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Midway (Williams) Y unit (Z unit and T unit) Discussion, Serial Numbers etc

So @mypinballs was working on Narc earlier, and there were some issues. Luigi30 was the first to get this working, i cleaned it up further and added two features left out of production.

First there's the clowns. I recall from the ZX Spectrum they would stab the hookers, but in all the roms i tried, they just pick them up and run off with them.
Shoot Kinky Pinky and rescue them before they get dragged off. I found the disabled code in the source and put it back in.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNfCNACdXD0

Now they've got back their healthy appetite for blood.

Then there's a video showing a board one of the programmers updated for the Galloping Ghost arcade.
It has a chopper level where you fly around shooting and bombing the bad guys.
I found the level and added it in place of stage one. I'm not sure where it is supposed to go. Here it is in action:

View: https://youtu.be/c-EpOKdWlRg


If you want to build the roms, everything is on my Github. You'll need a bit of Dosbox to make things happen.I hope to make some Narc fans happy this way!
 
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Asure said:
So @mypinballs was working on Narc earlier, and there were some issues. Luigi30 was the first to get this working, i cleaned it up further and added two features left out of production.

First there's the clowns. I recall from the ZX Spectrum they would stab the hookers, but in all the roms i tried, they just pick them up and run off with them.
Shoot Kinky Pinky and rescue them before they get dragged off. I found the disabled code in the source and put it back in.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNfCNACdXD0

Now they've got back their healthy appetite for blood.

Then there's a video showing a board one of the programmers updated for the Galloping Ghost arcade.
It has a chopper level where you fly around shooting and bombing the bad guys.
I found the level and added it in place of stage one. I'm not sure where it is supposed to go. Here it is in action:

View: https://youtu.be/c-EpOKdWlRg


If you want to build the roms, everything is on my Github. You'll need a bit of Dosbox to make things happen.I hope to make some Narc fans happy this way!
Click to expand...
I've found the most effective way of dealing with the clowns is to rocket bomb them. because for whatever reason that doesn't hurt the women.

the GGA proto roms came from the programmer George Petro himself. and as far as I know they'll never get dumped. was player 1 red in the older versions of the game supported by MAME? cause that's how GGA proto is, or was that another thing restored from source code?
 
mecha said:
was player 1 red in the older versions of the game supported by MAME? cause that's how GGA proto is, or was that another thing restored from source code?
Click to expand...
Damn i didn't even notice. By default it appears player 1 is red in this source code by default, i didn't even change anything to get it to do this.
Maybe it was George's personal preference? (The rom _is_ marked - 7.00-GNP as the revision.)
 
Asure said:
Damn i didn't even notice. By default it appears player 1 is red in this source code by default, i didn't even change anything to get it to do this.
Maybe it was George's personal preference? (The rom _is_ marked - 7.00-GNP as the revision.)
Click to expand...
that's his initials lol yeah I just know the proto version player 1 is red. and I think the footage in Insert Coin showing location test games player 1 was red also. in fact both joysticks on the games were red, not the blue/red scheme of the production models.

I don't even know if that was a prototype or if it was something he just engineered for GGA adding the helicopter stage back in. which I've never actually seen before. him and Doc Mack are super tight. I was at NARC developer day back in December 2015, I think that's when NARC and Robotron both got rom updates, and later NARC was made to run 2 switchable versions of the game.
 
Asure said:
So @mypinballs was working on Narc earlier, and there were some issues. Luigi30 was the first to get this working, i cleaned it up further and added two features left out of production.

First there's the clowns. I recall from the ZX Spectrum they would stab the hookers, but in all the roms i tried, they just pick them up and run off with them.
Shoot Kinky Pinky and rescue them before they get dragged off. I found the disabled code in the source and put it back in.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNfCNACdXD0

Now they've got back their healthy appetite for blood.

Then there's a video showing a board one of the programmers updated for the Galloping Ghost arcade.
It has a chopper level where you fly around shooting and bombing the bad guys.
I found the level and added it in place of stage one. I'm not sure where it is supposed to go. Here it is in action:

View: https://youtu.be/c-EpOKdWlRg


If you want to build the roms, everything is on my Github. You'll need a bit of Dosbox to make things happen.I hope to make some Narc fans happy this way!
Click to expand...

I was trying to get it to run on Y-unit hardware and in std res. Is this what you achieved?
 
