JAS
JROK's Arcade Simulator

            
Screen captures of Mappy and Galaga 3

What is the history of this emulator??? Well, here is all of the information, straight from the author:

After seeing the PATHETIC effort Namco made in emulating Mappy for the PC, running under Winslows'95, I decided it was about time someone wrote a decent Namco emulation (for purely educational uses by owners of the original game boards).  Having already learned 6809 assembly programming, through another project, I figured that writing a simulator in x86 assembler wouldn't be a big deal, well the 6809's hardly got any registers and only a small number of instructions ( I think it's like 79 total).

So after a little coding, and a lot of debugging, the 6809 simulator lived, a few days after that 'hey presto' the Mappy emulator was born! Unlike the official Namco release, which when run on a Pentium Pro @233MHz ( yes I overclock ) only manages 96% original game speed ( or only 31% if the screen is maximized ), mine achieves 100% speed of the original, even on an old Pentium 90 !!  Maybe I need MMX, hah hah hah....

The emulator was coded over a period of about 6 weeks, during the months of May to June.  I was looking for something else to do rather than actually complete PC*Bert. Anyone notice I changed the release date to August'97 ???

Currently the emulator core supports 7 games. These are:

Dig Dug 2
Mappy
Pac-Land
Super Pac-Man
Gaplus
Galaga3
SkyKid

I was going to to Pac'n'Pal but the game is just to horrible to do, besides it's emulated in MAME so it's not important.  Same it true of The Tower of Druaga, this is basically a Dig Dug 2 boardset with additional colors. The game is TOO horrible though.

            
Screen captures of Sky Kid and Dig-Dug 2

The emulator completely simulates the original game board, its twin 6809E CPU's, all custom IC's and sound. It's totally encapsulated and contains no code of the original, all graphics, sound and program are read from the game ROMs and converted into more manageable formats for emulation 'on-the-fly'.

The 6809E emulation, screen, redraw and audio mixing is 100% assembler, everything else is in 'C'.  Mappy & Super Pac should work on everything from a 486DX2-66 with PCI video upwards.  Dig Dug 2 required a bit more CPU power so you'll need a P90 or better to run that game. Gaplus needs a lot of horsepower to simulate the three CPU's, it'll JUST run on a Pentium 133, providing you use AWE-32 or Gravis sound (the SoundBlaster mixing slows it down too much ).

Video Modes: The emulator uses a custom video mode. Like the PacPc games the screen resolution is 224x228. THIS VIDEO MODE WILL NOT WORK ON SOME MONITORS. To fix this you need to get a VESA driver and use the 'V' mode on the command line.

Sound support for SoundBlaster, Gravis Ultrasound/Interwave based card, AWE/SB32. So that should cover all the most popular sound cards. With the Gravis/Interwave and AWE/SB32 cards you do need RAM as I upload the waveform ROM to the card.

The emulator is also Windows'95 friendly. It won't trash windows, lock up, require you to download some obscure DPMI driver, add EMM386 to your config.sys or any crap like that. To enhance performance you might want to run the emulator in pure DOS only mode.

Well there's lot of stuff I'd like to work on, but as usual time is the biggest enemy. After working out the Sky Kid micro-controller, the Pac Land one was pretty straight forward, so that's the next one on the list.

This will ultimately lead to adding support for the Namco system 1 boardset, these things are a MONSTER ! At some point I'll post a full technical run down of these AMAZING boards, they are, in my opinion, the pinnacle of 8-bit video game hardware design.

One thing that might get done in the near future is adding Baraduke to JAS the hardware is like an earlier revision of the Sky Kid boardset, but as always, don't hold your breath as I don't even known when I'm going to find the time to seriously look at it.

Go to the JAS homepage

This emulator can be downloaded directly from it's homepage.

NOTE: In order to run this emulator, you must have the emulator itself, and a copy of the ROM's from the original system.  The emulator itself is Freeware.  The ROM's are copyrighted by the programmer or the manufacturer. You are only legally entitled to do so if you own the actual game, or a PCB/ROM Cartridge from the game that you are emulating. If you decide to download ROM's to test out an emulator, you must delete the ROM's within 24 hours unless you own the equipment mentioned above.

ROM's may be found at many sites, including EMUCLASSICS.