0.105u2 [David Haywood]
WIP:
- 0.176: OKI6295 memory map instead of memcpy and added save state support [Osso].
- 0.175: Made the way jpeglib.h is included more pretty [Julian Sikorski].
- 0.167: ANY and The Dumping Union added clone Sliver (set 2). Changed parent description to 'Sliver (set 1)'.
- 0.145u7: Brian Troha filled in / corrected all dipswitches for Sliver and added DIP locations. Added dipswitches 'Coinage', 'Game Time', 'Difficulty', '2 Player Mode', 'Demo Sounds', 'Draw Insert', 'Joystick Input Mode', 'Game Paused (Test)' and 'Unused'.
- 0.144u7: David Haywood and R. Belmont added libjpeg (JPEG image encoding, decoding and transcoding). Converted Sliver to decompress pictures on the fly.
- 18th January 2012: David Haywood - I decided to integrate some proper JPEG decoding libraries into MAME. Why? Well, there is one game, which has been running in MAME for a while which actually uses JPEG decoder chips on the PCB. This game is the rather obscure 'Sliver'. As a game, it's not even remotely interesting, or good, but from a hardware perspective the pair of Zoran chips used to decode the JPEG images stored in the ROMs make it an interesting case. Until recently MAME has simply loaded an extra 'fake' rom with the JPEG images pre-decoded, and used a look-up table in the driver to convert the addresses requested by the game for the JPEGS into addresses where our pre-decoded bitmaps were stored. Obviously this isn't how the hardware worked. By integrating the JPEG library I've managed to remove the fake ROM, and can now point the decoder directly at the real JPEG data in roms as and when it's requested by the game. Note, you can see ugly JPEG artifacting on the game screen, they obviously didn't compress the images with very high quality settings. From an end-users perspective, the game still runs and plays exactly how it did before, but from a MAME perspective the emulation is now better, and we have a JPEG library to play with if we want it, maybe as an option when creating screen-shots at high resolutions where PNG becomes excessively large? Either way, it's there and could be put to further use. There is one other game which uses the same JPEG decoder chips on the board Magic the Gathering: Armageddon (Progettoemma link due to MAWS being down after it was used to hack MameWorld). Currently that game doesn't work, but Phil Bennett was last seen getting some 3D out of it, so having a JPEG decoder should help him get the correct textures, which are encoded as JPEGs in the ROM. As with the FLAC stuff, thanks also goes to R. Belmont for ensuring it compiles / works on Linux and Mac environments.
- 0.144u3: Angelo Salese converted Sliver to RAMDAC device.
- 0.136u2: Atari Ace converted Sliver to use driver_data structure.
- 0.117u1: Tomasz Slanina fixed Sliver - Game now playable. The background images on this hardware are in JPEG format, the Zoran chips are hardware JPEG decompression chips. The driver uses temporarly a fake rom with decompressed images (gfx.bin). Changed region gfx1/2 to user1/2 and visible area to 368x240. Added Player 2, 8-way Joystick, 3x buttons and 2x coin slots. Added dipswitches 'Coin A', 'Lives' and 'Demo_Sounds'.
- 19th March 2007: Tomasz Slanina - Preliminary emulation of Sliver. It's very interesting hardware - two Zoran chips (http://www.zoran.com/) are used to decode gfx stored in JPEG format. Both are not emulated - gfx is extracted from roms and converted into binary raw format.
- 0.105u2: David Haywood added Sliver (Hollow Corp 1996).
- 10th September 2004: Guru - Finally got Sliver (Hollow Corp. 1996) from Japan. Thanks to MAMEWorld donations and several anonymous (private/direct) donations.
Recommended Games (Puzzle):
Loco-Motion
Qwak
Cue Brick
Pipe Dream
Pipeline
Puzzle Club
Many Block
Puzzle Time
Puzzle Star (Sang Ho Soft)
Sexy Boom
Paint & Puzzle
Sliver
Zenkoku Seifuku Bishoujo Grand Prix Find Love
Mosaic (F2 System)
Multi Champ
Penfan Girls - Step1. Mild Mind
Puzzlet (Japan)
