These videos help show what MAME contributors have to deal with to preserve these old games in software. It's good seeing NAMCO System 23 emulation getting better with time.
I am arcade repair guy from the UK and I work with a few arcades that have N 23 and N22 hardware, so many of our machines are dying as it's getting harder to get hold of boardsets now. However this is encouraging, apart from Networking the games are a little slow and flakey so thanks for taking the time to work on the MAME code, I sadly cannot follow the code but I hope we can support you in anyway. Our TC2, Cyber Cycles, Tokyo Wars machines are dying or need resurection. I did try and fix our TC2 but ended up getting various boards from around the world, I have no matching pairs but virtually every version. I am aware of maybe 2 Panic's in the UK, hard to find game and its supervised at the Arcade Club. Please keep going, I hope to talk to you soon and I am watching the discords channels. GG
Kids and I loved playing this at the Nickel Nickel when those were still around... very cool... and awesome work as always on the progress. For everyone else... make sure you stay until the "real end" of the video.
You are a legend! I just tried the latest version of MAME & all but one NS23 games that are playable run great! You are a talented developer. Thank you!!!!!
I grew up playing this game with my little brother and every year i check to see if there's any progress made for system 23, finally my dream is almost a reality , thanks a lot for your hard work man ❤
I visited an arcade specifically to play this the other day but it wasn't working. Seeing how close we are to a fully playable emulation makes me so damn excited. Keep up the good work!
Thanks so much for your work man I’ve been hoping to play panic park for a while now and thanks to awesome mame devs like yourself that’s finally possible. I wish you the best of luck getting other namco system games playable in the future!
Thanks! Here's just hoping I can get it past the finish line. Some of these games have some gnarly hookups. Sheer luck that once I dug my way to the problem it was an easy fix, as opposed to life throwing the equivalent of an impromptu lock-picking minigame in right when victory was in sight.
First time this decides to pop into my feed, gotta say, it's cool to see someone do some in deph work for the emulation scene, let alone it be a moogle. Love the vid, love your work, Hope you can get this game working soon, cause it looks like a blast!
It requires a lot of professional detachment in some circumstances. There's this one pub-quiz game which MAME supports that I love to point out, because it happens to be an extreme example: I forget the exact name of the romset, but from a hardware standpoint, it's a pretty basic setup that just has a tilemap or two so that it can display text. It's a quiz game, after all. The thing about this game in particular is that it has a whole bunch of "questions" that are pretty much a carbon copy of "Grandpa's Stereotpical Book of 'Jokes' About Minorities", if such a book ever existed. It's a detestable piece of media. But it's preserved in MAME anyway, because to omit it would be to give a false impression of the state of the world at the time. On a personal level, I don't care if a game or a piece of interactive media runs counter to literally everything I stand for, it still deserves to be preserved - without omission, without favor, without skew or agenda. It's the historians' jobs to try to derive some meaning from all this, not mine.
I also love to bring up that ^ game because it neatly contradicts the small (but vocal) cadre of people who act like the world was so much better back in the day. Nah, it still sucked, just not as equally.
I completely agree. The main reason I had to leave the previous comment is since I'm a bit biased. I'm a game dev that has worked two games that unfortunately was canned POST release. No way of buying them or play them today if one didn't get them on release. OTWD was one of them... not a "great game" prehaps but a game on a good path to become lost media. :(
@@mogemulation I did work there. Nothing archived on my side. I do own my steam copies tho' and I'm fortunately still able to download through steam. But I'm just a level-designer so I'm not too skilled with the techy wizardry u emulator ppl are up to haha.😅
Thanks! Decided to do it with the first video (Polygonet Commanders), then just stuck with it. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Google search in this video yet. ;)
It really is. Fortunately, it seems like there's low-hanging fruit to be grabbed. Panic Park not making it past the end of the self-test ended up not being down to some horrible edge case, it mainly involved a couple days of tedious digging. Luckily, X marked the treasure spot, and not the spawn point of some fungus-hatted dude going "Sorry, Mog, but the bug is in another file!"
