# MAMEINFO.DAT v0.117                                 Last Update: 10th July 2007
#
# Homepage: http://www.mameworld.net/mameinfo         E-Mail:  mameinfo@arcor.de
#
#
# Credits go out to Robert J. Rabgno creating the initial file and all the members of the
# Mametesting Project for contributing to it's continued relevance.
# If you are interested to know more about emulation bugs or want to be part of the
# Mametesters team go to http://www.mametesters.org/
#
#
#
#    THE MAMEINFO.DAT CONTAINS INFOS ABOUT:
#
#    - Reported bugs from the MAME Testing Project:
#       'Current Bug Report', 'Know Bugs', 'Possible bugs', 'The Orange Files',
#       'Bugs that aren't bugs', 'DIP Switches and INPUT Bugs' and 'Source Issues'.
#    - Source/Whatsnew/Readme.txt from MAME 0.01-0.117
#    - MAME-Listinfo 0.34RC1-0.117
#    - WIP informations from all MAME DEVs (Example: 12th December 2003: DOX - Fix protection...)
#    - MAME Work-In-Progress (WIP) from February 1999-July 2004
#    - Notes about Setup, Service, Test Mode and Known issues
#    - Game LEVELS: http://www.emuitalia.net/mamend/
#    - Category and Recommended Games
#    - 'PLAY INSTRUCTIONS' and 'STORY'
#    - 'ARCADE RELEASE' dates
#    - Other Emulators: Calice, Callus, CINEMU, Cottage, GalEMU, HiVE, FinalBurn, JAE, JAS-SYS1,
#                       JFF, LASER, M72, Mimic, Nebula, RAINE, Retrocade, Shark, Sparcade,
#                       System16, SystemC2 and VAntAGE
#    - Game Drivers (TODO, NOTES)
#    - Source code (drivers/vidhrdw/sndhrdw)
#    - Version releases for all original games
#    - 'UMAMED NOTES' from http://unmamed.mame.net
#    - Samples
#    - Romset and Harddisk/CD
#    - Games with different language
#    - Tips and TODO
#
#
#
#
#    Bug Colour Coding:
#
#    Red      Fatal bugs (crashes, games not working etc.)
#    Yellow   Severe emulation problems (corrupt graphics, sound not working, etc.)
#    Green    Cosmetical issues (jerkiness, minor gfx problems, etc.)
#    Blue     Has been fixed
#    Orange   Useful Information
#    Gray     DIP Switch and/or Control/Input Information
#    Cyan     Links to screenshots, .inp files, .sta files, or additional text.
#    V        Tested and verified by a number of testers.
#    P        Verified though a side-by-side comparison with an original PCB.
#
#

$info=jojo
$mame
0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added clones JoJo's Venture / JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken (Asia, 990108, NO CD) and (Asia, 981202, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. JoJo's Venture is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Added clone JoJo's Venture / JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken (Japan, 990108). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'JoJo's Venture / JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted JoJo's Venture images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.81u3: Added JoJo's Venture (Capcom 1998).


Romset: 53760 kb / 9 files / 41.8 zip

CD-ROM: 62.7 MB (Compressed: 43.0)

$end



$info=jojoba
$mame
0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added clone JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future / JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken: Miraie no Isan (Euro, 990913, NO CD). Renamed (jojoba) to (jojoban) and (jojobaa) to (jojoba). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future / JoJo no Kimyouna Bouken: Miraie no Isan'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted JoJo's Bizarre Adventure images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.82u2: Added clone JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (alt).

- 0.82: Added missing user1 BIOS rom.

- 0.81u3: Added JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Capcom 1999).


Romset: 66048 kb / 10 files / 48.86 zip

CD-ROM: 77.12 MB (Compressed: 50.46)

$end


$info=warzard
$mame
0.116u4 [?]

0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added Red Earth (Euro, 961121) (Capcom 1996) and clone (961121, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Warzard is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'Warzard / Red Earth'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted Warzard CD images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.81u3: Added Warzard (Capcom 1996).


