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BOUNTY: CPS1.5 games (with Q-Sound) on CPS2 multi

Yeah, I had a chance tp play the current C&D build yesterday. Overall, very playable! I crashed it two times using Hannah D. funnily enough. Still some sprite priority wackiness that makes finding the high point value diamonds a joke, hehe. Music sounded great.
 
Exciting times indeed!

Come on guys, lets get those donations to break $3K, only a bit more to go.
 
Layer priority issues were bugging me a bit, so I investigated. Realized that CPS2 requires setting a second register in order to correctly setup layer mixing with sprites, so if a game ever used a layer priority order other than 1>0>2>3, sprites would be the wrong priority. Solved with a lookup table, now the elevator in Cadillacs mostly works right (per-color priority strikes again for the remainder of it). Also I properly hooked up the EEPROM now, so everything saves like it should. Did this since Muscle Bomber doesn't boot unless it works. Muscle Bomber is an asshole though, tons and tons of anti-hacking/anti-piracy checks in it, it's really painful.
Asure said:
It would be cool to have some sort of progress blog or a beta, hint hint @trap15 :thumbsup:
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I was thinking about this, I might as well use my website for something...maybe I'll post some bloggy stuff there eventually.
RGB said:
Let me know if you need a CPS2 3/4 Player harness + NeoGeo joypad adapter, I can ship it asap :)
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Far from need, but it could be nice :)
 
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Went back to hacking up Tenchi wo Kurau 2 since I haven't touched it since all my big reworks. Bopped the last of the anti-hacking code (there's very little of it), so it seems to work just fine now. Still has those per-color priority issues, but there isn't much of it in this game aside from some really obvious points. Muscle Bomber's continuing to be an over-protected hellspawn, so I might go do Punisher now, or start working on the per-color priority problem. Also I think I got the last bit of anti-hack in Cadillacs, needs more soak time.

UPDATE: Went and did Punisher, it works extremely well. There's quite a few anti-tamper codes in here, but they seem to like to trigger infrequently :) They're also extremely cute, compared to all the other anti-tampers. Most of the other games will just crash or return to the title screen if they detect modifications. Punisher seems to pick between: you're invincible; enemies instantly die; and the screen turning dim randomly. I seem to have caught most of them, but we'll see.

This leaves: pulling apart Muscle Bomber some more, trying Muscle Bomber Duo, trying other regions of a done game, or carving up backgrounds and reworking stuff for it. And of course lots of testing. If only Tenchi wo Kurau 2 was shorter...
 
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Been working through Muscle Bomber some more, I think I'm going to give up on it for now. The protection is insanely aggressive, and I really don't want to spend more time unraveling its mess for now. Punisher will probably be the first to finish then, since it uses the priority effect less than Cadillacs and TK2, and the protection is much much easier to trace than Muscle Bomber.

I've played Cadillacs quite a bit on the multi, it works most of the time, but it has triggered protection occasionally, so I just need to actually play in MAME. Once I get Punisher working most of the time, I'll probably start asking for people to test stuff in MAME (and only MAME, I can't get any debug information out of people playing on the multi). Tenchi wo Kurau 2 seems to work entirely fine, I don't think I've had it crash since I did the most recent build (that said, it's a very long game, so I haven't even credit fed to the end yet). Still yet to even investigate chopping up the backgrounds, I'm not exactly excited to do it, since it'll be quite a bit of up-front work :D I'm still fairly confident I can automate it once I do get it working, but just getting there is gonna suck.
 
@trap15, thank you so much for taking this on! I know you wouldn't be doing it if you didn't enjoy it at least a little, but still. Someone mentioned on this forum elsewhere that it takes a combination of things to make these sort of projects happen: skill/knowledge + time/resources + desire. Often only 2 of those are present, but finding all 3 has yielded stuff like Darksoft's projects, Kevtris' FPGA cores, and your work here. It blows my mind the strides made in retro gaming preservation just in the last few years.
-ud
 
trap15 said:
Been working through Muscle Bomber some more, I think I'm going to give up on it for now. The protection is insanely aggressive, and I really don't want to spend more time unraveling its mess for now. Punisher will probably be the first to finish then, since it uses the priority effect less than Cadillacs and TK2, and the protection is much much easier to trace than Muscle Bomber.

I've played Cadillacs quite a bit on the multi, it works most of the time, but it has triggered protection occasionally, so I just need to actually play in MAME. Once I get Punisher working most of the time, I'll probably start asking for people to test stuff in MAME (and only MAME, I can't get any debug information out of people playing on the multi). Tenchi wo Kurau 2 seems to work entirely fine, I don't think I've had it crash since I did the most recent build (that said, it's a very long game, so I haven't even credit fed to the end yet). Still yet to even investigate chopping up the backgrounds, I'm not exactly excited to do it, since it'll be quite a bit of up-front work :D I'm still fairly confident I can automate it once I do get it working, but just getting there is gonna suck.
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count me in as both MAME and multi tester.
 
Good progress overall I think, excellent work!
Cannot wait!

I would like to volunteer as a multi tester if you cannot find anyone else ;)
 
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