Agreed. I could be wrong about this, but games like that "Stacker" thing, and a bunch of the sorts of machines you can find in a Dave & Buster's these days (from what I'm told; crossing the Atlantic is a bit far to get to one), worry me specifically because at *least* gambling games for adults have strict regulations about things like payout rate. I'm not sure there are laws governing arcade machines that are purely "redemption" games. Scary thought that the machines your kid could find in a Dave & Busters might be outright less ethical than the machines you, as an adult, could find in Caesar's Palace.
I'm still waiting on the Super System 23 progress of Crisis Zone, my most favorite arcade game. I'm ready to put chunks of money getting some guns and building an arcade cabinet for it but it's still not in a great state in MAE. The last time I was waiting for something to progress for this long was an English translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 into emulators lol. It is really appreciated in how much time and effort is put into getting things like this done. I can only imagine how long of a grinding process it is.
It's an auspicious evening, in that case - I have Crisis Zone booting. It looks like Namco completely revamped the interface for the graphics hardware, although the exact functional details remain largely the same. I currently have the game running through attract mode although there's no visible 3D. I guess the problem to solve is pretty clear!
500 GP boots in my branch, and I believe it does in MAME as well. The exact sticking points for the other SS23 games aren't yet known, but I'm not convinced the SH-2 hookup on the GMEN I/O board is completely correct. One of the reasons why Panic Park fails to proceed past the POST in current MAME top-of-tree seems to be due to the sub-CPU's interrupt source being hooked up to the screen's vertical-blanking signal. Panic Park reboots the sub-CPU just before the "SUB-CPU WAIT" text comes up, while the other S23 games just turn it on once and let it free-run. So, even though the sub-CPU was receiving interrupts (and counting down its own internal start-up timers in RAM) way slower than it should have been, the system POST took long enough that all of the S23 games other than Panic Park didn't notice. With such fundamental errors just laying around like that, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before all of the games at least boot into attract mode. When that happens, the number of games available for cross-checking the GPU behavior (currently 6, Panic Park makes 7) will nearly double. I have high hopes. :)
Right. It's very much Point Blank with different controls. In real life half the fun is trying to shove your friend out of the way, which makes it a bit like digital arm wrestling.
So question what are the main blocks with sega model 2. I know the old emu is hacky and he works for sega now but just unsure where things were. (I know this gets beat into dirt just unsure what needed to be done)
For the most part, what's needed (in order of importance) is: - Someone with the technical know-how to write test code that can be run on actual hardware. - Someone with the actual hardware to burn ROMs for this test code and run it on the hardware. Ideally, this could be the same person. - Someone who can turn the results provided from that test code into working emulation code. The person who writes the test cases, the person who runs the test cases, and the person who writes the emulation code dono't have to be the same person, but in that case they'd have to coordinate closely together. But that's the reality of it - Model 2 isn't happening unless this dream-trio assembles. There was some movement from this one person with access to a Model 2 board-stack and calling themselves something-Freeman (as an HL2 reference, I forget the exact nickname), but they burnt out when they kept trying to hit above their proverbial punching weight as far as code changes go, and were rebuffed for it. At the end of the day, Model 2 needs a hardware wonk, a software wonk, and someone with hardware access, all of whom need to lack an ego enough to understand that there are no "eureka!" moments to be had, and that progress only comes via a slow and taxing grind.
thank yo for the effort btw i do have question, how do this game controls internally? does it need 2 controllers not overlapped/cross each other? or is it just "suggestion" and "physically impossible" but would still run normally regardless but also unintended?
I'll have to look into it a bit more. At least as far as the Input Test menu is concerned, the I/O board doesn't try to do any sort of filtering, but I'm not quite sure if the game logic itself performs any rejection along those lines.
