2016.01.04
"Saving Wing Force"
Let's kick off this 2016 with something very special! A Christmas present a
mere week late, but 23 years in the making. Wing Force by Atlus, an
ultra-rare, unreleased Japanese shooter, has been saved from oblivion thanks
to ShouTime, a renown MAME-friendly arcade collector!
This vertical game was developed by A.I., who were also responsible for also
writing Blaze On. Set for release in 1993, it never got past the development
stage, and was thought to be lost forever. All that remained were a few shots
printed on some game magazines back then, such as this one.
When a prototype board unexpectedly turned up in an online auction, ShouTime
was so generous to buy it, dump it and document it. It's 16-bit Kaneko
hardware, in excellent conditions. The ROM riser boards and the hand-written
labels reveal it's no ordinary game:
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/wingforc_pcb_1_small.jpg
The unpopulated spot on the left is where the Toybox chip would sit in the
production board. That is a custom MCU that Kaneko would add for protection
of its games on this hardware, starting from 1994 onwards. Luckily they did
not have time to finalize this aspect of the production, which means we have
no additional hurdles to overcome to enjoy this title.
Here's a close-up of one of the (fragile) riser boards, used for faster
prototyping of the development versions of the game:
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/wingforc_pcb_2_small.jpg
Below are shots of the game running in MAME. The hardware is almost identical
to Blaze On which I emulated in kaneko16.cpp. Most notably it uses two sprite
chips, like the only other Atlus title in the driver:
http://www.lucaelia.com/mame.php/drivers#kaneko16
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/0001.png
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/0008.png
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/0014.png
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/0018.png
http://www.lucaelia.com/images/mame_snaps/wingforc/0027.png
(其他截圖請至來源處瀏覽)
First ever video of the gameplay, in MAME. I'm playing (badly) with an
infinite lives cheat for convenience:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BlsmWb51rQ&feature=player_embedded
You can use this MAME executable (Windows x64) , freshly compiled to include
the driver, to play it yourself (but roms are not included). For infinite
lives, type the following incantation in the debugger: bp 29ec, 1, {pc+=4; g}
來源 http://www.lucaelia.com/mame.php/2016/Saving-Wing-Force