God dammit, CAVE has thought of everything...

[esreveR]

Alright, some of you may know I'm a sprite ripper kind of guy, I like to rip from shmups and stuff, but one thing has always left me stumped, and it's ripping from CAVE first-gen arcade systems.

Now, if you ever try opening, say, DoDonPachi in MAME, you'll find the only tile layers available to show are 8x8 ones. I initially thought that the graphical data was just stored on said 8x8 layers, but I could never find any real graphics in there other than Taisabachi's abdomen and some other useless crap. Well, it turns out that "It's in 8x8 layers", if anything, sounds a bit more believable than is actually the case...

...Because I just opened DDP in Raine out of curiosity, and it seems every CAVE game has a 16x16 tile layer, and not only that, the MAME developers have intentionally hidden it from prying eyes!

Yes, it's all there in the ROM. The thing is, MAME just refuses to show it.

Which leads me to believe that not only is CAVE telling the MAME devs to not emulate their newer games, they also have some agreement to prevent us ripping (Or rather, ripping effectively) from their older ones too.

Well damn. I thought the whole anti-piracy thing was understandable, but this?

[Drachenherz]

I'd say you're paranoid. Go out, enjoy the sunshine and stop treating stg as the center of the universe.

Yes, bad troll is bad troll...

[esreveR]

I'd say you're paranoid. Go out, enjoy the sunshine and stop treating stg as the center of the universe.

Yes, bad troll is bad troll...

Sometimes I feel like I have an incredibly short attention span. Then I get on the internet and realize I have nothing to worry about.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

stg ARE the center of the universe

And the big bang was an explotion of purple bullets

FIXED

[Drachenherz]

stg ARE the center of the universe

And the big bang was an explotion of purple bullets

FIXED

I prefer the blue ones...

[Dave_K.]

stg ARE the center of the universe

And the big bang was an explotion of purple bullets

FIXED

I prefer the blue ones...

Interesting factoid: in DDP, the largish blue spinning bullets have only 4 frames of animation, while the smaller pink cluster bullets have 16 frames. ^_~

[Drachenherz]

Interesting factoid: in DDP, the largish blue spinning bullets have only 4 frames of animation, while the smaller pink cluster bullets have 16 frames. ^_~

You know... I'm a simple person. 16 frames would be too much for me, thus my preference of the blue bullet kind...

[esreveR]

And I thought MSDB threads derailed quickly.

Oh well.

[StarCreator]

MAME doesn't exist to facilitate sprite rips, it exists to document how the original hardware worked. And I'm pretty sure the original hardware didn't have a way to isolate sprite layers.

[esreveR]

MAME doesn't exist to facilitate sprite rips, it exists to document how the original hardware worked. And I'm pretty sure the original hardware didn't have a way to isolate sprite layers.

I must be good at misusing programs then.

[Keade]

To be honnest, the OP seems a bit far-fetched.
Maybe that is true, but something being simply unimplemented yet sounds more plausible.
You could ask the MAME devs (preferably the guy(s) who worked on the particular driver) directly, I mean, what would they gain by lying to you ?
Who knows, they might even be kind enough to provide technical clues as why it doesn't work as you intended it to.
If you put the question like the OP, I do think they'll think you're paranoid or something along those lines, though

[esreveR]

To be honnest, the OP seems a bit far-fetched.
Maybe that is true, but something being simply unimplemented yet sounds more plausible.
You could ask the MAME devs (preferably the guy(s) who worked on the particular driver) directly, I mean, what would they gain by lying to you ?
Who knows, they might even be kind enough to provide technical clues as why it doesn't work as you intended it to.
If you put the question like the OP, I do think they'll think you're paranoid or something along those lines, though

What other explanation would there be? They clearly know how to decrypt the information, or it wouldn't be in the game, either.

Palette-searching is also nigh-impossible, despite the fact said palettes are used in the emulation all the time.

If they just decided we wouldn't need it or something, then why did they bother with tile/palette viewers in the first place?

[mjclark]

To be honnest, the OP seems a bit far-fetched.
Maybe that is true, but something being simply unimplemented yet sounds more plausible.
You could ask the MAME devs (preferably the guy(s) who worked on the particular driver) directly, I mean, what would they gain by lying to you ?
Who knows, they might even be kind enough to provide technical clues as why it doesn't work as you intended it to.
If you put the question like the OP, I do think they'll think you're paranoid or something along those lines, though

What other explanation would there be? They clearly know how to decrypt the information, or it wouldn't be in the game, either.

Palette-searching is also nigh-impossible, despite the fact said palettes are used in the emulation all the time.

If they just decided we wouldn't need it or something, then why did they bother with tile/palette viewers in the first place?

Yes ASK THEM!!!!!
Of course the beauty of paranoia is that when they reply with a plausible, innocent and true answer you can build it into a conspiracy and believe that they're deliberately trying to mislead you
Maybe CAVE are trying to control the minds of the youth and, from this forum, it looks like they've almost fuckin' succeeded lol

[MoonZ]

I already studied the question, and after reading cave.c driver, it's possible to disable layers within MAME. You just have to run the debug version of mame... (Thanks to Luca Elia)

edit: please read http://mamedev.org/source/src/mame/video/cave.c.html

[Herr Schatten]

Maybe CAVE are trying to control the minds of the youth

Already taken care of by the four-dimensional lizards people.