MiSTer FPGA Forum

That looks really good with the improved resolution. Donkey Kong Jr is my favorite G&W game, followed by Donkey Kong II. Looking forward to it being updated. Love being able to play the old tabletop games as well on MiSTer.

Hey Pierco, are you still working on G&W and Supervision or focussing on arcade cores for now? Was great to get Q-Bert recently, many thanks for that.

Supervision is not yet a priority but I have just restarted the G&W today, I'm confident that I will make good progress this time

Pierco wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 6:46 am Supervision is not yet a priority but I have just restarted the G&W today, I'm confident that I will make good progress this time

Awesome! That is great news! Really looking forward to seeing your progress.

EDIT: Oh and do you think voices could be added to Q*Bert at some point? Probably as samples and not emulated. I preordered the Q*Bert Replicade cabinet from New Wave Toys, it even has the kicker, really looking forward to that one.

I will be interested in the 'feel' of Donkey Kong Jr, I've been playing mine since at least 1986 (I found when I took it apart some years back, that I wrote my name and year in pencil on the PCB!).
But just because I've played it a lot does not mean I am great at it though

I don't know if it the logic or 'muscle memory' but on Donkey Kong JR I can move the character along fast. On Donkey Kong (which I only recently got) it seems the character is locked to the 'beat/clock' of the system. On DK Jr it seems you can move in-between the 'normal beat' and move fast over say 3 character spacings.
Interesting to hear from people who know Donkey Kong well, if this is also the case, and it is about timing of button presses. The difference in control pads between the 2 games probably makes a bit of difference.

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 7:34 am EDIT: Oh and do you think voices could be added to Q*Bert at some point? Probably as samples and not emulated. I preordered the Q*Bert Replicade cabinet from New Wave Toys, it even has the kicker, really looking forward to that one.

The Votrax Chip is a complex one. The full schematic is available here: https://og.kervella.org/sc01a/schem/
but I'm not motivated enough to start the Verilog conversion. I tried a sample based emulation but result is very poor, especially between phoneme transitions... but I fully agree with you, Q*Bert without a voice is not really Q*Bert!

I have just restarted the G&W today, I'm confident that I will make good progress this time

Excellent news. I'm looking forward to this core.

Great news! Really looking forward to this one.

Pierco wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 8:00 am

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 7:34 am EDIT: Oh and do you think voices could be added to Q*Bert at some point? Probably as samples and not emulated. I preordered the Q*Bert Replicade cabinet from New Wave Toys, it even has the kicker, really looking forward to that one.

The Votrax Chip is a complex one. The full schematic is available here: https://og.kervella.org/sc01a/schem/
but I'm not motivated enough to start the Verilog conversion. I tried a sample based emulation but result is very poor, especially between phoneme transitions... but I fully agree with you, Q*Bert without a voice is not really Q*Bert!

I've looked into that before, there indeed doesn't seem to be an FPGA version of it anywhere yet. I can imagine it would be a massive amount of work to make. Too bad it doesn't work out when using samples. The voice does indeed add a lot, but the game is fun regardless.

Is that chip used in anything else?

Moondandy wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 8:26 pm Is that chip used in anything else?

It is also used in Gorf, Wizard of Wor and Reactor.

Great, I have been dying to play again the Popeye G&W since I was a child!

Any update on the Game and Watch Core? I was looking at the github page and could not locate the .rbf core

An old build is here: https://archive.org/download/gameandwatch_202010

I never understood why they give the G&W CORE and this games pack.
the core is taking only .BIN and these games extension are not supported by this core.
at this time, only Donkey kong JR is supported.

Looks like Pierco is going to be giving this core some more love!

That is fantastic news, really looking forward to it! That screenshot looks great!

Another update

I really love the image quality of it.

These look lovely, great to see Pierco is back looking at this core. Hopefully it is possible to do the later more advanced G&W games within the core also.

Hopefully the core is developed in such a way that it could be used as a basis for other LCD game cores as well. I would love to see a core for the Zelda Game Watch (not to be confused with Zelda Game & Watch) one day
https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/The_Legen ... Game_Watch

Absolutely, I have a small collection of LCD games from Nintendo, Gakken, Bandai, Casio and other brands, as well as VFD tabletop games. A lot of them are still quite fun to play. They have interesting varied themes and cool artwork.

Do you know if these other LCD games have been dumped with graphics scanned and are playable in emulators?

I really look forward to it! It is looking great indeed!

That Donkey Kong Jr screenshot looks mint!

Regarding the question about if other G&W have been dumped, there was a MAME article in Retro Gamer mag some months back and there was a G&W MAME subsection. Seems like many G&W have been dumped and hi res scans done.
Would also love to see the dual screens. Zelda has a lot of depth for a G&W game.

The Donkey Kong dual screens are great as well. I have the second Donkey Kong one, it looks really cool and gameplay is quite interesting, having to traverse back down the level after releasing one of the locks on Donkey Kong.

Nice!!

I do have a 'hero and princess' from Tandy that it was never preserved. But I'm not fully sure how they do it.

I tried by doing photograhs but, it does not look quite right.
http://handheldempire.com/game.jsp?game=1597

I love the varied designs and topics of these classic games. These are a few games from my collection, from the same casio series. Astro chicken is the most fun and weird one of these.

The chips in them are usually glob-tops, I guess they very carefully remove the glob to get to the chip. Not sure if that is enough to get all the game logic as well.

Awesome

Such a cool idea to sync the time like that. Now we will be able to use the MiSTer as an alarm clock

LamerDeluxe wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 8:28 pm Such a cool idea to sync the time like that. Now we will be able to use the MiSTer as an alarm clock

The true MiSTer feature I've been longing for!