Star Wars Arcade (SEGA, 1993)

[dkongjr]

Recently a progress has been made to emulate this game in MAME. It's finally playable, but several issues still remain, and to solve them some information is required.

Stage 3: Death Star surface
- behavior of Darth Vader's ship, where does it go, what does it do, is it invincible?
- behavior of Darth Vader's two tie fighter escort, what do they do, are they invincible too?

Stage 4: Reactor chamber
- camera movement after shooting the reactor, what does it do, how it looks like?

So, if someone owns this game, or is otherwise able to play it, and can make a video recording of these last two stages, that would be great and very much appreciated.



http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=351945

[DarthMarino]

Have you tried checking the 32x port?

[lettuce]

I dont think the 32x version would help, its very different from the Arcade version. The 32x version is more simplified

There must also be some way to get the game in English as well as there is England voices in the sound test

[dkongjr]

Have you tried checking the 32x port?

Yes, it's different.

[dkongjr]

There must also be some way to get the game in English as well as there is England voices in the sound test

Something could be hacked out, but I do not see a legitimate way to switch.


Does anyone know how the speed control works, is it auto-centering in the middle?

[DarthMarino]

There must also be some way to get the game in English as well as there is England voices in the sound test

Something could be hacked out, but I do not see a legitimate way to switch.


Does anyone know how the speed control works, is it auto-centering in the middle?

Looks like it springs back to the center.  Go to 3:32 in this video:



This machine is also set on English.....

[lettuce]

There must also be some way to get the game in English as well as there is England voices in the sound test

Something could be hacked out, but I do not see a legitimate way to switch.


Does anyone know how the speed control works, is it auto-centering in the middle?

Looks like it springs back to the center.  Go to 3:32 in this video:



This machine is also set on English.....

Hmm i wounder how they set it to English, i know the Model 2 based games had a region code, like holding down certain V.R Buttons on the test screen, i wonder if Star Wars has a similar option

[aldub516]

 So I am asking this out of pure education because this topic was actually interesting to me. What is the relevance of knowing what certain things do or what happens in a game. Is this used by the person dumping the game to allocate certain files or actions for certain things happening in the game. It would be my little understanding that the ROMs or whatever is dumped would hold all the info of what Happens to say the tie fighter when you shoot it.  Is someone actually trying to emulate what happens   I'm clueless but thought it's a cool subject. Say someone  send you a video of the last levels with Darth Vader's ship or the camera movement you asked for. What would you do with that

[Haze]

The game has a 'maths chip' which has internal code (we believe) and can't be dumped by any conventional methods.

The game uses operations programmed into that chip to control certain aspects of the game play.

As we can't dump the chip and emulate the CPU inside of it we have to understand the behavior and write high level emulation/simulation code for the behavior of the chip.

Understanding what should happen in certain situations in the game allows better guesses to be made for what the various operations do.

This applies to all Model 1 games (and infact Wing War emulation seems to have got worse with improements to Star Wars, could be that the chip is programmed in different ways, could indicate there are still issues)

We know the chip is programmed in a different way for Virtua Racer, but we also discovered that Virtua Racer and Daytona seem to share the same / similar maths engine, so we were able to cheat and use the external data Daytona uploads to emulate Virtua Racing, we don't have that luxury for the other games.

[oldschoolplaya]

I'm really interested in getting the model x games working in MAME.  Glad to hear there is progress with Star Wars Arcade. 

Maybe it is futile, but has anyone from the MAME team just asked Sega if they could release any schematics or documentation for the custom chips?  I seriously doubt Sega would care at this point, look at all the system 16 / 32 games that have been emulated and they are probably liking it.

[clok]

I'm really interested in getting the model x games working in MAME.  Glad to hear there is progress with Star Wars Arcade. 

Maybe it is futile, but has anyone from the MAME team just asked Sega if they could release any schematics or documentation for the custom chips?  I seriously doubt Sega would care at this point, look at all the system 16 / 32 games that have been emulated and they are probably liking it.

Sega would probably not care, but they wouldn't, there is the chance of  retro release  so letting this out would "maybe" some time in the future hurt some sales of something they haven't made. But most likely there is licencing issues, SEGA doesn't own the ability to sell the game in any form other then carts, and my guess is the agreement said once the hardwares/carts where discontinued the agreement was too with options to renew. SO Disney (Lucas arts) or Sega both wouldn't do it. Of course hardware that runs Licenced games is somewhat different, there might be some leeway there, they are not releasing the game, just the hardware.

but who knows, maybe Im wrong 

[ark_ader]