Romset: 45568 kb / 8 files / 34.64 zip

CD-ROM: 53.21 MB (Compressed: 35.4)

$end


$info=sfiii
$mame
0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added clones Street Fighter III: New Generation (USA, 970204) and (Asia, 970204, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Street Fighter III is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'Street Fighter III: New Generation'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted Street Fighter III images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

-  7th April 2003: Guru - Street Fighter III New Generation (Capcom 1997, CPS3) arrived from Smitdogg.

- 0.81u3: Added Street Fighter III - New Generation (Capcom 1997).


Romset: 45568 kb / 8 files / 35.16 zip

CD-ROM: 53.2 MB (Compressed: 36.0)

$end



$info=sfiii2
$mame
0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added clones Street Fighter III 2nd Impact: Giant Attack (USA, 970930) and (Asia, 970930, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Street Fighter III 2nd Impact is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'Street Fighter III 2nd Impact: Giant Attack'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted Street Fighter III 2nd images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.81u9: Added new bios rom (user1 $0).

- 0.81u3: Added Street Fighter III 2nd Impact - Giant Attack (Capcom 1998).


Romset: 66048 kb / 10 files / 39.72 zip

CD-ROM: 77.1 MB (Compressed: 41.2)

$end



$info=sfiii3
$mame
0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added clones Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future (Japan, 990512, NO CD) and (Japan, 990608, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Street Fighter III 3rd Strike is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Added clone Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future (USA, 990608). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.108u3: Added new user1 rom sf33usa.bin (this one is from a usa version).

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight for the Future'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted Street Fighter III 3rd Strike images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.82: Added missing user1 BIOS rom.

- 0.81u3: Added Street Fighter III 3rd Strike -  Fight for the Future (Capcom 1999).


Romset: 82432 kb / 12 files / 63.27 zip

CD-ROM: 96.2 MB (Compressed: 64.7)

$end

$info=warzard
$mame
0.116u4 [?]

0.81u3 [?]


CD-ROM required


WIP:

- 0.116u4: Added Red Earth (Euro, 961121) (Capcom 1996) and clone (961121, NO CD). Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 25MHz.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Warzard is now playable.

- 0.116u2: Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 6250000 Hz. Added Custom (14318166 Hz) sound. Changed visible area to 384x224. Added 'Unknown' dipswitches.

- 0.96u2: Changed description to 'Warzard / Red Earth'.

- 0.86u3: R. Belmont converted Warzard CD images (CD cue+bin) to CHD.

- 0.81u3: Added Warzard (Capcom 1996).


Romset: 45568 kb / 8 files / 34.64 zip

CD-ROM: 53.21 MB (Compressed: 35.4)

$end


$info=cps3.c
$drv
0.116u2 [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi, Tomasz Slanina, Philip Bennett]

0.81u3 [?]


TODO:

- There are currently a bunch of hacks in here to workaround the way the encryption works on the actual PCB. It seems that the SH2 DMA should bypass the encryption, returning values directly stored in the BIOS and/or flashROMs. Without modification to the CPU core this isn't possible. The hacks currently in the driver allow the Flash commands to be sent correctly from the BIOS rom (they're stored unencrypted) and allow the Flash type and Rom checksums to pass, needed for the flash routines.

- The SCSI / CD Rom controller code here is limited, it's designed for the needs of CPS3 only, we should fix MAME's generic implementation and use that.

- Street Fighter 3 2nd Impact uses flipped tilemaps during flashing, emulate this.

- Figure out proper IRQ10 generation: If we generate on DMA operations only then Warzard is OK, otherwise it hangs during attract. HOWEVER, SFIII2 sometimes has messed up character profiles unless we also generate it periodicly. I think the corrupt background on some of the lighning effects may be realted to this + the DMA status flags.

- Alpha Blending Effects: These are actually palette manipulation effects, not true blending. How the values are used is not currently 100% understood, however it seems good enough for Warzard etc. at the moment.

- Linezoom: Is it used anywhere??

- Palette DMA effects: Verify them, they might not be 100% accurate at the moment.

- Verify Full Screen Zoom on real hardware. Which is which, x & y registers, how far can it zoom etc.

- Verify CRT registers: Only SFIII2 changes them, for widescreen mode. What other modes are possible?