Jeez, I only wish I had as many old-school monitors/TVs as she seems to. Since moving across the Atlantic about a decade ago, I'm rocking a total of 0 tube-based displays.
Not enough SS23 games boot to have made much progress on that front, but the one game that does boot (500GP) seems to indicate that the texturing system is different, at minimum.
@@ivojankov7811 Sure, but the CPU side doesn't matter much anymore. System 23 uses the IDT VR4650, which is a MIPS derivative that has a simplified memory-management unit (MMU). The only reason I bring it up is that Time Crisis 2, Final Furlong, and Rapid River all crashed after about 30-60 seconds until I noticed last year that the VR4650 is configured in a way that stops NULL-pointer crashes from crashing, unlike every other MIPS chip, but MAME was still trying to emulate the same MMU as most MIPS chips. Super System 23 having the same CPU as Gorgon and System 23, other than the clock rate, is now a solved problem, and the clock rate won't affect most things due to the instant nature of the GPU emulation. It's true, but it's a distinction without a difference. The issue is and always has been the rest of the surrounding hardware.
No, but if you're handy with git itself, you can sync my WIP branch found on my fork repo here: github.com/MooglyGuy/mame/tree/gorgonzola Don't be intimidated, building is pretty straightforward: docs.mamedev.org/initialsetup/compilingmame.html#microsoft-windows Personally, I'm not submitting a pull request upstream until I've figured out how to get Rapid River and Final Furlong to have valid graphics without the cost of Time Crisis 2 becoming more glitchy. At the moment, my changes result in the villain character ("Wild Dog"?) looking like he's levitating downward while giving his usual attract-mode rant, because somehow my changes break the movement of the surrounding *buildings* (which, you know, should probably not be moving without a very good reason to).
@@mogemulation cool thanks mog! You’ve made great progress with system 23 emulation, keep up the good work and i didn’t know you worked on helldivers, pretty cool stuff!
@@coolpup6385 Thanks! By the way, if you've pulled the branch between my earlier message and now, pull again. I did some last-second cleanups that broke the branch, but it should be back to working order again.
I’m curious why on the title screen the panic park logo ain’t there but on other screens it is, if i had to guess it’s maybe a blending issue. Also wonder if downhill bikers has done anything else in terms of graphics
oh ok well im sure youl get it up and running im waiting for the day when someone makes the nerf arcade also playable in emulation that would be awesome @@mogemulation
These videos help show what MAME contributors have to deal with to preserve these old games in software. It's good seeing NAMCO System 23 emulation getting better with time.
Loving the progress already. Never thought that we'd see Panic Park emulated. So thank you for the efforts.
Thought i'd never see this day, hats off to you. Excellent work.
I am arcade repair guy from the UK and I work with a few arcades that have N 23 and N22 hardware, so many of our machines are dying as it's getting harder to get hold of boardsets now. However this is encouraging, apart from Networking the games are a little slow and flakey so thanks for taking the time to work on the MAME code, I sadly cannot follow the code but I hope we can support you in anyway. Our TC2, Cyber Cycles, Tokyo Wars machines are dying or need resurection. I did try and fix our TC2 but ended up getting various boards from around the world, I have no matching pairs but virtually every version. I am aware of maybe 2 Panic's in the UK, hard to find game and its supervised at the Arcade Club. Please keep going, I hope to talk to you soon and I am watching the discords channels. GG
Kids and I loved playing this at the Nickel Nickel when those were still around... very cool... and awesome work as always on the progress.
For everyone else... make sure you stay until the "real end" of the video.
You are a legend! I just tried the latest version of MAME & all but one NS23 games that are playable run great! You are a talented developer. Thank you!!!!!
I grew up playing this game with my little brother and every year i check to see if there's any progress made for system 23, finally my dream is almost a reality , thanks a lot for your hard work man ❤
thanks for your hard work, +1 patreon
I visited an arcade specifically to play this the other day but it wasn't working. Seeing how close we are to a fully playable emulation makes me so damn excited. Keep up the good work!
