First, a BIG THANK YOU!! to all who helped during the drive to acquire the Incredible Technologies protos & dev CDs. In no particular order, thanking the donors:
[Donors soon to be properly added]
The first and foremost benefit is having access to the source so Aaron Giles can fill in or better document the inner workings of IT ITVIDEO42 ASIC (IE: the video chip used).
Secondly scrounging around all the files we found the following versions:
Version 1.40 - same as the MAME set
Version 1.39 - same as the MAME set
Version 1.38 - newly discovered clone set
Version 1.37 - same as the MAME set
Version 1.35 - newly discovered clone set
Along with the above, it was discovered the graphics for the GROM03-0 through GROM03-3 had changed with v1.38 but the graphics had the checksums set so the original values in the program would read them as correct even though other checksums like those we used would show them as different.
Mixed in the hodge podge of source builds you would see the relied heavily on the code from other games on the same platform. So there are references to World Class Bowling, Golden Tee Golf and even references in the source to the unreleased baseball game that was also in development. Seems they would grab working routines from other projects and absorb them into the dev tree and not even change the header info ;-)
There's a very preliminary Tournament build, which calls it's self "Shuffle Alley" and was so early the GROM checksuming routines use the values for World Class Bowling Tournament GROMs.
So there's lots information to yet be disseminated, but there is one little 1-in-a-million bit of luck. As they clearly used World Class Bowling for the preliminary Shuffle Alley Tournament set, there was a zip file that contained the full source and release files for WCB.
So, a few months back, I came across an eBay auction for program chips for World Class Bowling Tournament v1.30. Now I've checked hundreds and hundreds of World Class Bowling auctions looks for some undumped sets. I've run across exactly 3 Tournament sets in the last 8 or more years of looking and they have always been v1.40T. So this auction for v1.30T pops up, but it only contains 3 out of the needed 4 program chips. Well, I bought them anyways just to have them documented in MAME's source code. As you can guess in the lead up, here is a zip file dated 1997 and there is 4 program ROM files, 3 of which matched the currently dumped v1.30T. Adding the 4th file brings this set to a working state. Given the fact that this was the one and only time I have ever even heard of the v1.30T set I was shocked that there was an archive of it on the Shuffleshot source CD.
Better yet, this tournament set is like the standard World Class Bowling sets, it has the red based backgrounds and doesn't include the Flash Bowling. Starting with the Tournament v1.40T, IT added the Flash Bowling game and then when they started to wind down the Tournament feature. IT re-released it as World Class Bowling Deluxe v2.00.
So yeah! It was all a great find for historical reasons as well as technical reasons.
This is just the start of the many great things we able acquire! As MooglyGuy related here: https://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Number=386029 great things when the preservation community comes together as a whole!
So please, sit back and patiently wait for rest of the items to be released. It might take some time for things to be fully digested, because we don't want to miss anything!
Again, thanks to all that were involved.
BrianT
Edited by BrianT (05/06/20 02:13 PM)
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