Hmm no, no port to other h/w or std res yet, i can read it in the way i wrote, sorry to get your hopes up. I've got no Y-Unit to test things on at all.
I don't see why it would not run on an Y-Board with some GFX reshuffling, The Z-Board is basically Y-Board with different soundboard on it and ancient ROM tech.

Sound is a different matter, we have no sound source code, and nothing in other sources except for DCS.

I think with some effort it could run on Y-Unit (Carnage/Smash) easily, maybe a little too fast but that can be adjusted in the code.
Biggest problem (again) is the soundboard.
 
Asure said:
Hmm no, no port to other h/w or std res yet, i can read it in the way i wrote, sorry to get your hopes up. I've got no Y-Unit to test things on at all.
I don't see why it would not run on an Y-Board with some GFX reshuffling, The Z-Board is basically Y-Board with different soundboard on it and ancient ROM tech.

Sound is a different matter, we have no sound source code, and nothing in other sources except for DCS.

I think with some effort it could run on Y-Unit (Carnage/Smash) easily, maybe a little too fast but that can be adjusted in the code.
Biggest problem (again) is the soundboard.
Click to expand...
Sorry but I don't think you realised my project or didn't read the thread earlier, I had it running as stock ages ago as z unit I thought you knew this, would have shared the build etc, but my idea was to run it as std res on y unit hardware that is more common place. I have a build for this to but there are some issues currently. I moved on to smash tv and others as you know

From what I remember the sound is no big issue as its just pre dcs hardware on both, like the sys11 and early wpc pinball machines.
 
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Sorry, i'm a chaotic person sometimes :)
From the mame source the Z Unit version has 2x6809 cpu for sound instead of one. So it's not the board type they used for Carnage and Smash, i don't know if that exact board is readily available.
(Maybe sys11 can be repurposed, not sure.)
 
NARC sound board was unique to just that game. up to that point the System 11 sound boards were either all DAC (High Speed) or all YM2151. the CVSD digitizer capabilities were run on the MPU instead, so NARC was the first time I think they combined everything together. I bought the Z-unit book years ago cause it turned up for sale on ebay and I couldn't pass it up. I always thought the Z-unit architecture was brilliant and vastly ahead of its time circa 1987-1988. if it's any use, the NARC sound board uses the synthesizer side as the primary and digitizer as secondary. if the synthesizer CPU doesn't initialize for whatever reason, the entire sound board doesn't work from what I remember. I think that's going to be the only complication with that is that it has 2 CPUs and also 2 DACs (one for each side). the standard CVSD sound board from the Smash TV/System 11B era should be capable of running it, but I don't know how you can condense the operations to just 1 6809 CPU.

I've heard conflicting stories about Z-unit hardware, one side says Williams sold the game at a loss because it cost so much to make, but Eugene Jarvis said no to it losing money, it had some profit. but that was why it was condensed down to Y-unit and they borrowed the System 11B sound board until they got into T-unit/ADPCM.
 
mecha said:
NARC sound board was unique to just that game. up to that point the System 11 sound boards were either all DAC (High Speed) or all YM2151. the CVSD digitizer capabilities were run on the MPU instead, so NARC was the first time I think they combined everything together. I bought the Z-unit book years ago cause it turned up for sale on ebay and I couldn't pass it up. I always thought the Z-unit architecture was brilliant and vastly ahead of its time circa 1987-1988. if it's any use, the NARC sound board uses the synthesizer side as the primary and digitizer as secondary. if the synthesizer CPU doesn't initialize for whatever reason, the entire sound board doesn't work from what I remember. I think that's going to be the only complication with that is that it has 2 CPUs and also 2 DACs (one for each side). the standard CVSD sound board from the Smash TV/System 11B era should be capable of running it, but I don't know how you can condense the operations to just 1 6809 CPU.

I've heard conflicting stories about Z-unit hardware, one side says Williams sold the game at a loss because it cost so much to make, but Eugene Jarvis said no to it losing money, it had some profit. but that was why it was condensed down to Y-unit and they borrowed the System 11B sound board until they got into T-unit/ADPCM.
Click to expand...
Yeah i agree, i was thinking about the system 11b/c sound boards i think earlier when i was delving into this, where they have everything, yamaha chips, dac and cvsd speech chips. Maybe its 2 of these needed haha. The system 11 sound architecture is complex and annoying to repair as they have 2 csvd and dac chips in use, sound and cpu board, so you can get situations where some speech works but not all of it etc. ha At least on system 11c they ditched the cpu sound part.
 
