54 replies to this topic

[iamtheone]

Just seen the mfme2 Crystal Maze SWP emulation. I have waited a long time to see that again. Has anyone got the Mating Game or 12 Pound Turnover working. They were the best days of my life writing those games.

[NickYerPesos]

how do you play the Crystalmaze SWP. i have looked in the MFME2 section but cant see it...

anyhelp would be appreciated.

Cheers guys.

[Bencrest]

Just seen the mfme2 Crystal Maze SWP emulation. I have waited a long time to see that again. Has anyone got the Mating Game or 12 Pound Turnover working. They were the best days of my life writing those games.

As far as I am aware, the only game which works at the moment is Crystal Maze, but I'm sure that the ROMs will be available for the 2 games mentioned, and hopefully they will be working on MFME once updated

No idea of a timescale for that though, don't expect anything shortly.

Oh,

how do you play the Crystalmaze SWP. i have looked in the MFME2 section but cant see it...

anyhelp would be appreciated.

Cheers guys.

I'd recommend you read the release thread from here :

http://www.fruitemu....php?topic=218.0

Be aware that it is a test layout and some people are struggling to get it to work at all

[elcondor]

12 Pound Turnover is missing, unfortunately.

The main 'issue' with the quiz games is the question protection, no-one understands it!

Anyway, is it OK if I pick your brains over a few things, hopefully it should be enough to get this running properly.

[iamtheone]

To be honest that piece of code to handle the question sets was not written by me, the games were, Sean and I, Mark did the graphics, but not that bit.

All I remember is it was encrypted thru a characteriser chip (PAL)
and the questions were tokenised ie 'The= 1' 'and = 2' etc...
and also frequent uses of a string ie 'What is the' could be tokenised as well. So the question would be stored as a combination of tokens, actual text and all this was passed thru the PAL.

So the next question ptr would be picked

Then if it's a token read from the token table and print that string else display it as ascii.

That's about all I can say about that. Sorry!!

[iamtheone]

P.S All the game software was written in FORTH so if you ever dissasemble it, it may look quite strange. Some game bits were written in assembler eg the 'Crystal Dome' and 'The bedroom scene' in the Mating Game. I came in on a Saturday to write that bit. Anyone remember the 'Thumbs up hand' in Eyes down SWP. Sean who did that bit got sooo much stick for years after because it was so corny and slow. In fact I was speaking to him today and I mentioned it yet again. So Sean if your'e reading this them thumbs up to you.

[swic]

I wrote the question eprom encryption. It seems like a million years ago, so my memory of the implementation has faded. I will have a think about it and let you know!!

[iamtheone]

Chris Palmer wrote the first encryption at Barcrest.

[swic]

He did the Forth one. I did the unix c version!!

[iamtheone]

Ah the one where wingnut was helping you.. Hello Sean.!!!!

[swic]

The FORTH one took an age to run. The questions had to be downloaded to the emulator and run through the PAL. The unix version emulated the PAL.

[swic]

Wrong! Guess again.

[iamtheone]

It's either Wingnut or Tinks.

[swic]

Which one 50/50 chance!!

[iamtheone]

Hmmm.... I know tinks wrote a PAL emulator to create the fuse maps, and I know wingnut helped Sean write the C version of the QSET tokeniser. It has to be Sean winding me up or tinks. So I would go for tinks. If you have any good info you can remember, share it and we can ressurect the 'ole q & a's games.

[swic]

Good guess. I will rack my brains and see what I can come up with!!

[GaryMPU34]

Is there any chance at all that barcrest reused an AWP chr for the SWP protection and is it in the same sort of format as the AWP ones?

I have about 4 or 5 complete sets of question based swps with the chr chips so even if you could shed some light on any way that these could be read it might get one or 2 of them running.

Did you get involved with any of the BWB SWP machines? They seem to use the hardwware differently and just stick at the initializing screen. I would love to get space invaders swp running somehow

Great to see that even the programmers of the original games are enjoying playing them again, even if at the moment the emulation is far from perfect.

If you want to email me any info my email is hersheys@btinternet.com in case you dont want it made public and I will pass it onto all the relavent teams working on MPU4 vid emulation

Gary

[elcondor]

This whole thread has got me back interested in trying to get this in a MAGE core form - if only to make the games accessible to more platforms.

Sure, the LED's are going to be hell, but the current MFME layout doesn't have them either

Gary, if anything does come out of this, pass it on to me as well, could you?

[GaryMPU34]

El, well as you are one of the teams working on it that went without saying lol

[elcondor]

"Gary, if anything does come out of this, pass it on to me as well, could you?"

That sentence came out totally wrong, I had my mind on other things.

What I should have said in that post was, if you find anything, pass it on to "elcondor at gmail dot com" , not any other address you have, as that address is bigger, and less painful for me to wade through on dialup.

PS. I can't say how interesting this thread is to people like me, a real meeting of the minds so to speak.

PPS. Would anyone be interested in my categorised sets for Crystal Maze, they do run on MFME2, and have different games in them.