PC Engine core

[Newsdee]

Sorgelig, thank you very much for porting this core. It's one of my favorite cores for the MiST and the changes to use BRAM fixed a weird palette glitch that I saw with many games (e.g. R-Type). Much appreciated!

[amadama]

Using core TurboGrafx16_20171025 and Mister_20180115 on DE10-Nano with SDRAM card (no I/O board)
I'm encountering some games that don't work or crash on the TG16/PCE core:

D&D: Order of the Griffon, music plays but only black screen
Air Zonk, no sound and game crashes shortly after start
Battle Royale, just black screen
Bonk's Adventure, corrupt graphics
Cadash, crashes after entering character name
Dungeon Explorer, crashes after game start with multi-colored flashing screen
Raiden, game freezes after 30 seconds of game play
Talespin, freezes right as title is about to start

All games mentioned above are USA roms (same roms work ok on Mednafen emulator)
Can someone else verify these games to see if they have any issues like I describe above?
Thanks!

[Newsdee]

I think there is a flag in the OSD menu that you can turn on before loading TG16 games.

Also some larger ROMs like Air Zonk aren't supported.

[rittwage]

Also noted many games do not work. Blazing Lazers for one... It just plays the music, there is no graphic output.

[Newsdee]

Also noted many games do not work. Blazing Lazers for one... It just plays the music, there is no graphic output.

Try loading the Japan or American version, usually one works.

[rittwage]

Also noted many games do not work. Blazing Lazers for one... It just plays the music, there is no graphic output.

Try loading the Japan or American version, usually one works.

Nope, Japanese version is "Gunhed" also with the same problem. ROM is fine, this is some issue with the core..

[Bernd]

Hi,

I am new to MISTer and wondering why I can't swap between different romfiles pressing F12 and then selecting 'Load...' for selecting a different ROM using the PC Engine core?
Instead of showing the file selection dialog nothing happens.
Is this only happening on my MISTer? Am I doing something wrong? It only starts a rom when I rename it to boot.rom.
Same happens with the Atari2600 while e. g. C-64 and Amstrad work fine: There I can change between different roms easily.

Do I need to worry or is this happening on your machine as well?

Thanks,
Bernd.

SOLVED:
On these cores you have to press SPACE or joystick button to start select. "Return" does not work. Sorry for bothering.

[cacophony]

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

[Slade]

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

I tested quite a few games and the vast majority run fine.

After Burner II crashes during the intro
Aoi Blink doesn't load (black screen)
Batman doesn't load (black screen)
Benkei Gaiden doesn't load (black screen)
Bomberman 94 has a blue line running down the right of the screen, but otherwise seems ok
Burning Angels has corrupted graphics
Bosou Keiji - Burning cross (black screen)
Cadash (freeze on Taito screen)
Champion Wrestler (black screen)
City Hunter (black screen)

I stopped there... There are enough playable games, but a fair few that still don't load. Feel free to test some yourself.

[cacophony]

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

I tested quite a few games and the vast majority run fine.
...
I stopped there... There are enough playable games, but a fair few that still don't load. Feel free to test some yourself.

Thanks for the info. I'd test myself, but I'm trying to decide whether to take the plunge and purchase MiSTer + SDRAM board.

[cacophony]

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

I tested quite a few games and the vast majority run fine.

After Burner II crashes during the intro
Aoi Blink doesn't load (black screen)
Batman doesn't load (black screen)
...

I stopped there... There are enough playable games, but a fair few that still don't load. Feel free to test some yourself.

It looks like you were going alphabetically, so out of curiosity did Bonk's Adventure and Blazing Lazers work?

[Slade]

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

I tested quite a few games and the vast majority run fine.

After Burner II crashes during the intro
Aoi Blink doesn't load (black screen)
Batman doesn't load (black screen)
...

I stopped there... There are enough playable games, but a fair few that still don't load. Feel free to test some yourself.

It looks like you were going alphabetically, so out of curiosity did Bonk's Adventure and Blazing Lazers work?

I was going alphabetically. At this point in time, I can't recall those two games, specifically. I did only rudimentary testing on most of the games. I'm not at home at the moment, and won't be until late Sunday evening, but will be able to check either late Sunday or Monday and get back to you. I'm reasonably certain I got the games from the TOSEC archive on the Internet Archive. So if the files are in there, then I may have briefly tested them and they worked.

Remind me to check the games in a day or two and I'll have a second look when I'm back in front of my MiSTER.

[gnasher666]

Bonk's Adventure loads but I can only see Bonk, the number of lives and the score. No level graphics are displayed.

Blazing Lazers only plays the audio and no video output.