- Sprite positioning glitches: Some sprites are still in the wrong places, seems the placement of zooming sprites is imperfect eg. warzard intro + cutscenes leave the left most 16 pixels uncovered because the sprite is positioned incorrectly, the same occurs in the sf games. doesn't look like the origin is correct when zooming in all cases.

- Gaps in Sprite Zooming probably cause by use of drawgfx instead of processing as a single large sprite, but could also be due to the positioning of each part of the sprite.


NOTES:

- Driver by David Haywood with help from Tomasz Slanina and ElSemi. Decryption by Andreas Naive. Sound emulation by Philip Bennett.

- Sets are region hacked for now, to make the test modes readable, don't take the regions you see on bootup as being correct.


WIP:

- 0.117: David Haywood added alpha blending effects to the CPS driver and improved sprite positioning. R. Belmont fixed CPS3 code to be big-endian friendly.

-  8th July 2007: ElSemi - CPS3 Emulator v1.0: This is the final version of the CPS3 emulator. It adds transparency effects (not actual transparency, but well it looks like that :) ), although it's not fully understood yet. Fixed palette transformation for flashes, and fadein/outs, now blacks properly fade to white. Fixed crashes in some zoomin ending sequences in SF3 games. Fixed a 1 pixel offset in the framebuffer that was causing a 1 pixel column problem in the left side of the screen sometimes. Added support for Nebula external video plugins (there is some source code and the interface documents in the plugins folder). Added CHD (MAME's compressed Hard Disks CD Images) support. Just put the .chd files in the CHD folder in the main directory (sorry, no path selection for it). And the bios (or the full roms zip) romsets in the ROMS directory. When loading a CHD romset, the emulator will run the entire startup sequence so it will take a while to boot (early games just have a black screen) while the bios waits for the cd to spin up. You don't need to go through the flashrom rewritting sequence, although you can see how it looks (just for fun, as it doesn't actually write anything) by going to Test menu and selecting "Game Rewrite". Using CHDs doesn't have an actual benefit (except for seeing the exact startup sequence of the game machine) apart from being able to run Warzard in any region because Warzard always checks the cd ingame unless it's set to asia, so by having the real CD emulation through CHD, you can run it in any region).

- 0.116u4: CPS3 updates [David Haywood, ElSemi]: Corrected clock speed, used idle skipping instead of reducing the clock speed. Optimized some GFX functions. It now only decodes RAM based tiles when it needs to draw them, not every single time the data changes. Added support for CD flashing. Added support for alternate BIOS sets. Changed code to use a custom render function.

-  3rd July 2007: David Haywood - Watching Paint Dry: I've hooked up the CD-Flash mechanism in CPS3. The code is a bit messy at the moment, but it seems to be working, and yes, the SFIII3 screenshot says *70* minutes. Quite how they managed that I don't know, I don't think the CPS3 CD/Flash code could be more inefficient if they tried, not even Vista is *that* slow at copying files.

- 0.116u3: Various CPS3 updates [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, ElSemi]. Nicola Salmoria simplified CPS3 decryption function. R. Belmont fixed CPS3 code to work on big-endian systems. Changed SH-2 CPU1 clock speed to 10MHz.

- 28th June 2007: ElSemi - CPS3 Emulator Preview 3 Test Vversion: This is a preview version of my CPS3 emulator. Here you can see the current work-in-progress state of the emulation. New features emulated: Palette fadein/out, Sean stage special tile compression, Proper sprite/tilemap alignment and proper priority handling. The CPS3 emulation is almost complete. Only the shadow/blending emulation is missing. There is a preliminary emulation for it that works partially with the shadows, but is not correct in some other places (warzard sword effects for example). I've added savestates support. To make a savestate, first select the slot with CTRL+number (in the main keyboard, not in the keypad) then press F11 twice (it's done that way so you don't accidentally delete a working state). To load a savestate, select the slot and then press F10. I've added an option to set a custom fullscreen resolution in the .ini file (FullScreenWidth,FullScreenHeight). You must enable it setting Video->Fullscreen Resolution->Custom. Using a resolution that is not supported by your video card will cause the emulator to crash. I'm not including the MultiCPU version as it causes some graphics glitches and if you have a dual core CPU, then you have enough power to run the standard version.

