0.148 [Phil Bennett, Ordyne]
HardDisk required
WIP:
- 0.151: hap fixed Rise of the Robots (prototype) crash at boot.
- 0.148u2: Preliminary 53c7xx save state support [A. Viloria].
- 0.148: Phil Bennett and Ordyne added 'Rise of the Robots (prototype)' (BFM/Mirage 1994). Added preliminary emulation of the NCR 53C700 SCSI I/O processor. Hastily move the display list parsing outside of screen_update() or else things will break with frameskipping enabled [Phil Bennett].
- 0.147u4: Added internal boot loader programs to the TMS3203x core and support a switch between microcomputer (bootloader) and microprocessor modes via the TMS3203X_MCBL input. This is required for Rise of the Robots, whose boot code jumps into the middle of the bootloader ROM. Changes tested with primrage, sfrush and speedup [Phil Bennett].
- 16th November 2012: Phil Bennett - Rise of the Robots (prototype) is the exceedingly rare prototype arcade conversion of the infamous fighting game. It runs on Bell-Fruit/ATD RasterSpeed hardware which features a 486SX, a TMS320C31, 4MB RAM, a Xilinx XC4010 FPGA and an NCR53C700 SCSI controller. The game is stored on a 540MB SCSI HDD. Though 486-based the hardware bears no resemblance to PC architecture. The design is rather unusual. The video controller parses a display list where each entry specifies a horizontal pixel span. Pixels may be 8-bit palletised or 16-bit and a source address increment value can be used to perform scaling and mirroring. Pixel data is read from RAM and fed into a FIFO for video scan-out. The rationale behind this design was to avoid the VRAM bandwidth bottlenecks of traditional framebuffer and blitter designs by eliminating destination pixel writes. This does however require additional work on the CPU side to determine object visibility and to create the displays list. For scenes with many small or transparent objects this approach is rather inefficient as the resulting display list is very long. A framebuffer can however be emulated by creating a display list with a 1:1 entry for each scanline. The DSP performs sound processing, mixing and outputs a 24KHz stereo stream. It is also used to bootstrap the 486, copying code from ROM to RAM using its internal boot loader. As for the actual game, several improvements have been made to address some of the myriad criticisms of the home versions. For instance, any of the six robots can be controlled in both single and two-player modes. The speed has been greatly increased and it's's possible to jump over your opponent to switch sides. The attract mode is an epic Brian May fest and is by far the best part of the game. Disappointingly there's no in-game music, just some very badly looped ambient sounds. Improvements notwithstanding, the game is still atrocious. Beyond MAME there are no known working instances of this game. One machine that appeared several years ago had experienced HDD failure and another recently found (from which the dump was made) has a badly corroded, non-working boardset that is unlikely to be repaired. Huge thanks should go to Ordyne for dumping his copy and ensuring this rarity wasn't lost forever. There are at least two other RasterSpeed games, Zool and Football Crazy (a quiz game). Please get in touch if you have any information regarding them.
- 28th September 2012: Smitdogg - Ordyne dumped the arcade prototype version of Rise Of The Robots by Bell-Fruit (roms and hard drive). When the owner contacted Bell-Fruit asking information about it they were surprised he had it and said they had thrown out everything to do with it after the location testing failed.
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Rise of the Robots
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Rise of the Robots
Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness
Harddisk: 509.9 MB (CYLS: 65, HEADS: 255, SECS: 63 - Compressed: 418.4)
Arcade Video game published 24 years ago:
Rise of the Robots (c) 1995 Bell-Fruit Mfg. Company, Limited.
A 1-on-1 fighter in an upright cab.
- TRIVIA -
Rise of the Robots was released in May 1995 in the UK.
Rise of the Robots is the main attempt by UK slot machine manufacturer Bell-Fruit to create an arcade machine using a PC architecture. The game sealed the systems fate, but not before Gremlin Graphics attempted to port their consumer success 'Zool' to the platform, all games failed in the arcades.
- SERIES -
1. Rise of the Robots (1994) [PC]
1. Rise of the Robots (1995)
2. Rise Of The Robots - The Director's Cut (1995) [PC]
3. Resurrection - Rise 2 (1996) [PC]
- STAFF -
Produced By: Peter Jones, Gary Leach, Andy Wood
Based on a game idea: Shon Griffiths
Gameplay Design: Gary Leach, Thomas Wardle
Character Design: Sean Naden
Set Design: Kwan Lee
Select Screen: Gary Leach, Andy Clark, Matt Smith
Cinematics: Kwan Lee, Sean Naden
Lead Senior Programmer: Gary Leach
Original Code By: Andy Clark
Musical Director: Andy Wood
Music: Brian May
Engineered by: Justin Shirley-Smith
Sound FX: Richard Joseph, Rene Beumer, Paul Argyle, Tom Grimshaw
Sound and Vision Remix: Tom Grimshaw, Andy Wood
Sound & Vision Engineering: Tom Grimshaw
- PORTS -
This game was ported from the original PC-DOS version developed by Mirage Technologies. It also had many other ports, all of which were published by Absolute Entertainment, and developed by Time Warner Interactive.
* CONSOLES:
Amiga CD-32 (1994)
Panasonic 3DO (1994)
Nintendo SNES (1994)
Sega Genesis (1994)
Sega Game Gear (1994)
Nintendo Game Boy (1994)
Sega Master System (1994)
Phillips CD-i (1994)
* COMPUTERS:
Commodore Amiga (1994)
- CONTRIBUTE -
Edit this entry: https://www.arcade-history.com/?&page=detail&id=26829&o=2
