Way back in the 1980s, the days of the exciting home computer and game console boom, Micom Soft introduced their XE‑1 line of game controller peripherals. From the humble XE‑1B two-button joystick for Japanese home computers, to the XE‑1ST2 switchable 4-way/8-way joystick with support for FM Towns and Sega consoles, to the fully programmable XE‑1SFC Super […]
Archive for the ‘MAME’ Category
Going Old-School
For lulz, I decided to rewrite MAME’s Intel 4004 CPU core and add support for most 4040 features. The new CPU core operates at the bus cycle level, and exposes most useful signals. It also uses lots of address spaces for all the different kinds of memory and I/O it supports (thanks OG). Some CPU […]
Attacking the Weak
ShouTime dumped the incredibly rare game Omega (Nihon System). It’s a ball-and-paddle game running on similar hardware to Sega’s Gigas. These games use an NEC MC-8123 CPU module containing a Z80 core, decryption circuitry, and an 8 KiB encryption key in battery-backed RAM. When fetching a byte from ROM or RAM, the CPU chooses a byte […]
My PAL with the LASERs
Back in the distant past, MAME started cataloguing programmable logic devices (PLDs) in addition to ROMs. This was met with considerable hostility from certain segments of the community, as it was seen as forcing them to obtain files they saw as unnecessary for emulation in order to run their precious games. However PLDs are programmable […]