MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Desert Patrol emulation

>Was the game Desert Patrol ever emulated in Mame? I am referring to this game

Tafoid already provided exact answer.

There are a small amount of fans of the game as well that still post here on occasion, but most of the Desert Patrol fans have moved on.

If not familiar with some of the non-cpu video game hardware, PSE's Desert Patrol is one of those multiple pcb hardware games like PSE's other games such as Bazooka and Game Tree although their Knights in Armor is surprisingly a single board non-cpu video game, but the two roms have not yet been added to MAME source code at this time. And roms also not yet documented with PSE's Maneater as well.

This is MAME's official development open source project https://github.com/mamedev/mame

My extremely out-of-date computer is unable to go through all the branches there, so I'll use mirror site instead....

What has been done years earlier is documented several of the roms and proms of what they do according to each game using a manual as reference after roms have already been dumped and added to MAME source code.

See src/mame/drivers/pse.cpp file link ... and scroll down to near bottom of page to see rom files in source code and what each does.

https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers/pse.cpp

To most end users, this doesn't seem much, but for pcb owners that still have actual pcbs in possession, it means a lot in case a rom needs to be replaced in the future which is one reason why Nicola started MAME over two decades ago.

Many of the non-cpu video game titles have roms dumped and already documented in several source code files that end with *ttl.cpp such as Atari, Exidy, Taito, Sega etc.

This is Atari source file https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers/atarittl.cpp

If curious about some non-cpu video games already emulated see
src/mame/drivers/pong.cpp file

https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/drivers/pong.cpp

In pong.cpp file, there is some of the netlist source that helps run the emulated game, but the primary engine that runs the pcb is actually in the other source directory that has various net list files that can be found in section src/mame/machine/nl*.*

https://git.redump.net/mame/tree/src/mame/machine

Getting the roms and proms documented is important and that was one of the reasons why many folks helped get non-cpu pcb video games proms dumped for any games that used roms and proms.

There are some rom using non-cpu video games that are in a preliminary emulation stage such as Stunt Cycle.

For now, the net list emulation core code is still ongoing with various updates by couriersud, but some games already do have analog audio emulation and some of the non-cpu video games have already been emulated.

There are still a lot of ttl components not yet emulated and the thing with multiple pcbs will have to include the ability to synchronize each pcb with other pcb such as Kee Games Tank as an example or Meadows Bombs Away as another example. The game will run very slow compared to single board non-cpu video games.

The games that use 3 or more pcbs such as PSE's Desert Patrol or Game Tree might be much slower compared to Tank. And then think of Nutting Associates's Computer Space which uses 5 pcbs to run gameplay. That is why to expect single board non-cpu videogames to be emulated for some time unless maybe some unexpected surprise happens later.