agemame

Just a little note that, although I am not going to recommend MAME for this as the CPU emulation is completely broken, I did manage to get the Cobra games booting at least up to the checksum. Probably coincidence, but I noticed the non MPEG graphics bit is very like other arcade games I've seen based on the Philips CD-i. Seems an odd lineage. Going to try to get this submitted with thanks for the CD dumps, as I tend to find once things end up in the MAME sets, they become a bit easier to find

There is a faint connection between the later Scorpion boards and Cobra 3, like pretty much every British manufacturer at that point they're all using some form of the Cold fire CPU, and making something very close to Pluto. It's why Betcoms got so weird, the hardware got close enough that with tiny adjustments you could run games built for one tech on another.

Cobra 1 is Flare/Konix, so Inquisitor, QuizVaders l, that era. Then they just called all the video systems Cobra, much like every AWP platform was branded Scorpion.

Nothing to do with this, but I believe JPM remade it for their PC platform to provide some content for the early Gameboxes/it boxes. It literally uses the same base project as games like the original WWTBAM, but without the dongle protection.

In the original BFM SWP hardware that was based on the Flare One and Konix stuff, theoretically it supported data disks, just common or garden floppies. They ultimately changed to straight up ROM cards that they called ROMdisks, so it's a nightmare to figure out what was released and in what way. On the Cobra 3 front, I notice there's a few disc images here that MAME don't have hashes for (TOTP for one). I'd add them, but under whose credit? I don't suppose anyone knows who actually dumped them, otherwise I'll just put 'blueonesarefaster' as source

I meant the one that worked, I think the main problem with original Cobra is getting working sets. Bloody romdisks...

I've not heard any complaints, and in fact I was wanting to reach out, as basically that skeleton in MAME stayed as bad as it was simply because emulating MPEG without getting tag teamed by patent lawyers was a big problem. Not sure if it still is, but anything would help. I should point out that blueonesarefaster has helped out with feeding back into MAME a bit, including doing some VFD work derived from stuff some lazy sod called James half finished back in the day. Ooh, BTW, I think the Cobra that people have noticed in MAME is the earlier one, Brain Box and stuff like that.

Cheers guys, @johnparker007if you do get that to a position you want it reviewing, put it up and I'll try to take a look.

Yeah, basically there's been some rewrites to how memory and artwork are handled, so I've been hands off until they finish sorting it out. The inverter stuff is interesting, basically everything bar MAME uses the lines the other way around, so this is the fix. If you like the more continental and US type 8 liners and other such, there's an absolute ton of those in. Basically, the Golden Star driver I literally fished out of the reject pile all those years ago (and started this whole sorry endeavour) is the base of loads of these, and I never knew. Re spACE, yeah, it's stalled. When I'm less busy I'll see what's there and whether there's anything obvious I can map in to make something do something m

And now you know why I was asking about this

If I could track the guy down, I would. Clearly gets it, fixing the MPU3 zero cross etc, but I don't see much of a public trail.

Had literally come back from self imposed exile to post precisely that vid, and it's already up here, nice. No idea who the coder is, but the whole setup interests me. In answer to a post a while back, AGEMAME had to merge, because I lacked the time and resource to maintain it individually, and given that it did the job of convincing the then maintainer of MAME it was worthwhile, mission accomplished. I do appreciate getting PRs in nowadays is like that gag about Ian Paisley seeing St Peter, but if I can help, give me a nudge - I'm not around here much but John Parker and Shiny (remember him) know how to get my attention over stuff.

Just, just don't ask. The apparent double standard isn't lost on me. Admittedly my free time isn't my own right now, but at this point if that is the hold up, I'll hack the sounds back out and put it in mute if it helps. Problem is, no-one seems to be responding at all, which I agree looks bloody awful.

That took me back, for a brief moment I was searching the sidebar looking for Crowns Anyway, the only holdup with BlackBox is essentially deciding how to do the sounds - with MAME never really being geared up for this stuff, it's trying to do it cleanly. Same as the layout art really - it's very good at pushing simple primitives around, but something proper 3D is a hassle.

Yeah, still trying to tweak the sound - for some reason MAME had MPU4 as stereo sound cabinets, then tied all the channels together so you had two mono speakers. I'm switching it to proper mono, cleaning up the sampled sound and finally turning the alarm noise on (which is about two lines of code, but just fell on the floor for a decade because reasons). John also pointed out the unit tests were all MOD2, so shuffled that around too since we had one trying to connect to sound hardware that doesn't exist. Nothing that MFME didn't handle yet, but all this stuff pays off.