Pirating the Pirates
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009I’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.