wings carries over to those releases, so the remaining lineup follows from here. All of these titles are completed and will be released over the next week or so.

Disclaimer: All product names, trademarks, and registered trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. "Analogue", "Analogue Pocket", "OpenFPGA", "MiSTer", "MiSTerFPGA", "Data East", "NEC", "Hudson Soft", "Motorola", "Yamaha", "OKI", "H.G. Wells", "MGM", "KISS", and all derivative works are trademarks, registered trademarks, or copyrighted materials of their respective holders. Use of these names does not imply endorsement or association with this post. All rights reserved to their respective owners. This post is for educational and research purposes only.