(WIP) David Haywood's Homepage - 模擬器

2014.03.29

"What did the air ever do to you?"

I do like it when rare clones of existing games turn up, some have
proven to be more than just a little elusive over the years and the
subject of this article is one such clone.

MAME has emulated the IREM title ‘Fire Barrel’ for a while now (with
significant improvements a few years back) and if you’ve ever booted
the game in MAME this Japan region warning and title screen will be a
familiar sight.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2014/firebarr_0.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2014/firebarr_1.png

Fire Barrel is quite a rare game compared to some other Irem titles but
even rarer is the export version of that game known as Air Assault. For
many years one could be found at the Trocadero in London, but apart from
that nobody had seen a trace of it. We knew it was an official version
because the tiles for the ‘Air Assault’ title were present in the
graphic roms, just unused.

System11 has been a good source of clones in the last year or so, dumping
every board he comes in contact with and often uncovering previously
unknown revisions of existing games (especially Korean ones where there
is no real indication whether something is an alt version until you’ve
dumped the roms).

Anyway, to cut the story short one of his new arrivals was Air Assault,
the very same Air Assault board that has been sitting in London for years.
It looks like it might have been a location test version based on the ROM
labels, although I think the code is actually a newer revision than the
Japan set.

Luckily he got the board just in time, he’s also put up a strongly
worded warning about a leaking capacitor problem that he’s witnessed
plaguing these IREM boards, with this one already showing the first
signs of that.

Getting this working in MAME wasn’t entirely straightforward, it uses
a different encrypted sound CPU when compared to Fire Barrel, in this
case the same as Gunforce rather than the same as R-Type Leo, however,
there were some gaps in the encryption table causing the sound code to
not run correctly and report a ROM error although I managed to fix them
by using the code from the correctly decrypted set as a reference.

So here are some screenshots of Air Assault running in MAME, possibly
salvaged from the only remaining board in existence. It might ‘only’
be a clone, but it’s one I’m very glad to see dumped.

http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2014/airass_1.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2014/airass_2.png
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/pics2014/airass_3.png
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來源：
http://mamedev.emulab.it/haze/2014/03/29/what-did-the-air-ever-do-to-you/

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