Battle Garegga patches

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8bitForLife
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Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2011 1:52 am
Location: Carson City NV

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by 8bitForLife »

I bought a bootleg version would it be possible to use this on it? I think I would have to socket some roms?
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mikejmoffitt
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Location: Tokyo, Japan

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by mikejmoffitt »

I have plans to patch Zakk’s changes on top of my bootleg fixes. As it is now it will not boot on that bootleg.

If you don’t have the right tools (a desoldering gun) please don’t attempt to socket the bootleg with solder braid or things like that. It is a shitty, fragile PCB, which will have broken vias if done that way.
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8bitForLife
Posts: 47
Joined: Thu Dec 08, 2011 1:52 am
Location: Carson City NV

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by 8bitForLife »

mikejmoffitt wrote:I have plans to patch Zakk’s changes on top of my bootleg fixes. As it is now it will not boot on that bootleg.

If you don’t have the right tools (a desoldering gun) please don’t attempt to socket the bootleg with solder braid or things like that. It is a shitty, fragile PCB, which will have broken vias if done that way.
Oh no I'll probably send you mine to fix up if your willing to do it when you can. My dad is in san jose. I'm horrible at soldering.
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Animaitor
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Joined: Thu Jan 29, 2009 9:33 am
Location: Tokyo

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by Animaitor »

Hey Mike, I'm about to get one of these Chinese hacked Battle Garegga boards (the original is way too expensive for me right now) and I've been reading your contribution on the arcade projects site. If I understand correctly, if your patch is applied, the game will turn into a regular BG board? If so, is there any difference in graphics, sound, slowdowns, etc? How is your progress on adding Zakk's patch into yours? I hope Zakk doesn't mind if I ask these questions on his thread :oops:

Also, if you could choose, which board version would you recommend, the old (but fragile) or new Red Sun board (humming sound needs to be fixed?) If I'm not mistaken, both have Yamaha chips, right?
xavierjesus wrote:Fcuking love sticks made from random objects. I'm off now actually to buy a plastic vagina...
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mikejmoffitt
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Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by mikejmoffitt »

What my patch does is compensate for the deficiencies in the bootleg video chipset. That is, fix the alignment and desync between sprites and background.

In order to fix the sprite positioning, a tiny bit of code had to be added to the sprite drawing function. The game will face a tiny bit more slowdown.

All versions of the boards are kind of trashy in terms of design and reliability, so pick your poison indiscriminately. Whatever chips you get is nearly random; it's whatever these guys had lying around or pulled from other boards. One of them had a bootleg YM2151 that misbehaved at the wrong voltages, so I recorded it.

I haven't merged the two patches yet. Both are open source, so I encourage anyone else to have a shot at it!
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Animaitor
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Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by Animaitor »

Thanks for the prompt response. I'm not a programmer so I doubt I'll be able to contribute to the patches I'm afraid.

As for the board itself, I'm still undecided. If your patch works and the only side effect is a bit more slowdown, it might be worth it.
xavierjesus wrote:Fcuking love sticks made from random objects. I'm off now actually to buy a plastic vagina...
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Nebula
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Joined: Fri Nov 18, 2016 7:15 pm
Location: Asturias,Spain

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by Nebula »

zakk wrote:I made a slight revision, the GitHub repo and the download site are updated.

Changes:
Rank display is adjusted when in Harder/Special/Extended mode so as not to overwrite the mode indicator on screen.
I hijacked the "Stage Edit" dip switch so it enables/disables the custom hud (autofire and rank related displays).
The default for that dip switch is OFF. So if you want fancy rank display, be sure to flip it to on.
You can still access stage edit mode by starting a credit while holding the C button.

If you forget to flip the dip switch on, you can do it in the middle of a credit and it will immediately start to display the HUD, no reset needed.
Hi zakk, I opened an issue on your garegga patches repository on GitHub regarding a problem when displaying rank change in Extended Mode (A + Start)

https://github.com/zakk4223/battle-gare ... s/issues/1

Here is a video of the issue:

https://youtu.be/kkxjgUp-ABg

I only tested it in MAME because currently I don’t have eprom spares to test it in real hardware
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Nebula
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Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by Nebula »

Lately, I noticed some strange behaviors when playing several credits in same game session by resetting the game using Start + ABC

First of those is sometimes in the first stage I obtained the Search special option Formation which is virtually impossible in stage 1, as it's not possible to leave 5 option items. That makes me suspect that the count of option items not collected was not re-initilized when resetting the game.
So, after some investigation, I could find the memory positions where item not collected counts are stored for: small shot, small bomb, option and medal items, and using mame cheats to print their values at screen while playing, I could check that only small shot items not collected count is reset between credits.

Then, I investigated more and taking a look at the patch file from zakk and original source code, I could manage to update the patch to add the reset for the other 3 non collected item counts.

I was able to check it in mame and original PCB and it works fine.

I created a pull-request for adding it in the original github repository:
https://github.com/zakk4223/battle-gare ... hes/pull/2
There are 4 bytes in memory where non collected items counts are stored. They are important to activate special option formations.
In original code, not all of these counts are reset in every credit (only small shot count is), so previous credit state of non collected items affects the new one.
  • $109CB9 is the small shot items non collected count
  • $109CBA is the small bomb items non collected count
  • $109CBB is the option items non collected count
  • $109CBC is the medal items non collected count
patch.s file is updated to reset all these counts in every credit.

Original code has these instructions:
  • $B86: clr.b $109CB8 ; reset unknown count
  • $B8C: clr.b $109CB9 ; reset small shot items count
it could be changed to:
  • $B86: clr.l $109CB8 ; reset unknown, small shot, small bomb and option items counts
  • $B8C: clr.b $109CBC ; reset medal items count
Only prg1.bin file is affected to these changes.

Second strange behaviour is that I noticed that speed of ship (I usually play with Golden Bat) it's gradually slower and slower after some manual Start+ABC resets were done, specially when I reach later stages in previous runs. That makes me suspect that there is some count over there that also affects to the speed of the ship. When hard resetting the PCB (turning off the cab) I notice that the ship has the original speed (a little faster than previous run).
Did you guys ever noticed something similar? :?
vgambit
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Joined: Mon Jan 04, 2010 10:38 pm

Re: Battle Garegga patches

Post by vgambit »

Thanks for the patch, but does anyone have any instructions on how to get this running in RetroArch? The FinalBurn Neo core complains about CRC mismatch, and the MAME core simply crashes, so ignoring it per the readme doesn't work.
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