- 27th June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Tile Compression Part 3: Sean's Stage in SFIII New Generation uses a different compression scheme to the other games. For some reason, Capcom decided that one stage, in one game would use a different system. The Compression used on this level supports 8bpp tiles instead of 6, thus allowing for more colours, but a less efficient compression scheme. I've spent some time looking at this, and mostly figured out how it works. There are still a few problems, but I now have reocgnizable background tiles at least. Update: Ok, Sean's stage graphics are 100% fixed, ElSemi found the minor error in the implementation. I'll post screenshots later as I can't recompile at this very minute. I'm guessing ElSemi will have a good looking screenshot up fairly soon anyway.

- 23rd June 2007: R. Belmont - Bigger and better: Here is a revised cps3.c (unzip and put in src/mame/drivers and recompile) which fixes the sprites, backgrounds and colors for CPS3 on big-endian machines (for SDLMAME that's PowerPC Macs and the PS3). The front text layer is still missing so there are no life bars, but it's playable at least.

- 22nd June 2007: David Haywood - Full-screen Zoom: I've come up with a preliminary implementation of Full-screen zoom, used pretty heavily by JoJo and Warzard. Right now the code assumes that the view will never be zoomed more than twice the normal visible area away, as it's a framebuffer zoom I'd expect there to be some sensible limit in hardware such as this, although testing on the real hardware would be good. Note, I haven't managed to fix the reported crash in SFIII NG, I'm looking into it now.

- 21st June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Palettes (5:51 PM): I think I've fixed the palettes. There was a single bit to select which one to use (the one in the main list, or the one in the sublists). Not tested too much so far, but everything I've seen looks much better. The only 'bad' colours I can see now are where there should be shadow sprites / alpha blending effects.

- 20th June 2007: ElSemi - CPS3 Emulator Preview 2 Test Vversion: This is a preview version of my CPS3 emulator. Here you can see the current work-in-progress state of the emulation. I've fixed some problems in the emulation: Color palettes seem right now, fullscreen Zoom, sprite Zoom and linescroll. The priorities have improved but they aren't fully right yet (mainly in jojo games). Shadow/alpha is still missing. Linezoom is missing, but I haven't found a single place where it's used. Sean stage in sf3ng doesn't crash now, but shows garbage in the bg. I've added an entry to the ini so you can switch the region (except for warzard that it won't boot unless region is Asia). I've also tried to fix some problems that people were having with some old and integrated graphics chipsets. Probably some problems have been fixed, but there might still be some around. You can now also try to fix the renderer to the vsync of your monitor with an option in the ini file (ForceSync). CPS3 Emulator Test Version 2. This package includes both the normal and MultiCPU versions exes. If you have graphics problems and are using the MultiCPU version, try with the standard version. UPDATE: I've noticed that I disabled the image filtering in fullscreen. I've updated the package with an exe that works like the old version you can get the unfiltered version by setting FilterTilemaps=0 in the ini.

- 20th June 2007: ElSemi -  CPS3 Emulator Preview Test Version: This is a preview version of my CPS3 emulator. Here you can see the current work-in-progress state of the emulation. There are still a lot of missing features to emulate properly so don't report any emulation errors yet. The missing features include (and the effect caused by them missing): Sprite Zoom: you'll see the sprite tiles (squares) not being properly aligned or with gaps Fullscreen Zoom: Sometimes it seems like the camera is not pointing to the action Per-tile palette selection: some colors (a lot in some games) are wrong Priorities: objects that are over the background when they should appear behind Linescroll: Floor 3D effect missing. SF32ndi scrolling letters in intro missing. Linezoom: I don't know where is it used. CPS3 Emulator Test Version. This package includes both the normal and MultiCPU versions exes.

- 0.116u2: Added audio\cps3.c and includes\cps3.h. Initial cut at working CPS3 driver. Basically works but has a lot more work to be done to finish it up [David Haywood, Andreas Naive, Tomasz Slanina, ElSemi, Philip Bennett].

