MAME, MESS, and Other Fun

When you stole my iPod last night, thank you for using the unlocked car doors, and not needlessly smashing out any windows.  It was a rental, and that would have been really unfortunate to have to both spend money replacing my iPod and replacing the window.

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!

I’m not sure how many people are aware of this, but there’s an interesting little non-working game in MAME that goes by the unassuming nickname, “39in1″.  It’s one in a line of numerous “Xin1″ games, including 4in1, 9in1 and 48in1 as well, though only 4in1 and 48in1 have been dumped in addition to 39in1..

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.