MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Taito Balloon Bomber

>Did Taito lose the source code for Rainbow Islands as well as Bubble Bobble?
>I have a hunch that Taito hacked around the C-chip and MCU protection in a similar fashion
>to how MAME used to. If they couldn't properly archive the source code to Bubble Bobble, I
>don't have faith that they kept complete code for their protection chips. I am sure someone
>else before you had already pointed out that the official compilation versions of Operation
>Wolf had similar inaccuracies to the old MCU simulation/hacks in MAME

A lot of the past products weren't archived. iirc someone had posted an old article link here from around 2005 or 2006 in which it mentioned how Sega didn't save code from games that were protected with either MC-8123, or FD 1089 or FD 1094 cpus in which they would eventually no longer work. The type of stuff that would put fear in Sega fans back then. Fortunately many of the titles (excluding alternate region versions still not yet preserved) are now preserved.

>However, I do know that the sound effects in Taito re-releases of Space Invaders are, if
>not 100% accurate, at least more correct than MAME; when discrete sound emulation was
>added, it was based on the Midway version. It seems that Midway wrote their own discrete
>sound logic, because the sound effects are different, most noticeably the sound when you
>kill an enemy. (And there is still variance between MAME's sounds and real Midway
>versions too, notably the pitch, timbre and/or modulation of the laser sound, but that's
>a totally different subject.) The old sound samples in MAME came from a Taito board, and
>YouTube videos of Japanese and official UK/Europe Taito versions have the familiar sound
>effects Taito has always used in connection with Space Invaders. Finally, I played both a
>Midway upright and a Japanese Taito tabletop at California Extreme, I had my ear up to
>the speaker on the tabletop version and I heard the same "Taito" sound effects.

It was in 2007 when Derrick Renaud worked with Zsolt Vasvari in separating the 8080 cpu hardware (L-shaped pcbs) of Midway games into their own separate file when updating and improving the various Midway 8080 video games including adding discrete/analog audio for some of the games in 2007. Midway schematics are readily around compared to Taito logic schematics which is why Derrick and Zsolt were able to improve many of the Midway games.

>That said, I doubt that MAME will ever return to samples for the Taito sets. The Taito
>discrete sound clearly needs its own emulation (as does Space Invaders Part II, which had
>no sound variation between Taito and Midway versions), and there are already comments in
>the driver code on the subject of Taito sounds vs. Midway sounds, though no actual work
>has yet been done. The closest we have in MAME right now is the discrete sound emulation
>in Midway's Space Invaders II, where to make it easier to tell which player had killed an
>enemy, it would play the "Midway" sound when one player scored a hit, and the "Taito"
>sound for the other player. (I'm not sure if any of the other Taito sounds were used
>though - the shot sound, the UFO sound, the UFO hit sound, the player death sound, the
>extra life sound, etc.)

Although both Derrick and Zsolt are no longer involved, couriersud has/had been updating discrete related (netlist and analog etc) along the way. Difference of audio sound effects between Midway versus Taito could be condition of pcb (parts etc), voltage currents probably being different with Taito versus Midway hardware, parts and components used with Taito pcbs could be different versus Midway pcbs. And then factor in how the operator has audio adjustment settings (pots) that could be set different since some pot adjusters could be set to pitch frequency, or volume adjustment settings, and maybe settings that adjust the speed output of specific audio effects (such as the sonar sound output of Midway Sea Wolf iirc).