- 21st June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Sprite Zoom: I've hooked up a preliminary spritezoom in CPS3 (this progress is in Mame0116u2) and passed the information on how it works to ElSemi so that he can implement it in his standalone emulator. Basically each part of a sprite can specify the height / width of that part in pixels, and the number of tiles that are used to cover that height / width. Previously I was using the upper 4 bits of the height / width as the number of tiles instead. After realising that this was wrong and finding the actual # of tiles bit implementing the zoom was fairly straightforward. JoJo / JoJo Ba have a test mode where you can test the sprites. This is only available when the game is set to 'Developer Mode' ( 0x7x region code in the BIOS ) As the current MAME driver is set to this while I work on it, you can access the hidden mode by holding Player 1 button 1 when entering test mode. Warzard also uses it for the character profiles in the background on the select screen. Compare this to the shot in the previous news post. Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike uses it during the intro for some portraits, these looked terrible with the previous preview code. And it's also used for the 'Fight' graphics at the start of the round on most of the games. There are many other places where it's used as Capcom made fairly extensive use of it for special effects etc. So having it implemented improves a large number of little things. CPS3 also has 'Line Zoom' and 'Frame Zoom' Frame Zoom seems to be some kind of Framebuffer zoom, allowing the player to see a greater / smaller area of the playfield. Implenenting that *fast* in MAME could be a pain ;-) I remember having to do similar for 'Rabbit' and it slowing the whole thing down significantly due to the overhead of having to render and clear an extended display area. Anyway, I'll look into it at some point, but first I'd like to look into fixing the remaining sprite palette issues both myself and ElSemi are having. He's using one sprite colour register, I'm using the other, there must be some way to combine them, or select which one to use.

- 20th June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 More Progress: I fixed a few problems (broken fastboot hacks are bad mmmk) and Warzard now has sprites, and the Sprite positions in the other games seem more correct. The zoom isn't emulated on the sprites yet, hence the bad looking ones on the first shot in the backgrond. You may have noticed the site was down for a bit yesterday, basically the bandwidth usage was killing the mameworld.info server, so Twisty disabled it for a while. Go easy on the refresh button guys.

- 18th June 2007: David Haywood - Sprites... (9:13 PM): This is the first shot of some sprites with meaningful tiles. Everything is in the wrong place and upside down at the moment, but you can see where this is heading.

- 18th June 2007: David Haywood - Tile Compression Part 2 (6:30 PM): Dox made a suggestion, i implemented it and now the tile DMA is fixed. Basically the RLE byte should affect the last normal byte before it, NOT the byte after it. This simplifies the code, and produces much better results.

- 18th June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Tile / Sprite Data Compression: CPS3 uses compressed data for it's BG tiles and Sprite Data. The system has a 'DMA' list in Video RAM, and when given the command the video hardware will process this list, and copy + decompress graphic data from the FlashROMs into Video RAM for use by the game. The compression initially looked rather complex, but actually turns out to be much more simple than first thought (although emulation still isn't perfect). The basics of it are simple. The first command in the DMA list is a special command, telling the chip to upload a 256 byte table to its internal memory. The Compressed data contains 8 bit values from 00 - FF. Byte with 0x80 set (0x80 - 0xFF) are treated as a lookup into the table it uploaded, replacing one byte, with one word from the table. This allows them to compress the 128 most common words to a single byte instead of a word, thus saving 50%. After that there is an RLE stage, bytes with 0x40 set are command bytes, telling the chip to repeat the next byte a certain number of tiles. What you're left with is a series of values between 0x00 and 0x3f, giving 6bpp (64 colour) sprite / bg tiles. What isn't quite understood is what happens if there is an RLE command byte followed by an RLE command byte, or if RLE is applied to a 0x80 byte, does it just affect the first value in the table, or do both get repeated etc. Here are some screenshots, they're not quite as good as ElSemi's, probably due to a bug in the code I'm using right now. Also I've had to disable the text layer palette for now because MAME can't handle over 0x10000 colours in a palette without custom drawing functions.

- 16th June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Colours: The palette DMA is now emulated, so the text layer is looking a lot nicer now. Note, Warzard / Red Earth still does not boot in MAME, I have no idea why, don't worry tho, the decryption of it is fine, it's just not booting for me. Note 2, ignore the regions, most dumped sets are actually Japan. Note 3, the strange outlines around the tiles are because they're being drawn as solid, not transparent... mainly due to the fact that there is nothing behind them right now.

