Operation Wolf, Pocket Gal

We have two new games this week. I have fond memories of both.

Operation Wolf

This game needs no presentation. This is the spritual successor of N.Y. Captor. It reuses the idea but makes the game much more vibran and interesting. The hardware is very close to Rastan's so I have implemented the system by expanding the Rastan core to support it.

Operation Wolf uses an MCU, which was a barrier for a while but IkaMusume made his implementation of the MCU public, so we have been able to use it. This is a carefully crafted design, cycle accurate. Andrea Bogazzi integrated the MCU into Rastan, enabling the protected versions of Operation Wolf to work.

Note that the core is compatible with the Sinden light gun. You can also play it with the gamepad or mouse.

Special thanks to Fulvio for showing me a few weeks ago that this game and Rainbow Islands could be implemented based on Rastan. By the way, DarkSoft has made a multi that transformed a Rastan board on a Rainbow Islands board. He visited our office this week and explained the project to us.

Sound

Real hardware is quite distinct from MAME's documentation. There are two MSM5205 chips. They are amplified digitally by a chip labeld as `TC0060DCA`. The way the volume is programmed in MAME is non-sensical with the board as it uses signals that don't go into the DCA chip. I am proposing a different way of doing it, which agrees with the schematics and sounds correct too, but I should verify it further.

The other interesting part is that one PCM chip has no antialiasing filter, whereas the other has a 6th order 4kHz filter. The game selects whether to send sounds through the filter or not. This is another feature not implemented or documented until today.

Pocket Gal

This is game that introduced me to the billiard world. Nowadays, it is just a simple silly game, but it still feels quite relaxing. One note, one button is for shooting but when you press the other, you can select where to hit the ball in order to cause an effect. You can even make the ball jump over the others.

Other Updates

Fixed music issues in Toki/Cabal core

What we do

This Patreon is devoted to research, preservation and accuracy. We have published tenths of full schematics of arcade PCBs over the years. We have funded reverse engineering work of many kinds. We have contributed to MAME, not just taken from it. Each arcade core aims for perfection, and many of the 60+ JT cores have already achieved it.

Thanks for your support and understanding.