mypinballs said:
Yeah i agree, i was thinking about the system 11b/c sound boards i think earlier when i was delving into this, where they have everything, yamaha chips, dac and cvsd speech chips. Maybe its 2 of these needed haha. The system 11 sound architecture is complex and annoying to repair as they have 2 csvd and dac chips in use, sound and cpu board, so you can get situations where some speech works but not all of it etc. ha At least on system 11c they ditched the cpu sound part.
Click to expand...
you know what's crazy is we have Earthshaker and that's supposed to be a System 11B game, but the MPU sound section is empty and it uses all sound board. moderately confusing. I recorded pinball music in BridgeM1 for several years now and it sucks cause it only handles FM and DAC, there's no digitizer. (but has the CVSD volume controls and acknowledges it's there) I had to use Visual Pinball to get the speech parts with all the mechanical sounds that you conveniently can't mute.

I tried to notate as much information about the different sound boards as I could here: https://www.arcaderepair.net/williams-midway-cvsd-adpcm-sound-boards/
 
So, i've been hard at work trying to fix the missing games. Jam, Hangtime and WWF remain. We don't have source for Rampage it seems.
Out of those, i really like Hangtime and Jam. But they are missing the 'preasm' tool used during make.
This tool allows relaxed rules when writing code. You can use duplicate labels and values all over the place, and the tool will de-duplicate them before compilation.
I spent a lot of time on this and used chatgpt because i couldn't do everything i wanted on my own. I'll explain the logic later.
Here's a link to a version in Powershell on my Git: https://github.com/Asure/midway-preasm-powershell. (Might need to port this thing to somet other lang eventually.)

So with that done, i got to work on Hangtime first, but after manually fixing the game some time ago, it gave me 'out of memory' errors during compile.
It does the same with the preasm-fixed code, and i don't see how they would have worked around that. I'm an old school PC user, so i've been using DOS, QEMM and stuff like that ever since we got our first pc's around 1985, and i know how to get the most available EMS,XMS and base mem. I tried in a VM, emm386,QEMM/XMS/EMS settings, all the tricks in the book.. But it's a no-go.

With Wrestlemania things are different. I have the game working now. The final game, i played a ton of this when it came out on PC and Akklaim did a decent port.
The game was never in arcades a lot in my country, WWF was not popular enough in Euroland. Once Mame got to a point where this game worked, i again played the hell out of it. (I also own a PCB.)

Unifinished game?
I always loved the rumours and stuff in the FAQ's i'd get from Usenet, but they never enabled Undertakers' finisher in the PC version, so i missed out on that.
It eluded me why the other players didn't have them. But, it appears someone in the WWF got angry, i can't remember if it was Vince, and where i read this.
Anyway, the source leak came with a 'finish.asm' that holds Yokozunas falling lights finisher, and i've got this implemented:
View: https://youtu.be/_uvPeFvxV8c

(Finisher: DUDU+P, placeholder stick moves from Undertaker's finisher used for now.)

This isn't exactly how it may have looked in arcade, it was field tested and some guys saw it, but the code we have is not finished.

There's animations for more finishers, but no code to quickly implement them. It appears they wanted to save money, and extra features like these got cut because of rom sizes, and free space. There's almost no free space in the program area. However, they did ship the game with some gfx implemented for various things, one being blood. According to one .doc (from playtesters?) included with the leak "
Blood: There ain't none! In fact, we've told Mark and Sal that we don't really want any... after all, you don't see blood in the WWF anymore... if you want blood in wrestling, you watch the WCW, where they still use branding irons and such on each other... " . But they still tried it during development with Doink's character, and the code is in there, just commented out.

1699870556096.png


It was easy enough to enable. It's only shown on some face hits, but really changes the tone of the game.

The current ROM release with Doink blood and Yoko fatal is available in the GIT in the ROM folder ( wwf_game_rom_l1.30.u54 and wwf_game_rom_l1.30.u63)
You'll need the MAME debugger to load the GFX for the Yoko fatal, see the IMGROM folder on how to load this misc2.bin.

Enjoy!
 
I did some experimentation with swapping roms in MAME. there's no application possible for making NARC work with a standard CVSD sound board that I can tell cause the synthesizer roms only work with the NARC sound board and without the synthesizer working, there's no digitizer. lol

I did get Black Knight 2000 FM to work in Smash TV, that was wild. it's a similar issue with System 11/A/B pinball, FM runs off the sound board, but the digitizer is operated off the MPU, those roms don't plug in anywhere else.
 
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