ESP Ra. De. free play patch

[mikejmoffitt]

I was sick today so I took some of this home-bound time to finish up a ROM hack for ESP Ra. De. that replaces the "3 coins 1 credit" setting with "Free Play".

The source as well as IPS patches for the ROMs are available from this github repository.

https://github.com/Mikejmoffitt/esprade-freeplay

[monouchi]

Awesome stuff!

[emphatic]

But attract mode still works as usual, right? It’s not like Guwange’s Free Play?

[mikejmoffitt]

Correct - the normal attract sequence is displayed until a game is started.

[emphatic]

Thank you for your service. Would it be possible to add this to Guwange as well? Would be quite an improvement not having the attract mode stuck on the title screen.

[mikejmoffitt]

Thank you for your service. Would it be possible to add this to Guwange as well? Would be quite an improvement not having the attract mode stuck on the title screen.

Probably - I just haven't played Guwange so I haven't had a look at it yet. The motivation here is that ESP Ra. De. is the only shooter PCB I own so I wanted to be able to set it up on a night people come over without having to fiddle with coin switches

[PC Engine Fan X!]

It's about damn time that the ol' Cave/Atlus ESP.Ra.De pcb got a free play option. I inquired about such a "Free Play" option here on this hallowed shmups.com site many moons ago but it was no dice.

There are plenty of Cave shmup pcbs worthy of your arcade pcb stash, Mike. Don't just settle for one as with the lone ESP.Ra.De pcb (sure, the ol' wallet or purse will take a deep hit with the current prices especially with the classic Cave STG pcbs these days -- they were certainly more affordable back in the early to mid 2000s but those days are long gone).

Thanks for the cool free play option (fellow shmupper Bananamatic will still preach the ol' virtue of being able to play the classic Cave pcbs for free via emulation but in dealing with a real bonafide Cave pcb, it sure feels good to play with a real Cave pcb these days -- it doesn't any better than that, folks).

Any plans to do a free play option for the Japanese region ESP.Ra.De pcb as well?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[mikejmoffitt]

There are plenty of Cave shmup pcbs worthy of your arcade pcb stash, Mike. Don't just settle for one as with the lone ESP.Ra.De pcb (sure, the ol' wallet or purse will take a deep hit with the current prices especially with the classic Cave STG pcbs these days -- they were certainly more affordable back in the early to mid 2000s but those days are long gone).

This is the most expensive board I've ever bought and doing so made me wretch! I almost exclusively buy broken games that need work because it's cheaper, among other reasons. I'd love to buy everyone's broken cave boards, if they still exist out there - but I just can't justify something so expensive like these cave boards.

Thanks for the cool free play option (fellow shmupper Bananamatic will still preach the ol' virtue of being able to play the classic Cave pcbs for free via emulation but in dealing with a real bonafide Cave pcb, it sure feels good to play with a real Cave pcb these days -- it doesn't any better than that, folks).

I used MAME extensivley for testing and debugging, and I know a lot of skilled players are okay with it, but playing this kind of game through the shitty, complicated stack of latencies and buffers that PC emulation implies just feels awful to me. I think emulation on an embedded platform, possibly tweaked for each game, synchronized to hardware readout vblank but without a triple buffer can go well, but - MAME on the PC is not useful to me beyond testing. And that doesn't even touch upon the "look and feel" appeal of playing on a cabinet with a nice monitor.

Any plans to do a free play option for the Japanese region ESP.Ra.De pcb as well?

Maybe given a little more time. It's a pretty busy time for me right now but I'd like to do it. These Atlus cave games share a lot of code so making similar hacks for the other titles from this generation shouldn't be too hard.

[Stompp]

Awesome work indeed! Thank you

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Came across this interesting tidbit concerning a bug crash that can occur with an ESP.Ra.De pcb setup on Mike's github page in regards to the free play patch:

; KIND OF GROSS HACK ALERT
; There is a bug that is extremely hard to reproduce. Only twice I
; have hit start, gotten through character select, the transition
; animation begins, and... the screen stays covered in the transition
; squares indefinitely. The BGM is still of the how to play / char
; select screen, so for some reason the transition to state $5 is
; not made. This is a soft watchdog to ensure that the character
; select screen is stuck for too long. This is for if the game is run
; in a semi-public setting.
;
; This hack is in the wait for vblank routine as the same mechanism is
; used to allow you to hold P1 & P2 start to reset the machine.
; Increment the counter

So if I encounter this bug on my ESP.Ra.De pcb, will a simple reboot (meaning turn off & turn on from a "cold boot" on a supergun or candy cab setup) return it back to factory defaults?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[mikejmoffitt]

Came across this interesting tidbit concerning a bug crash that can occur with an ESP.Ra.De pcb setup on Mike's github page in regards to the free play patch:

; KIND OF GROSS HACK ALERT
; There is a bug that is extremely hard to reproduce. Only twice I
; have hit start, gotten through character select, the transition
; animation begins, and... the screen stays covered in the transition
; squares indefinitely. The BGM is still of the how to play / char
; select screen, so for some reason the transition to state $5 is
; not made. This is a soft watchdog to ensure that the character
; select screen is stuck for too long. This is for if the game is run
; in a semi-public setting.
;
; This hack is in the wait for vblank routine as the same mechanism is
; used to allow you to hold P1 & P2 start to reset the machine.
; Increment the counter

So if I encounter this bug on my ESP.Ra.De pcb, will a simple reboot (meaning turn off & turn on from a "cold boot" on a supergun or candy cab setup) return it back to factory defaults?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

It won't return it to defaults, but there's no need. It is only a single runtime error, it's not one that would become systemic. That is what the reboot safeguard is there for. After having made a few other changes, I haven't been able to reproduce the freeze, which I only saw twice out of probably over one hundred tests. If it does happen to you, the worst thing that happens is that the board will reboot on its own and you will have to hit start again. It only happens at the start of a game; there's zero risk of the board being stuck in some undesirable configuration.

In other words, that little nasty hack is there to automatically deal with the potential problem. You shouldn't have to do anything out of your way to deal with it.

[StarCreator]

Pardon my ignorance on this hardware, but are the altered ROMs socketed or soldered in? This sounds like a great thing to have but I'm a bit leery of doing irreversible alterations to my board...

[zakk]

They're socketed

Pardon my ignorance on this hardware, but are the altered ROMs socketed or soldered in? This sounds like a great thing to have but I'm a bit leery of doing irreversible alterations to my board...

[Eaglet]

Are there any 90's boards with soldered prog.roms?

[mikejmoffitt]

They're socketed, I just tested this on hardware last night and it went great.

[StarCreator]

Thanks!

Are they pdip or plcc form factor? I'm away from home this week and I'm trying to get this chip order together with a friend's before I get back, lol

zakk, do you need more chips while I'm at it?

[rtw]

Thanks!

Are they pdip or plcc form factor? I'm away from home this week and I'm trying to get this chip order together with a friend's before I get back, lol

http://www.world-of-arcades.net/Cave/Es ... rdware.htm

[mikejmoffitt]

Just two 27C040 EPROMs in DIP32 form factor will do it. Those stupid stickers with the logo are valuable so get some replacement ROMs if you can.

[StarCreator]

As it turns out my board is missing the foil stickers. Hope that means it's not a conversion, but apparently I have pretty bad luck with that sort of thing.

[mikejmoffitt]

The only thing it could be converted from is another region of ESP Ra.De. so it really doesn't matter.

I'd like to port this patch to the J version, or even better, make a combination of the J and W versions.