0.167 [System11]
0.124u3 [Bryan McPhail]
WIP:
- 0.167: System11 added Led Storm Rally 2011 (World). Changed 'Led Storm Rally 2011 (US)' from a clone of Mad Gear to a clone of 'Led Storm Rally 2011 (World)'. Guru added correct sprite rom dumps to clone (US). David Haywood adjusted the rom loading / gfxdecoding in the driver to accommodate the correct ROMs for Led Storm Rally 2011 (US) - Game now playable. Renamed (ledstorm2) to (leds2011u).
- 12th October 2015: Guru - If you have ever played Led Storm Rally 2011 in MAME you will have seen some of the sprites were wrong, either with missing pieces or incorrect data, and the ROMs were flagged as bad dumps. They were not actually bad, they were just from the normal Led Storm ROM set and were being substituted while we waited patiently for the correct ROMs to be dumped. Having almost infinite time on my hands now means I can finally get around to doing crazy stuff like that dumping job for Led Storm Rally 2011... There were three ROMs that needed to be dumped. The first one was dumped by me on 24th May 2009. Unfortunately I didn't have time to get back to this job for several years. Now the time has come! The second and third were completely different so a lot of research was needed. The first of those took about 3 hours (including research and Guru-Meditation). The second one took about an hour to wire up and about 5 seconds to read. When they were plugged into MAME they still didn't look right. This was due to the data being in a different format so someone figured it out and now it works perfectly. Pity about the actual game though, it's super hard and likely not many people will play it for more than a few minutes. Maybe someone with more enthusiasm for the game than me will do a complete run from start to end and put it on youtube. Maybe not.
- 29th December 2014: System11 - I used to absolutely love an arcade conversion called LED Storm (also known as Mad Gear in the arcades). I played it for hours, it's a vertically scrolling 'race against the clock' type deal in futuristic cities and wastelands. One of the things I always remembered about it was the amazing music, on the ZX Spectrum 128K and the Amiga it was composed by Tim Follin, one of the best tunes (although short) was during the map screen which showed the overall route and a bit of text introducing the computer, Mac. The music in the game generally really dug its hooks into me and as a result I played the game for hours and hours and hour and... eventually I moved on to other things. Fast forward many years and I'd got into arcade collecting, the first thing I did was start getting hold of anything I'd enjoyed before - games like Robocop, Black Tiger, and LED Storm. It had been years, LED Storm was a different beast entirely - the music wasn't as good (it just isn't), it seemed to play very differently (part of this was the corrected screen aspect), you could choose cars at the start (boring ones) and Mac along with his route map was gone. That made me sad, I liked Mac. I wrote it off as just one of those things that so often happened back when home computers got ports - game differences were common as they were rarely provided with the original code or assets. Recently on a mailing list I'm part of, Shou started asking if anyone had a lead on a Rally 2011 LED Storm PCB, I'd never actually noticed before but it's been in MAME for a while with broken graphics due to someone not being able to dump the strange surface mount ROMs properly. All the Mad Gear and working LED Storm dumps came from boards with an extra ROM riser fitted with standard chips so they were no problem. I had a quick look around and found a dirty looking faulty PCB on ebay with a low BIN and 'rally 2011 led storm' written in pen on a sticker. Since at this point we hadn't really contemplated it too much, nobody seemed to think it was the right game but spotting the LSE labels I knew it had to be an undumped revision of some kind anyway, so bought it for the greater good. It arrived today. Sure enough as promised, it was quite faulty. And it has some minor corrosion that I should be able to easily remove (a few sockets will need replacing too). You can still just make out the serial number - 00009. It needed a lot of juice to run, more than it should certainly. It was failing RAM tests and when it finally booted the screen was strobing horrible shades of yellow. It was quite painful to look at to be honest. However - it also turned out to actually be a Rally 2011 LED Storm. Reseating the ribbon cables got it to boot, and after some testing against my LED Storm (newer rev) board I narrowed the fault location down a bit and had to replace both of the colour RAM, they're the couple of Toshiba ones (now) in sockets. Bingo - fixed! The story goes that the game tested quite poorly in arcades, so Capcom went away and reworked it a bit, and what people have mostly seen in the arcades and MAME was the LED Storm / Mad Gear version. As we'd later discussed as being likely on the mailing list, the home computer versions must have been based on the original revision of the game - so finding one in Europe was not that unusual really. It might even be pretty common, I don't think that many people care about the game outside of ex Amiga/etc owners. The differences are actually... huge. The intro is different and doesn't jump straight into attract gameplay, you don't get to pick from 3 ugly cars and instead have the lovely futuristic one I remembered. Mac is there with his map, and HE TALKS! The car jump feature is fast like I remembered it instead of floating in the air for all eternity which makes the game stupidly easy, the maps are closer to how I remember, and something which wasn't in the port - you can transform into some kind of bike by pressing button 2. So now I finally have a PCB which is as good as the game I remembered.
- 0.151: Various fixes [Phil Bennett]: Fixed 'Led Storm Rally 2011 (US)' sprite ROM order (though bad sprites remain due to incorrect ROMs). Changed VSync to 57.444400 Hz. Changed input from 1 to 3 buttons.
- 0.133u1: David Haywood marked graphics ROMs on Led Storm Rally 2011 (US) as bad, as they cannot possibly be the right ones for this set. Renamed (ledstrm2) to (ledstorm2).
- 0.132u4: Brian Troha updated 'Led Storm Rally 2011' with new roms as per Guru's info. Marked this game as GAME_IPERFECT_GRAPHICS due to the bad sprite etc. Guru added README / PCB layout. Removed 7x 'Unknown' dipswitches.
- 24th May 2009: Guru - I've been doing a bit of work today wiring up the mask ROMs from Led Storm Rally 2011. After 2 1/2 hours we have this... A 64 pin quad flat pack mask ROM from Led Storm Rally 2011. 2 dumped, 2 more to go. Not today though.
- 27th November 2008: Guru - LED Storm - Rally 2011 PCB arrived this week (needed for the undumped surface mounted quad-flat-pack mask ROMs). Thanks to 'Arcader909'.
- 0.124u3: Bryan McPhail added 'Led Storm Rally 2011' (US).
Other Emulators:
* FB Alpha
Recommended Games (Racing 3):
Super Bug
Safari Rally
Highway Chase (DECO Cassette)
Mad Alien
Jump Bug
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The Battle-Road
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Mad Crasher
Stocker
Taxi Driver
Gekisou
Porky
Street Heat
Break Thru
Night Stocker
The Speed Rumbler
City Bomber
Hyper Crash
Road Blasters
Hot Chase
Last Duel
Led Storm Rally 2011
Mad Gear
RoadWars (Arcadia)
Maze of Flott
Night Striker
S.T.U.N. Runner
F-Zero (Nintendo Super System)
F-Zero AX
Lethal Crash Race
Chase Bombers
Speed Racer
Thrill Drive
Thrill Drive 2
Crazy Taxi
Crazy Taxi High Roller
Emergency Call Ambulance
Tokyo Bus Guide
Code One Dispatch
Smashing Drive
