Has SEGA System 16C been ported to FPGA?

[kamiboy]

Short recap, the sequel for the arcade hit Fantasy Zone was made for the Master System. Then in 2008, for Sega Ages Vol. 33, those madmen at M2 went ahead and made an arcade upgrade port of the game for a hypothetical new revision of the System 16 arcade hardware, which they called System 16C. Apparently the only change in this hypothetical revision of the hardware was a 256KB RAM upgrade.

I know that System 16A and 16B have already been ported to work on the MiSTER FPGA hardware, and since the hypothetical C revision is so close to those revisions I am thinking it should be relatively easy to make the C revision work as well. But search as I might I have not been able to find any information on whether this has been attempted or not.

I am very strongly leaning towards investing in a MiSTER for my Blast City, and getting rid of the ageing, flakey MAME PC I got in there. As such I thought it would be neat to try the Fantasy Zone 2 on it via FPGA.

Has anyone thought of this, is it possible to do already? Can it be done? Will it be supported in the future?

[donluca]

Definitely possible, System16C isn't anything strange.

If you look at the System16B schematics you'll see that it already has lines for the extra memory, it's just not wired up.

I'll see if I can move things.

[kamiboy]

Jawsome, for some reason the idea of playing an FPGA implementation of this hypothetical hardware dreamt up by those M2 wizards seems really neat to me.

[ZellSF]

I don't think Fantasy Zone itself works yet, does it?

[kamiboy]

No sure, it's not easy finding up to date information. After a bit of google-fu I think the guy doing the project has been having personal issues, which might have stalled the project. After some more looking around it seems the MiSTER platform is not really hot right now in terms of arcade emulation.

[BrianC]

There's currently a system 16 core in beta from Jotego with Shinobi. Not available to the public yet.

[kamiboy]

Well if the core is actively being worked on then I guess now really is the best time to bring System 16C to the attention of the developers. If anyone has a direct line of communication to them then please do.

[ZellSF]

The original Fantasy Zone and Fantasy Zone II DX have been ported to MiSTer FPGA now.

[Fudoh]

that's fantastic. Does anybody know if the "arcade" rom - contrary to the PS2 one - has working continues? The PS2 version allows you to drop in coins as much as you like, but there's no continue option, so you're forced to 1CC the game, which actually isn't this easy.

[donluca]

Ah yes, I forgot to post back here

Jotego did it.

And as far as I'm concerned... there's no such thing as "arcade ROMs".
Or, if you want to look at it another way, there are only "arcade ROMs" because those are the ones in the PS2 disc.
They are just merged into one (or more, can't remember) file so you have to split it into the ROMs you then put on the ROM board on your System16B and away you go.

Also, the test mode is there but not functional, it just does random things.

tl;dr: there's probably no continue option.

EDIT: IIRC there was a thread somewhere here where mike said that he was working on some fixes for FZ2DX, but unfortunately he recently announced on Twitter that he won't be working on those anymore.
I'm not aware of any fixes published so far, but if you google for it, you'll find a thread of mine asking for the fixes.