Recently, an acquaintance bought me a SunPlus SPG200 devkit:

SunPlus is a Taiwanese semiconductor company that, surprisingly, actually makes their own tech rather than ripping other companies off.  Their hardware is usually ridiculously cheap, and as a result has found a niche in cheap game consoles: The KenSingTon Vii, Mattel Hyperscan, V-Tech V-Smile, JAKKS Pacific TV Plug’n'Play games, lots of cheap “MP4″ players, and so on.  The SPG series in particular was used in the Vii, V-Smile, and TV Plug’n'Play games.

The first thing I did, naturally, was blink an LED:

I was playing The Impossible Game - an Xbox 360 “indie” game - on the subsequent night when an idea hit me: Bot the game.  Sure, people have managed to beat the game normally, but there’s no EE-style challenge in that!

Another night’s of work and a couple trips to Radio Shack allowed me to eliminate the crappy, many-year-old 75-in-1 electronics kit that I was borrowing from a friend.  Some quick kludging of an Xbox 360 controller later, and I was off and running:

A more close-up view of the breadboard itself:

Overall, it’s a pretty simple circuit.  I have I/O port A line 0 hooked up via a 10kR to an NPN BJT, and the Xbox 360 controller’s A button wires sitting across the collector and emitter with a 10kR inline.  Simple.

The rest of the circuitry is to make my life easier.  There’s a pair of wires that I can touch together to bridge the A button manually in order to navigate menus, there’s another jumper wire that’s hooked up to I/O port A line 8 in order to start the automated sequence of keypresses, and six LEDs to show where in the sequence I am currently.

There are only two real issues that I’ve run into so far: First, I have to manually exit out of the current game and go back into it whenever the player dies in order to resync the hard-coded button timing with the game.  Second, every so often the timing will be a few frames off from the beginning - I blame slight variances in load time.

What I really need to do is figure out why the op-amp comparator circuit I tried to build failed to work.  Once it’s working, I should be able to trigger the restart based on the dead silence that occurs whenever the player loses a life.  After that it would be simple enough to make it automatically start playing once I start the program, or alternatively, I could even make it use a simple genetic-like algorithm to try to find the appropriate sequence rather than me having to hard-code the timing.

Once The Impossible Game falls, I’ll be taking a crack at automating Guitar Hero; after having disassembled the controller, it’s obvious that it’s actually really simple inside.  Then, the world will be mine!

Me, I think that this lawsuit is a fantastic idea.  Hopefully they’ll release the list of people who have signed onto the class action suit - we should all be able to know who’s too fucking stupid to read the text on-screen that clearly displays the point-to-price ration every single time you have to buy points.

The fact of the matter is that there is a reasonable level of suspicion that this “dump” may, in fact, be ripped from the Virtual Console release for the Nintendo Wii, and not from a legitimate prototype cartridge.  These suspicions were effectively confirmed by someone with ties to the Wii warez scene posting on the MAMEWorld forums and flatly stating as much.  In the event that these posts are deleted, here they are in their entirety.  All typographical, syntactical, and grammatical errors are there in the original posts.

“News from mameplus frontpage
neogeo: added Ironclad / Choutetsu Brikin’ger (Wii) [dumped by katana]

proov Katana is the author of this dump please”

After being told that his post was basically a word salad and made no sense, the following reply was made:

“1st/ He just downloaded the dump from the wad at a chineese forum
but is not the author of this dump

2nd/ the dump used in mameplus is not really
proper, ask iq_132 who have finished the
work to make the latest “proper” dump of this game

(sorry for my bad english)”

To be perfectly honest, this is as good a reason as any to never support this particular dump.  What may not be known by the ex-MAMEdev who is complaining the loudest about this is that because of the (in)famous epilepsy-inducing episode of Pokémon, the publisher is required to check for flashing screens, and as a result there’s a very good chance that there have been modifications to either the art or the program code of the game.

In the event that that technical reason isn’t a good enough one to suspend its inclusion in MAME, I ask you, the reader, to ask yourself: Who has been one of the most litigous companies in emulation history, well ahead of even Sony or Sega?  Indeed, it’s Nintendo.  They tried their best to stomp on earlier emulators in the mid-90’s, they tried to stomp out UltraHLE in the late 90’s, and I, for one, would rather they not choose MAMEdev as the group in the late 00’s to rectally violate with Thor’s hammer turned sideways.

This is Rumor Control, those were the facts.

“You know what I like about Taco Bell?  If you go in there with a $20 bill in-hand, you’ll eat like a king for the next week!”

Without missing a step, my coworker simply replied:

I also appreciate the fact that you left the 7 Nintendo 64 games that I had yet to take in from my most recent Play-N-Trade trip, as they are considerably much harder to come by than an iPod.  Likewise, thank you for leaving the male-to-male stereo audio cable with which I had connected the iPod, as I wouldn’t want to have to shell out another $20 for a small length of wire.

On the subject of finance, however, you missed an opportunity to make a quick dollar or so by not taking the multitude of soda cans with you as well.

Overall, I hope you enjoy your newfound portable music player, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the rather eclectic collection of music on it.  You may be disappointed, though, as there wasn’t quite as much gangsta rap on there this time of year as you might like.  Enjoy!

The reason why these games are interesting is because they’re bootlegs of MAME, hacked to run on a 200MHz Intel XScale system-on-a-chip, so there’s a very good chance that these games will be the first instance of MAME self-virtualizing, albeit with an earlier version than itself.

Between Andreas Naive breaking the encryption on the main program ROM, me wiring up a good number of the PXA255 peripherals, and R. Belmont figuring out a lot of the CPLD communication, it finally runs far enough to display something, albeit an error message:

Stay tuned; there’s probably more to come.

Well, that’s the end goal, anyway.  For now I’d be satisfied with tracing out the game’s boot process to figure out why, exactly, it fails to boot in MESS currently.

Either way, my current work is here.  That’s after around 4-5 hours’ worth of work.

I am not entirely happy with the fact that it is compatible with all of the programs, though.  Certain programs in particular, i.e. “nightmare.snp”, would not run on the SSEM had it ever been extended to the full 8192 words of storage space of which it was theoretically capable (per some SSEM history sites), as they pad out the unused 8 address bits with pretty patterns.

And now, a pretty picture:

The controls are as follows:
Up / Down: Move the selected store line up/down
Button 1: Halt / un-halt the SSEM
1-8, Q-I, A-K, Z-,: Toggle bits 0-31 of the currently-selected store line

As it turns out, there’s already a Java-based emulator out there.  Inspiration struck, and I decided to see how easy it would be to emulate the SSEM in MESS.  It was, historically, the first electronic stored-program computer (if I read my sources right), so it seems like a prime candidate for support in MESS.

Without further ado, here is the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine displaying the results of Tom Kilburn’s “Highest Common Factor for 989″ program, including the correct answer (43).

Chances are good I’ll be able to get clearance to add this to MESS.  Fingers crossed!