American Laser Games (Mad Dog McCree and others)
 

I got curious about Mad Dog McCree, it's perhaps not commonly known that the Arcade cabinet is powered by an Amiga 500 (along with a genlock, laserdisc player et al).

I wondered if there was someway to crack the software and get it to run on a standard Amiga, though bearing in mind it'd be useless without a genlock, laserdisc player and whatever other custom hardware it might need.

The entirety of the software (laserdisc video excluded) is on two ROMs, where the bytes are interleaved. I've combined the two ROMs back into a single file, and it appears that there's no less than three Amiga executables in the ROM (going by the standard "$000003f3" header) but according to the utility "WRIP" they appear to be corrupt, and therefore it couldn't extract them.

In any case, that's as far as I can go with my technical skills. I've put the stuff in the zone in case someone with more brainpower and patience can do something further with it.


EDIT

Thanks to the hard work of Toni Wilen, we have playable ALG games in WinUAE!

Gallagher's Gallery

1. Download the latest beta of WinUAE and extract somewhere.
http://www.winuae.net/files/b/winuae.7z

2. Download the ALG ROMs and put them in your WinUAE ROM directory. You can find these in the Zone.

3. Download the video of Gallagher's Gallery. Note that it isn't complete, the original YouTube rip seems to have left off part of it, so it'll freeze in places. (If it does freeze, just press F2 or F3 to continue)
https://mega.nz/#!JBZ0WIAL!I4iMdbedI...q_0ps8Hkfln2f0

4. Start the beta of WinUAE, and use this configuration from Emufan:



1) Quickstart A500 1.3 ROM ECS Agnus 512 Chip / 512 Slow fast - NTSC
ROM: Extended Rom: American Laser Games Gallagher's Gallery v2.1 (256k)

2) Chipset: enable Genlock Connected [x] -> American Laserdisk Games and choose the videofile by earok.
--> if you get a blue screen instead of the video, then something is wrong with the videofile or missing/wrong video codec
enable NTSC [x]

3) GamePorts: Port1: none Port2: none

4) Input: remap Configuration #1 - Mouse
X Axis - Lightpen Horizontal
Y Axis - Lightpen Vertical
Button 1 - ALG Right Trigger

--> you should see a yellow cross which you can move around, if this is working.
--> if you dont see the yellow crosshair, remap the second mouse entry (not Windows Mouse) if you have a 2nd listed

5) Input: remap Configuration #1 - Keyboard
F1 - ALG Service
F2 - ALG Right Start
F3 - ALG Right Coin
F4 - ALG Right Holster

--> if none of the maped keys work, just try with your 2nd keyboard entry (not winuae keyboard)

6) if game starts push F3 (inserts Coin) - and watch what happens.
next push F2 to choose a subgame.
F1 brings up the game service menu - here you can calibrate the Lightpen pointer.
F4 will "Reload" the gun of the 1st player - some games will use this.

"ALG Right" values are for 1st player, "ALG Left" for the 2nd player


GUN CALIBRATION:
1. Press F1 when the machine has booted to enter service menu
2. Press F1 twice more, "Gun Aiming" should be highlighted
3. Move the cursor into the yellow box
4. Hold F2 and click
5. Click again to confirm the shot is accurate
6. Press F1 to exit Gun Aiming
7. Press F1 until Done is highlighted
8. Press F2


OTHER GAMES
Just substitute the ROM and Video to play these other games we've found laserdisc rips for. Download the Video below:

Platoon (unsupported?)
Mad Dog McCree (Seems to be good, frames may not be 100% aligned)
Mad Dog McCree 2: The Lost Gold (Italian)

i cannot help here on the technical side, but i tried to redo what you describe, here the steps:
#1) using this rom Mad Dog McCree v2.03 board rev.B ROM ( MAME rom maddog.zip ) -> includes two rom files
#2) using WinHEx -> Tools -> File Tools -> Unify -> Bytewise 8Bit
now choose 2nd and then 1st rom and next save as combined
#3) wrip from aminet produces the result in attached image.

*image removed to free some bytes*

ROM image looks wrong. I think it should map at $f00000 and rom has two resident structures, both have same adress $f00008 and they are located at rom image offsets $21000 and $219e0. (4a.fc.00.f0.00.08...) This does not make sense unless dump is wrong or something is missing. This rom image can't autostart. EDIT: or there is some address line swapping.

@EmuFan yeah, that's exactly as far as I got.

I admit it's way above my head, heh.

Does the MAME source code for the game clear anything up? There's some references to address mapping.

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob...rivers/alg.cpp

Ok, it has very simple address "scrambling". Now it makes sense :)

thanks confirming :)
so we could just use the decryption routines (line 677 of alg.cpp) to "fix" the rom
(not that i'm able to do so, just asking) ?

I can add quick winuae "support". (=automatic "descrambling", nothing more)

sounds good to me :)
does that mean, we could then use these roms as "Extended Rom file"?

This is mostly for my own curiosity - would it be possible to simply descramble a ROM file, so (presumably? I have no idea) it could be used with existing WinUAE builds?

I am not sure if it will map correctly without some support code. I'll probably make it similar to Arcadia ROM selection (listed in cartridge rom list). It may need some extra hacks to make it make it think LD is connected etc and there won't be any GUI options, extra stuff will be enabled only by autodetected ROM type.

short reply: :great

sounds great, thanks for that :great

here's my take at Mad Dog mc Cree :

I tried Mad Dog McCree and it only asks to power on the LD player. It is most likely serial port controlled (few bytes are sent to serial port). Some kind of command information is needed..

Anyway, even if they are mostly useless, I'll add all ALG games to WinUAE rom scanner list.

maybe something in ldp1450.h or laserdsc.h?

:shocked What an amazing thread! :great

ldp1450.cpp lists the commands. Looks very straightforward, at least to get past the LD drive detection and initialization.

Funnily enough recently added mostly pointless genlock video support would allow full game emulation by using it to show LD video file, if they would exist.. (do they? at least mame lists them as no dump)

Wow.. that would be amazing :great

I haven't had any luck finding a dump of Mad Dog McCree's laserdisc myself, not even a rip to YouTube.

If there was some way you could make it playback generic video in lieu of the LD, maybe someone would put the manual effort in to reconstruct the laserdisc video from other sources (PC, DVD releases etc)

I've found a YouTube rip of the laserdisc of the ALG game Gallagher's Gallery, if it's any help someone (I guess I could if there are no volunteers?) could download the video and slice off the second or so at the start. No luck finding Mad Dog McCree etc so far.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRw4bOOcf0

No way to extract video from mame's chd or use this chd ?