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After Burner Deluxe - MAMEd?

xmarksthespot

xmarksthespot

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New here, found this forum while searching for sys x pinouts so thanks for those.

I picked up an After Burner Deluxe to restore and it needs (besides everything!) a working sys x board. I'd thought about MAME-ing it for a temporary and future-proof solution. So far I've determined that the MAME driver for sys x doesn't have the memory values sorted for the motor outputs. It also has the motor limit switches locked to ON so I'd need to sort that out and recompile before deriving the motor data. Howard of Mamehooker has actually already done this work but his posts indicate a reticence to share this data. I'm out of my depth here on getting these values but I've made some progress.

It's slightly blasphemous to MAME this machine but the sys x boards have fatal flaws and I believe future-proofing is essential to keeping a few of these rare machines out of the junkyard. The smarty-pi has come along recently, and while there's no AB Dlx support yet it's a strong case of continual community effort to preserve these machines.

There's some interesting projects on this forum, hoping you all might share your thoughts on a project like this.
 
MAME has become a great way to drop in replace the PCB boards prolong the life of dead cabinets.

However the MAME team do not get involved in hardware and say the project is open for others to tackle that and interfeace to MAME.


Some system are easy to interface with MAME on a windows PC. For example a UHID device and some JAE connectors with MAME and Windows and you have a drop in replacement for pretty much any driving cab (minus FFB).


It gets complicated when you have to drive motors. The Gaveoover forums have many projects on controllers for Sega M2 and M3 cabs with Windows MAME. Plus you have people like Boomslangnz developing FFB plugins to allow your cab use the FFB when running MAME.

When it comes to more extravagant Cabs you are really on your own to try and develop something. I've an After Burner Climax Deluxe cab here and can easily add in a PC with MAME original After Burner. Hooking up the controls is not a bother with UHID but getting movement working on this via MAME would be a big ask.

Windows is hard to develop hardware solutions for as there are driver signing issues. You may have better success with less restrictive platforms like Pi (And as you said MAME on PI with the smartypi interface for Sega cabs could be your solution in the long run.) or possibly even mister in a few years as there is a hardware scene behind that.
 
Awesome, thanks for the feedback.

I'm familiar with input hardware and Mamehooker - getting the game to run on PC using the original monitor and hooked output to the lights in the cabinet (start and warning/lock on) would be a breeze. It's the motor part that will be complicated for me. I know the Pi has some pretty easy hookups for RGB so there's that. I could see Mister maybe working out, but I don't know if there's even a sys x driver there yet so that would be a while.

There's a non-zero chance of me getting a working board for this machine of course, but according to at least one expert all sys x boards are on borrowed time. So for the sake of having a fully working cabinet I'd like to future proof it with a modern solution while including an original board for preservation.
 
Maybe you could work with the smarty pi dev(s) and offer to be the tester for potential motion control integration?
 
I messages with Marty of Smarty Pi a little already. He's got no near-term plans for integrating Ab Dlx.
 
Being a huge fan of super scaler games, MAME emulation is quite atrocious for those to me.
On the bright side, there are a lot more of those boards available than there are surviving cabs, so even if rare, the odds are in your favour.
Also faults seem very often to be bad RAM or TTL chips, those you can replace.
 
There's one custom chip that prone to failure, according to Ken at irepairsega.com (he has a stockpile of sys x boards waiting on donor chips) every sys x board is destined to fail.

Genuinely curious here so don't take it the wrong way - what's wrong with the super scaler games in MAME?
 
Let me first say I haven't followed MAME's progress in a while, some issues may have been fixed since then.
I remember a lot of sprite clipping (e.g. when crashing in Out Run), collision detection issues, slow downs, crashes, all of that on top of other annoying things like a bug in Space Harrier where sometimes you wouldn't lose a life when hit or a crazy increasing difficulty (faster bullets), in OutRun the gear selection being a toggle switch in MAME while it's a lever that stays in position on real cabinets, etc.

I'm also curious now, what is that custom chip failing? Do you have its reference?
 
According to Ken someone in the past successfully decapped that chip AND remade it in a non-fatal form. They did not share with the rest of the class though. I don't have a source on that story but point being, that chip can be remade.
 
It's becoming abundantly clear I am extremely out of my depth here for writing mame drivers to hook and output the motor functions. Stefan from the "Tinkering on Steroids" video below has been chatting with my via email a bit, providing some clues into how I might get this working. The mame2003 driver has plenty of notes, so that's a start. Total novice at coding here but I'll chip away at this over time.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vuh6hzreDA&t=3s
 
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