Thanks so much for your work man I’ve been hoping to play panic park for a while now and thanks to awesome mame devs like yourself that’s finally possible. I wish you the best of luck getting other namco system games playable in the future!
This is absolutely amazing. Thank you for your hard work so far.
Thanks! Here's just hoping I can get it past the finish line. Some of these games have some gnarly hookups. Sheer luck that once I dug my way to the problem it was an easy fix, as opposed to life throwing the equivalent of an impromptu lock-picking minigame in right when victory was in sight.
First time this decides to pop into my feed, gotta say, it's cool to see someone do some in deph work for the emulation scene, let alone it be a moogle. Love the vid, love your work, Hope you can get this game working soon, cause it looks like a blast!
What I love about this is that ya'll are saving these games from becoming lost media. Thank you for your service! 🥳
It requires a lot of professional detachment in some circumstances.
There's this one pub-quiz game which MAME supports that I love to point out, because it happens to be an extreme example: I forget the exact name of the romset, but from a hardware standpoint, it's a pretty basic setup that just has a tilemap or two so that it can display text. It's a quiz game, after all.
The thing about this game in particular is that it has a whole bunch of "questions" that are pretty much a carbon copy of "Grandpa's Stereotpical Book of 'Jokes' About Minorities", if such a book ever existed. It's a detestable piece of media.
But it's preserved in MAME anyway, because to omit it would be to give a false impression of the state of the world at the time. On a personal level, I don't care if a game or a piece of interactive media runs counter to literally everything I stand for, it still deserves to be preserved - without omission, without favor, without skew or agenda. It's the historians' jobs to try to derive some meaning from all this, not mine.
I also love to bring up that ^ game because it neatly contradicts the small (but vocal) cadre of people who act like the world was so much better back in the day. Nah, it still sucked, just not as equally.
I completely agree.
The main reason I had to leave the previous comment is since I'm a bit biased. I'm a game dev that has worked two games that unfortunately was canned POST release.
No way of buying them or play them today if one didn't get them on release. OTWD was one of them... not a "great game" prehaps but a game on a good path to become lost media. :(
@@TheThigoron Jeez, you worked at Overkill? Do you at least happen to have archived copies of OTWD and the other title?
@@mogemulation I did work there. Nothing archived on my side. I do own my steam copies tho' and I'm fortunately still able to download through steam. But I'm just a level-designer so I'm not too skilled with the techy wizardry u emulator ppl are up to haha.😅
This is absolutely amazing progress so far and very informative, too! You've done fantastic work once again! 😁
Thank you for your work. I grew up with this game and seeing be emulated this this good after years made my day
Thanks for your superb work. You are helping saving the history of video games.
Omg yes! Best arcade game ever and one of the few you couldn't emulate. Awesome work!
Love your videos, thanks for preserving these rare 3D arcade systems!!
Nice little easter egg at the end with the voice. Another quality video.
Thanks! Decided to do it with the first video (Polygonet Commanders), then just stuck with it. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Google search in this video yet. ;)
Love the video and the outtakes in the end 😅 interesting to see the progress ❤️
Love the progress ❤ system23 was the best of the last of the late 90s memories
Thanks for your work!
as always, top notch content
Very nice progress! The system 23 family is a beast to emulate
It really is. Fortunately, it seems like there's low-hanging fruit to be grabbed. Panic Park not making it past the end of the self-test ended up not being down to some horrible edge case, it mainly involved a couple days of tedious digging. Luckily, X marked the treasure spot, and not the spawn point of some fungus-hatted dude going "Sorry, Mog, but the bug is in another file!"
8:36 oompa dumpa
They really should ban those arcade gambling games already. Good work on the emulation!
Agreed. I could be wrong about this, but games like that "Stacker" thing, and a bunch of the sorts of machines you can find in a Dave & Buster's these days (from what I'm told; crossing the Atlantic is a bit far to get to one), worry me specifically because at *least* gambling games for adults have strict regulations about things like payout rate.
