0.182 [Tomasz Slanina]
0.92 [Tomasz Slanina]
WIP:
- 0.182: Fully reverse engineered of Laser Base / Future Flash and emulated the Z1 protection IC [Morten Shearman Kirkegaard, Samuel Neves, Peter Wilhelmsen, Tomasz Slanina]. Replaced laserbas macros with lambdas, make operation of bit selection more obvious [Vas Crabb, hap]. Fix for building with Visual Studio which doesn't support GCC extension "?:", simplify code & make spacing consistent. The Z80 is probably not running at 66mhz [smf].Changed clone 'Future Flash' to parent. Added Speaker and 6x '4-Bit R-2R DAC'. Changed Z80 CPU1 clock speed to 4.17MHz and VSync to 61.035156 Hz.
- 18th December 2016: Tomasz Slanina - Finally, after 5 years - a real update: Future Flash / Laser Base. What's Future Flash or Laser Base? It's an arcade game, similar at first look to Missile Command. The real gameplay is or rather was unknown. There's only one screenshot from the game taken form the official flyer. So 'planet of the apes' meets 'star wars'? There are two versions of the game: Laser Base (1980 - Hoei Int) and Future Flash (1981 - Amstar/Hoei). Amstar mainly licensed games from overseas and imported into the USA. Hoei only became Coreland and began making their own games a little bit later, but Future Flash was made in their era of rip offs. So, who was the actual developer of the game? I have no idea. I've got the broken Future Flash PCB a couple of years ago. The hardware is a bit complicated: Z80 4MHz, framebuffer based video hardware (two 256x256 4bpp layers) driven by common HD46505R CRT and overcomplicated sound hardware (2x 8253 clock generators and over 150 other parts: op-amps, reverb buffer, noise generators, tons of capacitors and resistors). Game is controlled with trackbal and single button. There's also game manual with partial, but missing the sound section and buggy schematics avaialble. I wrote a basic emulation driver, but found a blocker, protection device marked "Z1". Game wasn't playable at all. Was crashing soon after boot. Protection wasn't just a simple check at game start, like in some games from '80s. Z1 device was was mapped into memory range like a common RAM chip and accesses very often. I've removed Z1 from the board and sent to someone for decapping. But it got lost and nothing happened for a couple of years then few weeks ago Morten Shearman Kirkegaard, Samuel Neves and Peter Wilhelmsen made an awesome step forward. They bought another also broken board and cracked the Z1 protection, ended up with an algorithm that can be represented using a bunch of MUX2 gates taking entropy based on the past 4 read offsets (40-bits state). It took about a week. After that, i started to improve the emulation driver. Fixed controlls, interrupts and added very preliminary audio (only the 8253 clocks are emulated). Here's a video from the MAME attract mode (notice the special level with space tunnel made of dots) and start of gameplay. Emulation is far form perfection. There are gfx glitches, weird colors and lacks of most of the sound effects. There's no reference video and no one knows how the game should looks like.
- 21st November 2016: Smitdogg - Peter Wilhelmsen and his friends Morten Shearman Kirkegaard and Samuel Neves defeated the protection in the 1981 game Laser Base / Future Flash by Hoei.
- 0.150: Added inputs, flip screen and notes to Laser Base driver [Luca Elia]. Added Trackball, 2nd button and dipswitches 'Cabinet', 'Service Mode Test', 'Difficulty', 'Bonus Life', 'Bonus Life', 'Demo Sounds', 'Coin A/B' and 'Service Mode'.
- 0.143u9: Angelo Salese hooked up MC6845 to Laser Base. Angelo Salese and Tomasz Slanina hooked up PIT8253 to Laser Base. Added dipswitches 'Coinage', 'IN1', 'IN2' and 12x 'Unknown'.
- 0.135u3: Fabio Priuli added driver data struct and save states to Laser Base.
- 0.133u1: Renamed (laserbsa) to (laserbasa).
- 0.132: Tafoid and Fujix changed year of clone Future Flash to 1981 (Arcade TV Game List book).
- 0.123u6: Fixed debug assertion in Laser Base.
- 0.92u1: Added missing SHA1 values. Changed description of clone 'Futur Flash' to 'Future Flash'.
- 0.92: Tomasz Slanina added 'Laser Base (set 1)' (Amstar/HOEI 1981) and clones Laser Base (set 2) and Futur Flash. Unemulated protection.
- 16th February 2004: Tomasz Slanina - Some progress on Future Flash: Added video ram banking, but game is stil not playable.
- 3rd May 2001: Dumped Laser Base (set 2).
- 3rd June 1999: Dumped Future Flash.
- 16th July 1998: Dumped Laser Base (set 1).
Recommended Games (Defence):
The End
Missile Command
Arcade Classics (Missile Command II)
New York! New York!
Radar Scope
Space Zap
Speak & Rescue
Colony 7
Dark Warrior
Demoneye-X
Future Flash
Pleiads
Satan's Hollow
Satan of Saturn
Space Tactics
War of the Worlds
Liberator
Orbitron
Tactician
Raiders
Senjyo
Cosmoswat
Planet Probe
Repulse
D-Con
Alligator Hunt