Hope that helps.

Has release 20180304 improved the stability/accuracy much? What percentage of roms are fully playable at this point?

I tested quite a few games and the vast majority run fine.

After Burner II crashes during the intro
Aoi Blink doesn't load (black screen)
Batman doesn't load (black screen)
...

I stopped there... There are enough playable games, but a fair few that still don't load. Feel free to test some yourself.

It looks like you were going alphabetically, so out of curiosity did Bonk's Adventure and Blazing Lazers work?

[Slade]

Bonk's Adventure loads but I can only see Bonk, the number of lives and the score. No level graphics are displayed.

Blazing Lazers only plays the audio and no video output.

Hope that helps.

Hey, thanks for testing. I didn't have either of those games in my original rom set on the microSD card. I've grabbed several different copies of the games and concur. Neither game works properly and displays as you've described.

Edit: I thought I'd test a few more games:

Coryoon - Child of Dragon - crashes starting a game
Cyber Core - black screen on start up, invalid graphics when starting new games, broken collision detection
Daichi Kun Crisis - black screen on start up, invalid graphics when starting new games
Darius Alpha - black screen
Devil Crash - Black screen
Don Doko Don - black screen
Download - sprites flicker but is playable (just)
Dragon Egg - black screen / frozen audio
Dungeon Explorer - graphical glitches

Ok, that's the D's done of the main rom set I have. There are a lot more playable games than unplayable, that's for sure.

[Newsdee]

A long time ago I made this spreadsheet for MiST:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... p=drivesdk

If anybody wants to take over send me an edit request and I can add you to it

[GreyRogue]

I've been working on something else that still needs more work, but I took a break and looked at this.

I've just submitted a small pull request that looks like it fixes 384K games. You can grab it from my fork if you want to test it right now. I also added mirroring for several other sizes, but I don't know that they're actually needed.

Special thanks to alanswx for the I/O board which made this and the other thing I'm working on much less painful.

[Sorgelig]

Thanks!
I'm glad to see collaborations.

[GreyRogue]

While I was messing around with this, I decided to add save support. A pull request has been created.
Neutopia file cabinet support appears to work now.

In case it wasn't clear, the 384K fix above fixes at least Bonk's Adventure, Blazing Lazers and Neutopia.

[Sorgelig]

Thanks!
I will finish my current task and will back to PCE to test your changes.

Did you use the automount .sav files like it's done for NES?

[Newsdee]

This is great! So happy to see some love to this great core, thanks a lot!

[PhantombrainM]

Blazing Laser's!!! Thank you GreyRogue and Sorgelig!

[GreyRogue]

Thanks!
I will finish my current task and will back to PCE to test your changes.

Did you use the automount .sav files like it's done for NES?

Yes. I mostly just copied and pasted from the NES code. I just made a small change to allow formatting of the save file from the OSD. I don't think all games let you format in game, so this seemed like it could be useful. It replaces the formatting I was doing when loading a ROM (not the save; loading the save would overwrite this formatting with whatever the contents of the file were).

Feel free to fix any mistakes I might have made here. I believe saves are 2048 bytes (for the entire console; not per game). They weren't part of the games like NES carts. There were some consoles that had the 2048 bytes built in, and others used 2048 byte memory cards, or at least that's my understanding. I'm not super familiar with the system. If you think it makes more sense to use a single file for all games, feel free to change it.

[Newsdee]

Saves on PCE are a bit weird. There were 2K (IIRC) of memory on the console, powered by a capacitor. No game had battery backup on the cart, and later games where on CD.

The saves could get deleted if you didn't power on the console for a long time! So devices came out to backup the data to a special SRAM card (with battery backup) that held 8K if I'm not mistaken. The most famous devices were the Tennokoe Bank I and II. 8K is not much though, and you had to get extra SRAM cards if you had a lot of games to backup.

For simplicity I think it would make sense to allocate 2K (separate save file) per game. I don't think anybody would be interested in the "realism" of switching 2K virtual cards for backup. Except maybe to load existing saves from emulators.

(by the way, you can run the Tennokoe cards in the core, but wom't do much except show a menu and maybe show internal memory status)

[Sorgelig]

Using a single memory card for several games is a bad idea.
Current implementation of .sav per game is much better. We are not limiting by memory carts amount like 30 years ago

[Newsdee]

Indeed. And if anybody wants to spend further time on the core, I'd rather have CD support or SF2' [*] support over complicated save schemes.

[*] The game plays but it needs a custom mapper logic for character graphics, and support two 6 button pads (otherwise you have to press Select to switch from punches to kicks...)