MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Question about discrete for MAME

>The only simulated Breakout that I know of came in the form of a PC game that Atari
>promoted to Taco Bell awhile back.But it was called Super Breakout even thought it was
>the Original.

You'll have to settle with Super Breakout for now.

>If MAME does decide on simulating TTL chips,I would like to see Breakout and the
>original Tank.

MAME currently does emulate some of the TTL chip hardware used with some games.

As for emulating Tank, two hurdles specifically concerning Tank. The roms are a custom type rom and required someone (MAMEdev member?) visiting a university library (iirc) and getting a book from 1970s era in order to find out what the exact chip was that stores the game rom data so a specific adapter could be made to dump roms from a Tank pcb.

I am pretty sure Tank rom(s) may have already been dumped a few times earlier by some of the repair shops in order to repair Tank cabs or cocktail tables. But that stuff probably isn't online these days compared to Naomi hardware titles.

Besides the hurdle of dumping Tank rom(s), is the fact that Tank uses 2 pcbs while Fun Games' Tankers (a clone of Tank) uses 3 pcbs. The number of pcbs used in a non-cpu game presents a huge, emulation speed challenge.

Last year, Juergen B. (MAMEdev member) partially emulated Pong with his TTL emulation project and on state-of-the-art computers last year....the frame speed was no more than 7 frames per second.....and pong is a single board pcb. It would probably be same speed frame, maybe less, if original Breakout were to be emulated as well.

For speed of emulating a 2-pcb system like Tank....it might probably only run .05 to 1 frames per second on current state-of-the-art computers. A fair number of non-cpu games used multiple pcbs (Computer Space, Tank, Midway Ball Park, some of the racing games etc)