12/29/2002: Whew! Back from Christmas holidays with the family, and looking forward to the new year. Some exciting developments have been brewing, so the coming year should be an interesting one. Hopefully I'll be back on New Year's with another update, including at least one New Year's Resolution related to the site and the frequency with which I update certain sections of it. :-) 12/16/2002: Well, the holidays are fast approaching, and this means little time leftover for MAME work. I am excited that a new Bally/Sente prototype turned up, so there's a slim chance I may get that working before the end of the year. But the thing I'm most excited about is this little news story. If you're a fan of the adventure games released by my previous employer, you should definitely check it out! 12/8/2002: You can see some of the good stuff I've been working on over at the MAME WIP Page. And yes, Killer Instinct is hella slow. What do you want, it runs on a 100MHz CPU! However, I should point out that none of the new games has anything to do with my mystery pictures, sorry gregf! 12/4/2002: Time to talk about somebody else's site for a change. If you haven't been there recently, check out System 16: The Arcade Museum, which has just had a big update. Toby runs a great site over there with lots of good and accurate information. For this update, he added a Bally/Midway/Sente/Williams section, which, if you look at my driver list, you'll see is near and dear to my heart. So what are you waiting for? Check it out! 12/2/2002: Rats! I really hate it when the sound subsystem is required to work before the game will boot. Fortunately, it's the same sound system as War Gods, so I guess I'll have to finish that one off first. Oh, and here's a little something for you doubters out there (I mean, come on, what else would a 3DF/X test mean?). I really want to have the slowest MAME driver, and was very disappointed to see that Phil's Prop Cycle driver won this round. ;-) 11/28/2002: Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it! Hmmm, I wonder what this could be.... 11/23/2002: Another new section comes to life. The new FAQ area is designed to answer the most common questions I receive on email. Just a couple of (long-winded) answers there so far, but I'll add questions as they come in. In emulation news, I'm putting off working on the really slow drivers until my new computer arrives, hopefully in the next week or two. When given the choice of debugging War Gods at 933MHz now or at 3GHz in just a couple weeks, the decision is pretty clear. :-) 11/16/2002: Due to the amount of email I receive, most of which goes instantly into the trash, there is now a proper form-based email page that spells out explicitly the types of questions and requests I will not waste my time on. 11/11/2002: Call off the hounds. I managed to track down an Off Road Challenge PCB! Plus, War Gods showed up this weekend, so I've got my hands full for the moment. :-) 11/08/2002: Another new feature! The Atari GALlery is a collection of JEDEC files that can be used to replace bad GALs on many Atari PCBs. It's just getting started, but I hope to have most Atari PCBs covered by the time I'm through. 11/06/2002: And you thought it would never happen! Yep, a new section in my MAME Memories page. I promise I'll try to update that a little more frequently in the future! A new feature this time around is actual quotes from the original posts I made to the MAME list back in 1997. I even went back and added one to the previous part, just for fun. 11/05/2002: Well, a new month means my bandwidth belt-tightening is over. In the meantime I've been trying to get Driver's Edge up and running but it is baffling me at the moment. I've also been playing with the CAGE audio system (used in Primal Rage and T-Mek), and it too is causing me troubles. I'm suspecting there is another bug in the TMS32031 core that's causing both of these to misbehave; we'll see. In other news, I've managed to track down a War Gods PCB, but still no luck getting ahold of Off Road Challenge. Again, please stay on the lookout for one. Finally, a very nice MAME contributer has offered to send me his Ultimate Tennis PCB, which will hopefully be instrumental in figuring out the graphics system used in the Art & Magic games. 10/30/2002: Been busy recently, as you might have noticed. Man it's nice to get these games off my plate! I'm still looking for one more game that runs on the V-unit-style hardware, and that is Offroad Challenge. If anyone can help me track down a PCB for that game, please let me know. 10/25/2002: Finally tracked down the biggest bug haunting Cruis'n USA, and the game is now playable! There's just a few small rounding errors to track down yet. After that, some time for some optimization and adding the sounds and it should be good to go. :-) 10/16/2002: Well, thanks to the friendly people over at MAMEFans, I now have some more temporary bandwidth for pictures. I've put them on their own pages. So check out the Cruis'n USA WIP and the Cruis'n World WIP. 10/14/2002: Wow, oops, sorry guys, you went way over my transfer limit. Hope it doesn't cost me too much. The WIP page is image-less for the moment! 10/13/2002: You might want to check my WIP page. It's still very early, but I like to have tangible results. :-) 10/9/2002: Well, it's a start.... Not too bad considering it's a brand new CPU core with lots of stuff still to implement and debug. Hooking up interrupts is the next step. 10/6/2002: Went through the site today and converted it to be non-framed, using some PHP to incorporate common elements. This means most of the icky Javascript hacks are gone and direct-link URLs work much better now. :-) I've also made a few updates to the various pages along the way, so it might be worth your while to browse through the site again if you're curious about things I might be up to! Also, let me know if I broke any links or screwed up any pages. 10/4/2002: Well, I submitted the driver for the polygon games. They're not all perfect, but both Race Drivin' and Steel Talons are fully playable now, and MAME 0.62 is coming soon, so it was time. I still have to wire up the sound in Hard Drivin's Airborne and fix some glitches there, but even that game is playable. There were three other games that I know of that ran on the same hardware. If anyone has leads on where I can dig them up, please contact me. The games are: Hard Drivin' Panorama (basically a 3-screen version of Hard Drivin'), BMX Heat (a cycle game), and Police Trainer (NOT the shooting game). 