2015.04.13
"Little SemiCom in Dragonworld"
system11 recently picked up another SemiCom title, this time it’s Ma Cheon
Ru, a tile matching game which seems to be heavily inspired by IGS’ Dragon
World series (the overall feel of the game is quite close to Dragon World 2)
It’s actually a bit of a mashup of your regular tile matching games and a
selection on minigames because after each round you’re presented with one of
a number of bonus features, including timed stamping of envelopes, punching a
guy in the face and a shooting gallery of sorts.
The actual protection data for the game hasn’t been read out yet, but by
hacking it up to use data from the XESS (Semicom 3-in-1) game I was able to
get something which appears playable, obviously I want to extract the real
data for this game before marking it as working tho (that’s the next task,
working with system11 to do that)
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/mcheonru_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/mcheonru_3.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/mcheonru_5.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/mcheonru_10.png
"French for Robots"
Over the last few days 2 new dumps were forwarded to the team via the AUMAP
community usually known for supplying Spanish dumps.
In this case both the games are French versions, and very rare at that.
First up, supplied by ‘Arcade Vintage’ is a version of Berzerk with French
sound roms.
All versions of Berzerk have multiple languages for the on-screen text, but a
number of versions were also produced with different Speech roms. A few years
ago the German version was dumped (which, if you ask me, makes the robots
sound more intimidating than ever) and with the addition of the French
version the only known variant missing is ironically, the Spanish one. These
are significant because apparently producing the speech was a painstaking
task back in the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aH1_02c8MI&feature=player_embedded
The other French game is a version of a previously undumped Sega title known
as ‘Car Hunt’
This wouldn’t be the first time where the only region we have for a game is
for a very specific and unexpected region, our Midnight Landing (Taito) is a
German region set for example.
The game is another take on ‘Head On’ but in this case you have full
control over your car with up,down,left and right directions rather than
swapping between lanes. Each level has a number of blue cars that move around
the maze without really homing in on you, then occasionally a red car will
appear out of nowhere directly on your tail.
If you lead the red car under the bridge section it will vanish
(interestingly there are no collisions under the bridge, so time things
correctly and you can pass through the blue cars in that section of the maze
too) As with Head-On the fire button makes you go quicker. Overall the less
restricted movement means this plays more like PacMan than Head-On.
Visually the player car looks a bit glitchy, with a missing pixel in the
middle, some wheels wider than other, and the occasional flicker of one of
the wheels. I’m not sure why, and we could do with verifying it on the
hardware to make sure it isn’t a dump problem. The boardset that was dumped
was also lacking the sound boards, and although it’s likely the sound was
discrete components only it means we don’t know how it should sound, and so
it remains silent in MAME.
The board is actually one of the 2-in-1 games on the Vic Dual platform, the
other title included is Deep Scan, which has previously been seen paired with
Invinco. Oddly the controls are a bit of an issue with this one because UP
for Car Hunt maps to ‘drop charge on left side’ for Deep Scan, I’m not
sure how the panel would have mapped for that.
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/carhunt_ds_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/carhunt_ds_4.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/carhunt_ds_5.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2015/carhunt_ds_7.png
Thanks to Ricky2001 (from AUMAP) for this one.
As the audio board was missing Ricky has put out a request. In the unlikely
event anybody has schematics for this specific game (not the Vic Dual board,
but the Car Hunt specific parts) could they post them.
來源：http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/