MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: dox: Future Flash

*excerpt from dox's web page*
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I wrote a basic emulation driver, but found a blocker - protection device. There's a custom chip marked "Z1". Game wasn't playable at all. Was crashing soon after boot. Protection wasn't just a simple check at game start, like in some games from '80s. Z1 device was was mapped into memory range like a common RAM chip and accesses very often. I've removed Z1 fro the board and sent to someone for decapping. But it got lost... Nothing happened for a couple of years then..

Few weeks ago Morten Shearman Kirkegaard, Samuel Neves and Peter Wilhelmsen made an awesome step forward. They bought another (also broken...) board and cracked the Z1 protection - ended up with an algorithm that can be represented using a bunch of MUX2 gates taking entropy based on the past 4 read offsets (40-bits state). It took about a week. After that, i started to improve the emulation driver. Fixed controls, interrupts, added very preliminary audio (only the 8253 clocks are emulated). Here's a video from the MAME - attract mode (notice the special level - space tunnel made of dots) and start of gameplay. Emulation is far form perfection. There are gfx glitches, weird colors and lacks of most of the sound effects. There's no reference video - no one knows how the game should look like.
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Good to see further progress taking place. I wonder if the audio output is both a mix of digital (some audio data in roms) and remaining portion is analog/discrete based.

Too bad that a couple of the fanboy/users of Future Flash are probably no longer around. Maybe they could have helped recall game play, but if anything it would be great if the pcbs can be fully repaired if even possible.