MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Taito Balloon Bomber

Did Taito lose the source code for Rainbow Islands as well as Bubble Bobble?

I have a hunch that Taito hacked around the C-chip and MCU protection in a similar fashion to how MAME used to. If they couldn't properly archive the source code to Bubble Bobble, I don't have faith that they kept complete code for their protection chips. I am sure someone else before you had already pointed out that the official compilation versions of Operation Wolf had similar inaccuracies to the old MCU simulation/hacks in MAME (probably Haze?)

However, I do know that the sound effects in Taito re-releases of Space Invaders are, if not 100% accurate, at least more correct than MAME; when discrete sound emulation was added, it was based on the Midway version. It seems that Midway wrote their own discrete sound logic, because the sound effects are different, most noticeably the sound when you kill an enemy. (And there is still variance between MAME's sounds and real Midway versions too, notably the pitch, timbre and/or modulation of the laser sound, but that's a totally different subject.) The old sound samples in MAME came from a Taito board, and YouTube videos of Japanese and official UK/Europe Taito versions have the familiar sound effects Taito has always used in connection with Space Invaders. Finally, I played both a Midway upright and a Japanese Taito tabletop at California Extreme, I had my ear up to the speaker on the tabletop version and I heard the same "Taito" sound effects.

That said, I doubt that MAME will ever return to samples for the Taito sets. The Taito discrete sound clearly needs its own emulation (as does Space Invaders Part II, which had no sound variation between Taito and Midway versions), and there are already comments in the driver code on the subject of Taito sounds vs. Midway sounds, though no actual work has yet been done. The closest we have in MAME right now is the discrete sound emulation in Midway's Space Invaders II, where to make it easier to tell which player had killed an enemy, it would play the "Midway" sound when one player scored a hit, and the "Taito" sound for the other player. (I'm not sure if any of the other Taito sounds were used though - the shot sound, the UFO sound, the UFO hit sound, the player death sound, the extra life sound, etc.)