Back to the SGI driver in MESS. Now it gets pretty far into starting up Linux.

I added DSP1 support to the MESS SNES emulation, only to discover most of those games required more advanced timing than was currently supported. With some tips from Aaron Giles, I reworked the main raster timing and it’s greatly improved those games (and broken several others, but I’ll deal with that next). Here’s a few screens from Pilotwings showing all the nice improvements. (ETA: and some Ballz 3D too – bad game, but vector balls are the bomb anyway).

Ace Driver is the only (Super) System 22 game without sound in current MAME. This is completely correct. It was not “something I missed” and I did not do it to fark with people. The data in that ROM is incompatible with the Prop Cycle BIOS for whatever reason (there’s a chance it could be triggering an M37710 opcode bug, but that seems fairly unlikely at this point) and MAME will crash if you attempt to hook it up.

I’ve submitted an update to the MESS SNES driver (which of course also affects the Nintendo Super System in MAME). Games I know of that are improved by this include Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 3, Mortal Kombat 3, NBA Live ’95, Beavis and Butt-head, Clay Fighter (note: you need to press START and skip the singing), NCAA Basketball, and The Irem Skins Game. There are probably others as well – there are many more SNES games than I have time to find and test 🙂

Games known to still be broken include: Super James Pond, Mortal Kombat 2, NFL Quarterback Club, E.V.O. Search for Eden, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. The Donkey Kong Country series has control problems, and Super Mario All-Stars requires you to use Player 2’s controller in-game.