9/24/2002: Two more weeks have passed, so I decided to give an update on the state of the Atari Polygon games. That's all for now! 9/12/2002: Whoa, another update! Well, just a small one. Updated my MAME log and MAME to do pages, and added a small update to my Slapstic FAQ, with information on a newly-discovered chip. 9/10/2002: Ack, over a month gone again! We finally polished off Virtual PC for Windows 5.0 at the end of July, and I've been taking it easy since then. Of course, I'm still working on my secret side project, but in the meantime, I've had a chance to look back at the early Atari polygon games and have finally made some good progress. Check out the Atari Polygon WIP Page to see for yourself! 7/20/2002: I've been meaning to do this since I first got my page up! Back when I was working at LucasArts, I went back and filled in two "holes" in the Mac lineup — games that had been released for the PC before I got there, but which nobody had any plans to port to the Mac. Well, I had other ideas. Those two games ended up being my two favorite LucasArts games: Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road. Apparently, there were other Mac fans of Sam & Max because shortly after we released it, sales came to me with this piece of fan art, which was sent in with an order. I've had it up on my office walls ever since, and thought it would be amusing to share it with everyone. :-) 7/09/2002: Well, it's been quite a while! Since finishing up the artwork support for MAME 0.61, I've been taking a bit of a MAME break. Apart from keeping busy with real work, I have been busy with another side project that will hopefully see the light of day in the not-too-distant future. This also means no new updates to the MAME Memories page. But, if you're in the mood for hearing about classic game development, I highly recommend you head on over to The International House of Mojo, where you can read the Wilmunder Memoirs, written by Aric Wilmunder, one of my coworkers from the LucasArts days. Aric was there in the early days, back when it was called LucasFilm Games, and was one of the original programmers of the SCUMM adventure game system. 6/05/2002: Added some more cool snapshots of the new artwork system in action. 5/25/2002: Another month, another lack of updates. Still a lot going on at work, and the rest of my spare time has been spent adding generic artwork support to the MAME core (and cleaning up a bunch of stuff in the process). The number of bugs is finally going down, so it has been officially crossed off my To-do list. You can check out some snapshots here. Some exciting stuff is happening in the near future, not all of it MAME-related, so keep checking back every once and while and you might learn something new. My MAME log page is updated for May. 4/29/2002: Sorry, folks, work has picked up its pace a bit, and I haven't had any large blocks of time to work on major projects like the CoJag driver or this site. In the meantime, I've been tweaking some things, fixing a few bugs. I've also been working on the new artwork handling system, which will hopefully be ready in time for MAME 0.61. Updates to my usual pages: MAME log and MAME To-do list. 3/31/2002: Added a new entry to the MAME Memories page. Happy Easter (if that's something you celebrate!) 3/30/2002: Some good things have been happening recently. As you might have heard, the ROMset for Midway's prototype Judge Dredd showed up, and with some effort, I was able to plug it into the T-unit driver. It runs on hardware very similar to NBA Jam. Check out the MAME WIP Page for screenshots. Also, I finally fixed the missing shadows bug in the Mortal Kombat II/III — one more thing off my To Do List. 3/19/2002: Updated a couple of pictures on my WIP page to have proper colors. Man, those have been bugging me for years! I've made a little bit of progress on getting Primal Rage working better, and have been converting all the old Atari drivers I did to use tilemaps. One side effect of this is that I've been trying to figure out ways of fixing sprite/background priorities. To do this, I need to write special code to run on the original PCBs. Fortunately, I own working boards of most of the Atari games in question. Unfortunately, I don't have a working ThunderJaws or Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters(found!). So if you've got these, and would be willing to help out by burning some custom game ROMs to run on your board, please contact me. Thanks.3/11/2002: Wow, you guys can really suck bandwidth! I've removed a number of pictures from the WIP page in the hopes of keeping under my monthly limit. If things continue to go badly, I will have to remove more.... 3/8/2002: Whew! Just scraped in an update before a whole month went by! Been keeping my head down doing fun and interesting things. Check out my new and improved MAME WIP Page to see all the fun and exciting drivers I have in progress (note that some of them have been in progress for years, so don't get too excited!) 2/10/2002: A couple new interesting games showed up that were worth taking a look at. First was Rapid Fire, which is another TMS34010 game. Since there are relatively few TMS34010 games out there, it's interesting to tackle a new one. The second is Police Trainer, which I recently discovered ran on an R3000. Since I had been working on an R3000 core for other "secret" games, I figured it was a good chance to put it through its paces. Just a couple of small updates this time, to my MAME log and MAME To-do list 1/25/2002: I did it! At last, a new entry on the MAME Memories page! I'm also happy to report that I've added a new prototype Majoc Havoc prototype called Alpha One to MAME. This version of the game ran on only one processor, and has some notable differences. Check out The World of Owen Rubin for more information ... and also for a great read in general! 1/18/2002: Well, I added a new feature to the site: Fun Facts. It's just a random collection of things I've come across or thought of. I've been getting a lot of requests to add more to the MAME Memories page, so I will try to make an effort to write a new chapter in the saga over the next few weeks. Finally, a few Mac users have complained about not being able to download some of my Old Mac Software, due to there being spaces in the names. So I have removed them. Plus the usual updates to the MAME log and MAME To-do list. That's it for now!