I'm not sure there are laws governing arcade machines that are purely "redemption" games. Scary thought that the machines your kid could find in a Dave & Busters might be outright less ethical than the machines you, as an adult, could find in Caesar's Palace.
I'm still waiting on the Super System 23 progress of Crisis Zone, my most favorite arcade game. I'm ready to put chunks of money getting some guns and building an arcade cabinet for it but it's still not in a great state in MAE. The last time I was waiting for something to progress for this long was an English translation of Seiken Densetsu 3 into emulators lol. It is really appreciated in how much time and effort is put into getting things like this done. I can only imagine how long of a grinding process it is.
It's an auspicious evening, in that case - I have Crisis Zone booting.
It looks like Namco completely revamped the interface for the graphics hardware, although the exact functional details remain largely the same. I currently have the game running through attract mode although there's no visible 3D. I guess the problem to solve is pretty clear!
@@mogemulationI’m so excited to hear this! You’re my hero 🤩
@@BuffaloSanta th-cam.com/video/gFAjVQebwLk/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/EaQGaJ0h8IU/w-d-xo.html
DREAM COMES TRUE!
this is great it looks like its preety playable on here at least a little
thank you for the work and and fantastic video ! +1 patreon
Finally seen how Panic Park is working MAME after 10 years later
Rapid river *proceeds to show crazy rafting*
The controls are weird as hell to map onto PC controls, not gonna lie.
Will Super System 23 be emulated such as Race On! and Gunmen Wars
500 GP boots in my branch, and I believe it does in MAME as well. The exact sticking points for the other SS23 games aren't yet known, but I'm not convinced the SH-2 hookup on the GMEN I/O board is completely correct.
One of the reasons why Panic Park fails to proceed past the POST in current MAME top-of-tree seems to be due to the sub-CPU's interrupt source being hooked up to the screen's vertical-blanking signal. Panic Park reboots the sub-CPU just before the "SUB-CPU WAIT" text comes up, while the other S23 games just turn it on once and let it free-run. So, even though the sub-CPU was receiving interrupts (and counting down its own internal start-up timers in RAM) way slower than it should have been, the system POST took long enough that all of the S23 games other than Panic Park didn't notice.
With such fundamental errors just laying around like that, I'm sure it's just a matter of time before all of the games at least boot into attract mode. When that happens, the number of games available for cross-checking the GPU behavior (currently 6, Panic Park makes 7) will nearly double. I have high hopes. :)
このゲームの生まれ故郷である日本においても、ほとんどパニックパークの筐体は撤去されてしまった
Do you need the actual hardware to learn more about how the games work or was there a way to do that without the need for hardware?
It's basically Point Blank without the guns, or long WarioWare?
Right. It's very much Point Blank with different controls. In real life half the fun is trying to shove your friend out of the way, which makes it a bit like digital arm wrestling.
@@MESSDrivers Right! The mini-games themselves are fun, but the genius stroke is creating that physical conflict on the other side of the monitor.
So question what are the main blocks with sega model 2. I know the old emu is hacky and he works for sega now but just unsure where things were. (I know this gets beat into dirt just unsure what needed to be done)
For the most part, what's needed (in order of importance) is:
- Someone with the technical know-how to write test code that can be run on actual hardware.
- Someone with the actual hardware to burn ROMs for this test code and run it on the hardware. Ideally, this could be the same person.
- Someone who can turn the results provided from that test code into working emulation code.
The person who writes the test cases, the person who runs the test cases, and the person who writes the emulation code dono't have to be the same person, but in that case they'd have to coordinate closely together. But that's the reality of it - Model 2 isn't happening unless this dream-trio assembles.
There was some movement from this one person with access to a Model 2 board-stack and calling themselves something-Freeman (as an HL2 reference, I forget the exact nickname), but they burnt out when they kept trying to hit above their proverbial punching weight as far as code changes go, and were rebuffed for it.
