07-23-2019, 01:40 PM
So, I know Macross Plus has an arcade game, and I haven't seen any rips from it. I'm not sure if anyone cares about it (I know I don't particularly) but in the process of trying to rip the Sailor Moon Quiz game I tripped across the fact that macrossp and quizmoon use the same driver.... which means IF someone cares about it they might benefit from what I had to do to Quizmoon to get it into a rippable format.
Quizmoon's sprites display well in mame, but getting all the palettes (especially for cut content) required hunting through the binaries. The problem is that the binaries look like utter garbage. Eventually, with much mucking about in GGD I eventually found four binaries that looked like they had something that might have been graphical data. What it comes down to is that the sprites are stored in four separate rom chips in an interlaced format (I assume for the speed of reading the data or something.) To re-interlace the files I had to write up a program that wrote one byte at a time from each of the four files: 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1....
This is also true for the palette files (Although there's some data that makes me think there might be some uninterlaced palettes as well, but I haven't actually found any working palettes in the uninterlaced files.)
If there's anyone out there who cares enough about Macross to want to rip the game this info might help. I'm not sure how often interlacing like this comes up in ROMS, but it struck me as fairly unusual so I also wanted to toss out the info because it might help crack some tough nuts.
If someone's really desperate for the program for interlacing, I can provide it, but it's really a kludge that involves copy-pasting from hex editors in chunks...someone who's actually good at programming may want to take a better crack at it if interlaced roms are more common than I thought.
Quizmoon's sprites display well in mame, but getting all the palettes (especially for cut content) required hunting through the binaries. The problem is that the binaries look like utter garbage. Eventually, with much mucking about in GGD I eventually found four binaries that looked like they had something that might have been graphical data. What it comes down to is that the sprites are stored in four separate rom chips in an interlaced format (I assume for the speed of reading the data or something.) To re-interlace the files I had to write up a program that wrote one byte at a time from each of the four files: 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 3, 2, 1....
This is also true for the palette files (Although there's some data that makes me think there might be some uninterlaced palettes as well, but I haven't actually found any working palettes in the uninterlaced files.)
If there's anyone out there who cares enough about Macross to want to rip the game this info might help. I'm not sure how often interlacing like this comes up in ROMS, but it struck me as fairly unusual so I also wanted to toss out the info because it might help crack some tough nuts.
If someone's really desperate for the program for interlacing, I can provide it, but it's really a kludge that involves copy-pasting from hex editors in chunks...someone who's actually good at programming may want to take a better crack at it if interlaced roms are more common than I thought.