> > Out of curiosity, has anyone been putting effort into decrypting the x-in-1 boards? > > I'm less interested in this from the standpoint of seeing them emulated (which, > IMHO, > > is pretty much a 'who cares' sort of thing), but am interested in seeing what the > > underlying code for both the UI and emulator may be. > > 39-in-1 runs (slowly). When it's booting up and listing each game, it's actually > emulating it until the POST is complete, inserting a coin, and then save-stating it > to RAM. This is why each game takes a wildly different amount of time for its name to > be printed during that startup.
OK, that fills in one of the questions I've had regarding those boards' initial POST behaviour and is actually kinda cool. A bit bass-ackwards IMHO - they could have just loaded pre-generated save states from storage into RAM rather than creating them on the fly at each boot - but I guess that doing it that way saved $0.17 per board on the BOM or something
> Then when you pick a game to run it just resumes that save state. It's possible in > the MAME debugger to skip that step; it starts up immediately but when you pick a > game it then just POSTs and goes through attract mode
Given the intended application of these boards, it makes sense: with near-instantaneous game switching being desirable, this would certainly be one way of achieving it. > I strongly believe the emulator is MAME although I haven't tried to decompile it or > anything, and they did a good job scrubbing it for tell-tale strings (as opposed to > Konami's PS2 classics series, which has Aaron's name in it and the MAME version > string). The game selection and the timeframe pretty much guarantees that.
I seem to recall someone mentioning several years ago that there was an in-game giveaway in one of the 39-in-1's games as to the boards' MAME origins. Specifics escape me right now, but I want to say that it was something along the lines of a later-fixed bug specific to MAME's emulation of that particular game being triggered in one of the drivers during gameplay; this at least pegged it to a MAME version less than n.
That said, it's a pretty weak memory. I could be confusing it with something else.
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