Being Halloween month, I'm happy to share a backport of Morrigan to the original arcade version of Gunbird 2!
This was something I wanted to work on for a while, as I always felt the arcade deserved the "complete" experience that the Dreamcast received.
I had no idea it was going to be so tricky to get things exactly right for real hardware. While the Dreamcast version is based on the original arcade code, they changed the way that ending sequences are handled. Although it was fairly quick to get endings running on MAME, they didn't work correctly on actual PS5 hardware. This turned up a few inaccuracies in the way that MAME handles its implementation. It took about a dozen flashes to my actual board to pin things down and optimize to work 100% within the constraints of the arcade board.
The sound samples for Morrigan were not going to fit the sound ROM capacity either, so unused samples from the original game had to be identified and removed to make space. The third graphics bank was enlarged to 64M to make room for the new graphics. Fortunately the excellent @aje_fr multi recognizes the two enlarged ROM files and writes them fully without needing a firmware change.
In any case, the game works exactly the same as the official version unless you input one of Morrigan's maintenance codes outlined in the readme.
Note that to build this you need the original 'gunbird2' MAME set as well as both the US and JP Dreamcast discs. I couldn't generate an IPS/xdelta patch for legal reasons as it would include Dreamcast assets.
https://github.com/kuzearcade/Gunbird2_Makai
Hope you all enjoy and have some fun with this.
This was something I wanted to work on for a while, as I always felt the arcade deserved the "complete" experience that the Dreamcast received.
I had no idea it was going to be so tricky to get things exactly right for real hardware. While the Dreamcast version is based on the original arcade code, they changed the way that ending sequences are handled. Although it was fairly quick to get endings running on MAME, they didn't work correctly on actual PS5 hardware. This turned up a few inaccuracies in the way that MAME handles its implementation. It took about a dozen flashes to my actual board to pin things down and optimize to work 100% within the constraints of the arcade board.
The sound samples for Morrigan were not going to fit the sound ROM capacity either, so unused samples from the original game had to be identified and removed to make space. The third graphics bank was enlarged to 64M to make room for the new graphics. Fortunately the excellent @aje_fr multi recognizes the two enlarged ROM files and writes them fully without needing a firmware change.
In any case, the game works exactly the same as the official version unless you input one of Morrigan's maintenance codes outlined in the readme.
Note that to build this you need the original 'gunbird2' MAME set as well as both the US and JP Dreamcast discs. I couldn't generate an IPS/xdelta patch for legal reasons as it would include Dreamcast assets.
https://github.com/kuzearcade/Gunbird2_Makai
Hope you all enjoy and have some fun with this.
