0.145u5 [Roberto Fresca, Team Europe, Marcus Jendroska, Video Klein]
< Germany >
SETUP:
- Wait until message "ACHTUNG FEHLER IM BLOCK..." pops up and then press key (Y) to start.
WIP:
- 0.145u5: Roberto Fresca, Team Europe, Marcus Jendroska and Video Klein added 'Witch Strike (Export, 6T/12T ver 1.01A)' (Video Klein 1992) and clone (Export, 6T/12T ver 1.01B). Found and patched the protection scheme. Proper inputs and lamps support. Promoted both sets to working state. Added technical notes [Roberto Fresca].
- 15th March 2012: Roberto Fresca - Finally understood the nasty protection scheme. The "branchs to lalaland" happens when the program fails to check the integrity of a string inside the Dallas timekeeper RAM. I didn't find the generator, so assume that the string was laying there from factory. Anyways... The game is working properly now, with inputs from the scratch, and proper lamps support. Still think that this game seems to be a unfinished prototype. Here some snaps...
- 14th March 2012: Roberto Fresca - The extended graphics system of Video Klein newer boards is driving me mad. Some banks seems to be switched with no apparent reason. This time, a couple of sets from a Video Klein game were added. The game is Witch Strike, and is not working due to protection. As soon as you press the deal button, the program flow branchs to lalaland. To be honest, this game smell to unfinished prototype. Well, at least you can see the attract working. Here some snaps... Also the banking was improved, and a bug was fixed.
- 12th March 2012: Roberto Fresca - I'm currently working on an extended hardware manufactured by Video Klein. It's the same hardware they used for Witch Card (with CPU BOX and a lot of nasty protections) but (ab)using of banking, to push the hardware to the limits. Also they added some sort of Dallas Timekeeper. The system can handle up to 16 banks of 3bpp graphics, thing that is completely insane for this kind of hardware. Fortunatelly not all the banks were used, so I was able to figure out the existent graphics. I should have figured out before, because for simpler games (as Wild Witch) they used roms sized 0x8000 bytes to store 2 or 3 banks of 0x800 bytes each, wasting a lot of ROM space.
