> > WOW! A Moon Patrol fix! must check that out!! > > Remember that next time someone says it's OK to use 15 year old MAME because > nothing's happened to golden-age games since then
based on my own observations from fixing up the Alpha One support the Moon Patrol driver still needs a lot of hardware verification, eg. the backgrounds literally just hardcode the correct colour lookups (unique colours are used, but I imagine the hardware has a more complex algorithm for picking them, otherwise why have a larger palette with a bunch of duplicate colours)
I suspect I can remove the 'fill with solid colour' thing for the lower background parts now, although I haven't tested, it really seems like that's just a 0xff pull up from unpopulated rom spaces (because Alpha One populates them and expects a double height background not a fill)
Also prior to the Alpha One changes the driver was ignoring parts of the sprite CLUT simply because Moon Patrol only uses 2bpp sprite gfx when the board supports 3 (so decoding it with a blank plane and not fudging / ignoring parts of the sprite CLUT is a lot cleaner)
The sprite limit is probably wrong on Moon Patrol too since Alpha One needed double, and there are comments in the driver about how top / bottom half of screen sprites in theory are meant to be from different parts of RAM but in practice it didn't work so the driver just ignores that (so I guess that's another misreading of schematics, and that logic does exist in some form but isn't implemented)
To be fair, a lot of the golden era drivers still need a LOT of work, but yeah, even after the recent fixes there were a lot of things not quite right with Moon Patrol, some might be more correct now (even if there are no user visible changes)
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