Main > Driving & Racing Cabinets
Ridge Racer 2 and Rave Racer link play working in MAME WIP test build.
Hydreigon:
I compared C139 and MB89372's pinouts as from Final Lap's manual showing the schematics. Unfortunately, the pinouts of the two do not match but both chips were Fujitsu made.
Final Lap schematics: https://www.arcade-museum.com/manuals-videogames/F/FinalLap.pdf
John Bennett:
Yes, physically that chip is very different to the C139.
The MB has lots of discrete signals to control the operation, whereas the C139 just has eight registers you write to over the parallel bus.
The C139 also interfaces to a 9-bit SRAM IC that the main CPU can only access via the C139. The first half is for outgoing data, the second for incoming. I thought it was 9-bit due to parity, and it might be (that doesn't come into play for emulation), but it is also used as a marker to indicate the end of a packet (which certain games use, but not all, I think). The MB has small internal FIFO buffers instead.
But I've only had a glance and I'll have another read as there are techniques that might be common to both. I should also look at some other UART driver ICs, like those PC used as there'll be common features.
I think I'm close anyway and you don't emulate most of what the chip does anyway (or I'm not) - ultimately you're just working out when to move some bytes from one instance of MAME to another rather than worrying about clock-edges, parity bits and all the other low-level stuff.
As a progress-update, I started to look at Cyber Commando to see if it threw up any new ideas (as I didn't quite resolve why Ace Driver wasn't right). Looks like it uses the chip in an almost identical way. Unfortunately things are hectic with work so I've stopped for a week or so, but I'll get back to it. I'm starting to wonder if there's something fishy going on with global comms - like it can only do one read/write operation per frame, which would cause me a bit of bother as there's a lot more data exchanges than that going on when each board wants to send a packet onto the loop every frame (that would mean each game would expect to receive up to 8 packets of data for an 8-board hookup as each C139 will throw the packet onto the next device in the loop until it's been round them all). Maybe that's not the case with global comms, but I'll look into that next week (promise :-D ) .
buttersoft:
Got Rave Racer running today, pretty awesome. Thanks to JB for the build!
I did try the FFB plugin and can't seem to get it running. Anyone got it working? After setting Outputs = Windows in MAME.ini, and selecting my wheel from the FFB plugin GUI, is there anything else needed?
TheArcadeStriker:
While I have got both games linked up (interestingly enough frameskip seems to work if you apply them to both, so you can use it if the game runs slow from running two instances), Rave Racer doesn't let me accelerate when the race starts for some reason in both instances (the pedal does work at the menus AND before the count ends...but doesn't do so after; the wheel seems to be picked up).
Also Tokyo Wars would be interesting to see; tried it for curiosity but it is true that any other games other than RR2/RVR won't pick up any link stuff as they aren't supported yet.
buttersoft:
Have you tried reversing each or both pedals in the the mame analogue options while the game is running?
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