That was a great read! Seems like the guy made up that story of moving into a house and "finding" the PCB's but anyway great news the roms were saved.
Did you see in the new November MAME and soon to be released in December's MAME, MAME developer "Windyfairy" has added in some new graphics fixes to Ridge Racer (accurate shadows) plus added network card emulation to the Konami hornet and viper systems. Another MAME developer Ville had previously worked on this and said the network emulation was holding back a bunch of the Konami 3D Racers so fingers crossed for more working driving games soon.
@John Bennett perhaps yourself and Windyfairy could collaborate on your excellent work?
Happy new year!
Yeah, that was all made up about finding a Fullscale in the house, same bloke. So bloody annoying, the whole thing, but at least we saved the main parts.
If you look down on in that arcadeblogger page, there's a link to a video of an MX-5 dash on the floor - that's me. My current plans are:
Build up a PCB (parts arrive this week) so I can drive an MX-5 dash from a PC (without piles of wires and stripboard). Fullscale used a 'V138' PCB to drive the room lights and the dashboard. I cloned that for documentation purposes, then made my own version that talks to a PC and uses a dsPIC to control everything.
This'll draw a line under the fullscale emulation.
Tidy up the driver, and pull any recent updates (like the shadows you mention).
Put the code out there in the state it's in now.
Keep tinkering when I can.
I'm not really interested in putting the code into MAME myself, but it'll be there for people to pick apart. Code reviews are bad enough in a job, I'm not enduring them for a hobby
(plus that code is hack-central, it'll have people twitching, but I wanted it playable).