- 15th June 2007: David Haywood - CPS3 Sound: No real progress on the Backgrounds / Sprites / Palette i'm afraid. Lots of things have been ruled out, but no conclusions have been made on how it actually gets/decode the data from FlashRoms into RAM yet, it seems to be some kind of external DMA but we can't find any parameters or what triggers it right now. On the good side of things, Eeprom access has been fixed, so SFIII / 2 / 3 boot without Eeprom hacks. Warzard still doesn't boot for some reason, although ElSemi has it booting outside of MAME (it doesn't reveal any more clues about the backgrounds/sprites work tho). Also, and this is the main thing I want report here, Phil Bennett has added preliminary sound emulation (as mentioned in the comments of the previous post). Here is a short OGG recorded from SF3 in MAME. As you can hear, the game is running even if you can't really see anything apart from the health bars.

- 11th June 2007: David Haywood - Skipping Ahead: Dox decided to hack around a bit with the driver, and found a way to skip some of the tests. As a result JoJo and JoJoba actually now execute some of the game code, rather than just the bios. They both hang after the Japan warning however. The code appears to be stuck in a big loop, dong not much at all. Doing this properly is something of a pain in the backside due to the way MAME works. The games execute code from FlashROMs, however due to the way FlashROMs are accessed MAME must map them as Read/Write handlers in the driver, not blocks of RAM/ROM. MAME's CPU cores don't handle executing code from Read/Write handlers well, nevermind *encrypted* code (with the possibility of *decrypted* data) from such handlers. This is probably going to require some rather ugly hacking around. Its interesting to note that JoJoba is the NCD set, while JoJobaa appears to be a standard set. They both however still check for the CD, so I'm guessing there must be something else to it too. It's also interesting to note that the dates these things are booting up with seem completely wrong. Maybe it's not running the correct boot code.

- 10th June 2007: David Haywood - 10:09 PM. Keys to the World: Andreas Naive figured out the keys for the other games, giving us a bit more to work with. Of course, everything is stuck with error messages at the moment as I haven't made much more progress with the CD-Controller emulation yet. I found that the AMD 33C93A SCSI controller is supported in MESS (wd33c93.c), I don't know how well it works tho, it's only used by the Indy driver... I guess I'm going to have to find out. Warzard (Complains about the CD-ROM?), Street Fighter III: New Generation (The same?), Street Fighter III 2nd Impact: Giant Attack (Likewise), Street Fighter III 3rd Strike: Fight For The Future (Same message as the original JoJo) and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (Same message as the original JoJo).

- 10th June 2007: David Haywood - 3:59 PM. CPS3, more progress: I've hooked up the FlashROMs, now the bios is waiting for the CD-ROM so that it can flash them... Of course, without the CD-Drive emulated it isn't too happy... I guess I'd better correct it properly. Upate: At the moment the only graphics that are implemented is the text tilemap using the 8x8 tiles it uploads to RAM. Once it gets a bit further we can look at implementing the backgrounds and sprites. And if it starts flashing 'Insert Coin', i'll be happy to work on the rest of the video hardware.

-  9th June 2007: David Haywood - Andreas Naive is pretty good at decryption... Now, are we good enough to emulate it? Sounds like a challenge. Update: The game code has however also been decrypted, how it's accessed/used isn't quite clear at the moment due to the whole mess with flashing the flashram from CD etc. That's just the first meaningful screenshot we've got out of it (it uploads tile data to ram, then the tilemap data to display them). Andreas Naive will look at the other games soon, to see if they can be decrypted too.

- 0.81u3: Added cps3.c driver. This driver never work (encryption etc.). It does NOTHING, for reference only Street Fighter III etc.

- 29th March 2006: Razoola - CPS-3 Battery Replacement: Since I get emailed about this alot I have added a short FAQ on how to change batteries on CPS-3 hardware. This is totally based on an older FAQ found on the net and I take no credit for it (http://cps2shock.retrogames.com/cps3/index.html).

$end
