Taito Football Champ Hardware - Make it worth it!!!

myPinballs

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Ok, so this is just a brilliant idea i was thinking about late last night after sharing the latest lsi scramble work!!!

What can we get to run on Football Champ Hardware in the real????? The board is a pretty nice board with socketed chips, which i used to convert to the dead connection roms sets a good few years back now. It's a powerful board (in my eyes anyway, as the mega drive only came out last week lol!!!) A 68000 cpu and a yamaha sound chip with Z80 sound cpu. Decent sprite and tile chips. What more do you need???????

SO... let's start with my favourite game of all time R - TYPE.... Can we get this to run on here at 100% indistinguishable???

Some early testing..

These are still of the r-type game loaded into the video chips of a fc board on mame to check the tile maps, sprite list, palette and scroll positions can create thiscompare_0000.pngcompare_0001.pngcompare_0002.pngcompare_0003.pngcompare_0004.pngcompare_0005.pngcompare_0006.png
 
GadgetFreak

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One thing that will stop a 100% perfect RType on a Football Camp is the bitmap size.
On Rtype its 384x256 whereas FC is 320x224 this will affect how much playfield is visible and will affect gameplay as a result.
The other thing is the unique colours on the Irem boards which should be able to be tweaked by changing the colour resistors on the FC board perhaps.
With any conversions you attempt I would try to match video playfield sizes as this will help keep gameplay more accurate.
A good while back I got Flicky playing nicely on a Choplifter board but due to sprite start point differences I had to reduce the screen width by 16 pixels which definitiely had an impact on gameplay, especially with a horizontal scrolling game.

I did a deep dive on how Claude carries out these mods a couple of weeks back. Without Mame it would be lost, but its use of Mame is really impressive and actually matches a lot of the steps I do when working on conversions/mods. Only it does it a lot quicker ;)
 
myPinballs

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GadgetFreak said:
One thing that will stop a 100% perfect RType on a Football Camp is the bitmap size.
On Rtype its 384x256 whereas FC is 320x224 this will affect how much playfield is visible and will affect gameplay as a result.
The other thing is the unique colours on the Irem boards which should be able to be tweaked by changing the colour resistors on the FC board perhaps.
With any conversions you attempt I would try to match video playfield sizes as this will help keep gameplay more accurate.
A good while back I got Flicky playing nicely on a Choplifter board but due to sprite start point differences I had to reduce the screen width by 16 pixels which definitiely had an impact on gameplay, especially with a horizontal scrolling game.

I did a deep dive on how Claude carries out these mods a couple of weeks back. Without Mame it would be lost, but its use of Mame is really impressive and actually matches a lot of the steps I do when working on conversions/mods. Only it does it a lot quicker ;)
Click to expand...
Already aware of this and working through it. Note my updated start screen with r-type lettering spacing adjusted to fit. there are many changes needed and adjustments to get it working. Football Champ boards were scrap before so it's worth the effort. Yes the viewable width will be alittle less on the rhs at least to start with
 
GadgetFreak

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myPinballs said:
Already aware of this and working through it. Note my updated start screen with r-type lettering spacing adjusted to fit. there are many changes needed and adjustments to get it working. Football Champ boards were scrap before so it's worth the effort. Yes the viewable width will be alittle less on the rhs at least to start with
Click to expand...
The point was really that it reduces the playable screen width so aliens appear later and disappear earlier which will affect how the game plays. So converting games with the same physical display dimensions give a better chance of 100% accuracy.
But I am in total agreement that any game other than FC is a win for what is to me also a completely useless board :)
 
myPinballs

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Lurch666 said:
So is this writing code from scratch or just writing an emulator to run on the football champ PCB?
Click to expand...
It's a mega code port job.. porting the original code to run on the fc hardware. that includes porting the processor to 68000 instructions, using new sprite and tile chips and also porting the sound system to use the updated ym2610 hardware
 
Lurch666

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Yep I got that wrong,should have said porting code not writing from scratch but I was worried it would just be an emulator running on the football champ which would introduce the lag associated with emulation.
 
John Bennett

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You'd never have the grunt to emulate much more than a casio watch on a 68000. It's something like 1.5MIPS.

I do like a port if it has a bit of individuality added to it. Attempting a straight 1:1 is a bit boring anyway, especially now they're appearing daily on Neo Geo etc.

Out of curiosity, wasn't R-type 55Hz to get the 256 pixels high, and/or did you have to wind the vertical right in on the CRT?
 
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