> I'd just like to lend some extra weight to this. Handheld emulation is a place where
> MAME really shines. It's an area where MAME has been the first or only project to
> attempt real emulation rather than simulation based on gameplay observation. LCD
> handhelds aren't just nostalgia for '80s kids, they're a whole class of consumer
> electronics that's really faded from prominence, and it's important to preserve this
> piece of history. Not just as photos, but as an interactive experience.
>
> LCD handhelds have also been a catalyst for a lot of other improvements in MAME,
> including improvements to the output and artwork systems, and better support for CPUs
> with non-linear/paged program counters. These benefits carry over to other systems,
> giving performance improvements and making driver development more efficient. This
> effort has brought together people with a wide range of skills, from decapsulating
> and photographing the MCUs to tracing the LCD segments, to adding the game drivers to
> MAME, to the improvements to MAME core functionality that these games heavily rely
> on.
>
> So even if you don't particularly care for the games in question, this is something
> that can benefit the whole MAME ecosystem, and preservation-based emulation as a
> whole.
I have a feeling the non-MCU ones with ASICs might end up being a catalyst for people writing netlist style simulations of custom chips like that too assuming high enough resolution images can be produced as from the ones we have seen images of so far they look relatively simple compared to some of the others we've seen so might be a good starting place.
As we've found with various protection devices, not every single one we've ended up seeing decapped is an MCU, some are custom ASICs similar to those found in some of the handhelds (in the case of Jaleco's protection device used on some games, it actually likes like some 7-seg driver ASIC repurposed as a protection device)
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Re: Saving the History of Handheld Games (aka The Handheld Union)
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