Pnickies CPS1 conversion possible?

[skate323k137]

I have a CPS1 suicide battery free board that should have the right C board for the puzzle game "Pnickies" (pnickj), but no dump exists for this PAL:

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "bboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "pkb10b.1a", 0x0000, 0x0117, NO_DUMP )

I know these are tricky to dump and this is a long shot, This game seems pretty rare but I just am hoping to be able to try it on a cps1 board. It seems that PAL and also the sizes of the roms themselves may be an issue for completing a B board. I'm pretty good with splitting/combining/burning roms but my knowledge of cps1 is little.

I do see in mame some games may have incomplete PALs that allow the game to run and are noted to work on real hardware, but I wouldn't expect someone to assemble one (at least not for free). I hope someone can help

 

[skate323k137]

A skilled person has provided me merged roms and a PAL to run this on a CPS1 B board similar to the GnG conversions. I'll see if I can share the roms at some point in the coming days. I burned a set and I have Pnickies up and running on a CPS1!

 

[skate323k137]

So long story short, this guy merged the roms and made the PAL for me:

http://arcadefixer.blogspot.com/2017/03/conversion-sf2-to-ghoulsnghosts-world.html

I did send him a donation for the work. I've tried some of his other patched sets like this GnG one, and his forgotten worlds that's playable on a normal panel. They've all worked fine.

 

[kuze]

So long story short, this guy merged the roms and made the PAL for me:

http://arcadefixer.blogspot.com/2017/03/conversion-sf2-to-ghoulsnghosts-world.html

I did send him a donation for the work. I've tried some of his other patched sets like this GnG one, and his forgotten worlds that's playable on a normal panel. They've all worked fine.

Judging by his CPS1 work, it seems he might be capable of making CPS 1.5 to CPS2 conversions a reality. I wonder if he'd be interested in taking a crack at it.

 

[jassin000]

Judging by his CPS1 work, it seems he might be capable of making CPS 1.5 to CPS2 conversions a reality. I wonder if he'd be interested in taking a crack at it.

From what I remember, one of the biggest challenges was shifting spright priority.
In some of the screen caps taken from Punisher running inside MAME with the CPS2 drivers, you could clearly see background objects overlapping ontop of the characters.

"So, looks like it uses that register pair to cause the sprite hardware to snapshot the sprite memory area on the CPU and update the screen with data for the next frame."

"The Punisher I stalled at the point where I tripped a protection on the game program. It causes the enemies to die instantly as they appear on the screen. Also I was unable to find a satisfactory solution for the sprites priority problem."

 

[mountainmanjed]

So long story short, this guy merged the roms and made the PAL for me:

http://arcadefixer.blogspot.com/2017/03/conversion-sf2-to-ghoulsnghosts-world.html

I did send him a donation for the work. I've tried some of his other patched sets like this GnG one, and his forgotten worlds that's playable on a normal panel. They've all worked fine.

Judging by his CPS1 work, it seems he might be capable of making CPS 1.5 to CPS2 conversions a reality. I wonder if he'd be interested in taking a crack at it.

Reality is alot of people lost interest working on them. after my harddrive died I went to make that ST Hack with more colors and stages. While Leo went on with other projects as well.

 

[ekorz]

Judging by his CPS1 work, it seems he might be capable of making CPS 1.5 to CPS2 conversions a reality. I wonder if he'd be interested in taking a crack at it.

From what I remember, one of the biggest challenges was shifting spright priority.In some of the screen caps taken from Punisher running inside MAME with the CPS2 drivers, you could clearly see background objects overlapping ontop of the characters.

I had cause to email him a few days ago, I'm trying to get him to jump into the forum himself. In the meantime he let me know "I did convert few CPS1 Q-Sound games on CPS2 like Cadillacs & Dinosaurs but still have to remap inputs. Otherwise graphics and sound work fine." I'm not sure if he solved that shifting sprite issue but hopefully I can get him to jump in here and answer...

 

[skate323k137]

It would be cool if he got around on these forums. Between his code modifications and a certain admins hardware skills, a CPS1 multi would probably be relatively easy.

 

[kuze]

Judging by his CPS1 work, it seems he might be capable of making CPS 1.5 to CPS2 conversions a reality. I wonder if he'd be interested in taking a crack at it.

From what I remember, one of the biggest challenges was shifting spright priority.In some of the screen caps taken from Punisher running inside MAME with the CPS2 drivers, you could clearly see background objects overlapping ontop of the characters.

I had cause to email him a few days ago, I'm trying to get him to jump into the forum himself. In the meantime he let me know "I did convert few CPS1 Q-Sound games on CPS2 like Cadillacs & Dinosaurs but still have to remap inputs. Otherwise graphics and sound work fine." I'm not sure if he solved that shifting sprite issue but hopefully I can get him to jump in here and answer...

That sounds pretty promising!

 

[skate323k137]

Guess what I found today??

These have been sitting in a drawer since about 2019, I did play it numerous times on a donor board which I eventually put back as a GnG and sold off. I don't actually own a CPS1 anymore. For reference though, this is the board I was using, but with the GnG roms: CPS1 Board Stack

It would honestly be a shame to reclaim these EPROMS. Like, I don't want to turn these into BIOS chips for other systems or whatever else, given they have some slight meaning, even if just to me or our community. Reading back through my email, Apocalypse did tell me that because I paid him for his time to craft the PAL and help me merge the ROMs to this format, I could do as I wanted with that data. So the first thing I want to do is share it for free:

Pnickies Conversion Rom Set

GAL : 16V8D

EPROMS: As labelled on your B board, for the most part. The main roms 1-4 Depend on if you have the JEDEC EPROM or MASK type board. Photoed is a compete set for MASK ROM, on JEDEC EPROM 1-4 need to be 27c4096 type instead.

Smaller roms in the zip have been duplicated for ease of sourcing ROMs:

09.27c010.bin is a doubled 09.bin to use with a 27C010/27C1001
23.4096.bin is a doubled 23.bin to use with 27C4096

If you use one of these, it replaces its smaller source file/EPROM for your build at that location, and no mods to these particular EPROMs or the B Board are needed to accommodate if you make this subsitution(s).

Since this isn't a sales thread I will make a post in the correct section to move these chips along. I know most of you probably have multis by now, but this deserves to be 'released' to the community. I hope you enjoy.