At the end of the day, Model 2 needs a hardware wonk, a software wonk, and someone with hardware access, all of whom need to lack an ego enough to understand that there are no "eureka!" moments to be had, and that progress only comes via a slow and taxing grind.
@@mogemulationwas it Gordon Freeman?
in which version we could see it running?
thank yo for the effort
btw i do have question, how do this game controls internally?
does it need 2 controllers not overlapped/cross each other? or is it just "suggestion" and "physically impossible" but would still run normally regardless but also unintended?
I'll have to look into it a bit more. At least as far as the Input Test menu is concerned, the I/O board doesn't try to do any sort of filtering, but I'm not quite sure if the game logic itself performs any rejection along those lines.
I wish the same effort can be put on Gunmen Wars.
About that...
@@mogemulation ?
Hi, any new progress?
2:13 average emulation dev hard at work
Jeez, I only wish I had as many old-school monitors/TVs as she seems to. Since moving across the Atlantic about a decade ago, I'm rocking a total of 0 tube-based displays.
Is the super system 23 much different on the hardware side?
Not enough SS23 games boot to have made much progress on that front, but the one game that does boot (500GP) seems to indicate that the texturing system is different, at minimum.
I see, but on the cpu side, should be atleast the same fro what I've heard.
@@ivojankov7811 Sure, but the CPU side doesn't matter much anymore.
System 23 uses the IDT VR4650, which is a MIPS derivative that has a simplified memory-management unit (MMU). The only reason I bring it up is that Time Crisis 2, Final Furlong, and Rapid River all crashed after about 30-60 seconds until I noticed last year that the VR4650 is configured in a way that stops NULL-pointer crashes from crashing, unlike every other MIPS chip, but MAME was still trying to emulate the same MMU as most MIPS chips.
Super System 23 having the same CPU as Gorgon and System 23, other than the clock rate, is now a solved problem, and the clock rate won't affect most things due to the instant nature of the GPU emulation.
It's true, but it's a distinction without a difference. The issue is and always has been the rest of the surrounding hardware.
Can I grab a build off the github and play this?
No, but if you're handy with git itself, you can sync my WIP branch found on my fork repo here: github.com/MooglyGuy/mame/tree/gorgonzola
Don't be intimidated, building is pretty straightforward: docs.mamedev.org/initialsetup/compilingmame.html#microsoft-windows
Personally, I'm not submitting a pull request upstream until I've figured out how to get Rapid River and Final Furlong to have valid graphics without the cost of Time Crisis 2 becoming more glitchy.
At the moment, my changes result in the villain character ("Wild Dog"?) looking like he's levitating downward while giving his usual attract-mode rant, because somehow my changes break the movement of the surrounding *buildings* (which, you know, should probably not be moving without a very good reason to).
@@mogemulation cool thanks mog! You’ve made great progress with system 23 emulation, keep up the good work and i didn’t know you worked on helldivers, pretty cool stuff!
@@coolpup6385 Thanks! By the way, if you've pulled the branch between my earlier message and now, pull again. I did some last-second cleanups that broke the branch, but it should be back to working order again.
@@mogemulation cool! I’ll make sure to get it! Tbh you working on the game makes sense for why the last update was a year ago haha
I’m curious why on the title screen the panic park logo ain’t there but on other screens it is, if i had to guess it’s maybe a blending issue. Also wonder if downhill bikers has done anything else in terms of graphics
Get Time Crisis 2 working.
Sure thing, do you want fries with that, or onion rings?
i thought time crisis 2 was playable already on mame
@@lesliegibson5964 Barely, and with graphical issues that make some stages difficult due to enemies being sorted behind stage geometry.
oh ok well im sure youl get it up and running im waiting for the day when someone makes the nerf arcade also playable in emulation that would be awesome @@mogemulation