Zero Wing by Toaplan Arcade Core Released

[xblade]

Hi everyone.
I don't know how far atrac17, Darren_O and blk_yn is now with other cores and when they plan to make the truxton core.
As it was my favourite arcade game back in the days, I have tried to resurrect it using Darren_O code, but for now it's stuck after ram rom sound check.

stuck after ram rom sound check

1643278117243.jpg (3.2 MiB) Viewed 11679 times

It will also need to rotate the screen 270', correct dip switch settings and for sure other things I have overlooked.

I have to admit my knowlege of the fpga languages is very poor.
My only effort was just adjusting memory mapping using information from mame's toaplan1.cpp driver.

I would love to see this game to be available to me and others as soon as possible .
I would like to participate on development. ​I will soon begin to learn more about the mister fpga development.
In the meanwhile, please look at my repository, the code and send me pull request, if you can spot the problem.

Public repo at github

Many thanks to Darren_O for bringing toaplan1 to the MiSTer platform.
​

[metal_slugger]

The zip has to be named zerowing1.zip but if the zip you have has another name it may not be the good one. Try to rename it and see what happens.

The ziprom needs to be called zerowing1.zip and all the components exactly referred-to in the zerowing.mra file (read it with a text editor) need to be present in the root of the zip file.

One advantage of using the mra.exe tool to create a "*.rom" file first (a process which was only required for the day 1 release) was that it told you if any of components were missing inside the ziprom and what they are called, helping you to understand what's actually happening.

[Shuffle7]

I still can’t get this to work . I get the core menu up when i press F12. I have found a rom zerowing1. Renamed it to .zip, placed in mame folder . Rbf and mra places in usual places.. still nothing. Work constraints meant I keep trying when I get 2 mins . Will have a proper go later

[jca]

I only said to try by renaming the zip to zerowing1.zip because I did not know how the user got his zerowing.zip but I did not expect it to work.
When I used the mra tool I had to try 3 different zerowing1.zip before finding the good one.
I just went back to github to see if there was some updates and there are:
The release folder contains Out Zone (Zero Wing TP-015 PCB conversion).mra and Zero Wing (2P set).mra plus an alternatives folder containing Zero Wing (1P set).mra and Zero Wing (2P set, Williams license).mra.
Now the various zero wing mras reference zerowing.zip, not zerowing1.zip and out zone references outzone.zip.
I used the mame getter to get these 2 zips but nothing is working. Only the original zerowing.mra along with zerowing1.zip works.
On github the original mra along with the mra tool are in the rom folder.

[Shuffle7]

Nice one thanks jca - will look at GitHub. Be good to get this running

[xblade]

The rbf at the Darreon_O's github in the release folder is not current right now. It looks like it is 3 days old.
I had to build one myself to get outzone running.

You can wait for the team to release new rbf, or you can build one by yourself.

There is no need to have quartus installed. I can confirm docker version I'm using can do the job.

[metal_slugger]

Something I noticed was that the mra file states MAME version "0220", so possibly you also need to confirm that the ziprom you are trying is for MAME version 0.220 or later

[jca]

Thanks. Yes, I noticed that the rbf was 3 days old but I was more inclined to blame the zip files.
I have Quartus Prime Lite 17.0.2 installed so I compiled the core but no luck, I get the same problems I have with the old core.
I noticed 2 things:
1. After opening the project Quartus says that I should update some IPs which happens frequently when I compile various cores. I suppose it is because of the Quartus version, may be they have been compiled with 17.0, not 17.0.2. When this happens I do not update: this happened way back with the latest version of Multicomp before the new rbf was published, I did update the IPs and the core was funky, not updating gave a good rbf.
2. The rbf in the release folder is 3,454KB and the rbf I compiled is 3,097KB.
With both cores I get the same result:
With the zero wing mras I get a white screen filled with vertical bars (may be !) and nothing is moving.
With outzone I get a lime screen which changes to a different lime color and a little square with the original lime color, after that the screen goes black with the little lime square in a different position. The screen then cycles thru these 2 displays. It may be due to the zips downloaded by mame getter but for the time being I leave it like that as it is a work in progress and I don't intend to pull my hair (I have not much left).
So for the time being it will be the original zerowing.mra and zerowing1.zip for me.

[xblade]

1. After opening the project Quartus says that I should update some IPs which happens frequently when I compile various cores. I suppose it is because of the Quartus version, may be they have been compiled with 17.0, not 17.0.2. When this happens I do not update: this happened way back with the latest version of Multicomp before the new rbf was published, I did update the IPs and the core was funky, not updating gave a good rbf.
2. The rbf in the release folder is 3,454KB and the rbf I compiled is 3,097KB.
With both cores I get the same result:
With the zero wing mras I get a white screen filled with vertical bars (may be !) and nothing is moving.
With outzone I get a lime screen which changes to a different lime color and a little square with the original lime color, after that the screen goes black with the little lime square in a different position. The screen then cycles thru these 2 displays. It may be due to the zips downloaded by mame getter but for the time being I leave it like that as it is a work in progress and I don't intend to pull my hair (I have not much left).
So for the time being it will be the original zerowing.mra and zerowing1.zip for me.

1.)
I have installed Quartus 20.1.1 on my ubuntu, but I'm not using it for the building, because I want to avoid possible side effects.
I'm using the docker image located at https://hub.docker.com/r/theypsilon/quartus-lite-c5 version 17.0
I think using quartus 17.0.2 and ignoring IP updates should build rbf properly.

2.)
My rbf size is 3 179 588 B. I suspect every build is unique, because of the included build_id.v, so we cannot count on md5sum and should not on size too.

I had the same problem with stripes and lime background. I just forgot to update the rbf file to new a one. The old rbf is not working with new mra files.
They have changed the offsets i think.

First make sure, you have build the new rbf with up to date git repo ( git pull origin main ).
Also check you have the right zerowing.rbf at /media/fat/_Arcade/cores.
MRA tag <rbf> points to the correct .rbf file, so make sure, you don't have any other versions installed by side.
To be sure, you can remove outzone and zerowing zips from /media/fat/games/mame folder and run download_all and the mame downloader should download proper roms from archive.org

mra goes to /media/fat/_Arcade
rbf goes to /media/fat/_Arcade/cores
zip goes to /media/fat/games/mame

Take a look at screen shot. Do your rbf make same main menu results ?
You should see only Video Settings, DIP Switches and Reset

1643384424598.jpg (2.19 MiB) Viewed 11395 times

[jca]

Thanks for all this info and the time you spent for this detailed post.
Alas, so far it did not help (not your fault, mind you).
When I made my post I initially had the latest rbf from the release folder, the original zerowing.mra in _Arcade and zerowing1.zip in games/mame.
After downloading the latest mras and putting them in the right places I tried them right away and got a black screen without seeing the progress bar of the rom loading. So I opened the various mras and saw that I needed zerowing.zip (no more zerowing1.zip) and outzone.zip. I used directly the mame getter script which installed these 2 zip. At this point I got the stripes and lime screen. I made my post to see if someone had the same problem.
After your first post I built the core, renamed my previous rbf to zerowing_ok.rbf and installed the newly built rbf but got the same results. Now I knew it can be the core (due to these IPs updates) or the zips (which I did not believe as mame getter has served me very well all these years).
After your above post it can only be the rbf.
For the size of the rbf I knew that you cannot get the exact same size but usually the difference is in bytes, not 400KB like between the release core and the core I built.
Your core is 3,179,588 bytes, the one I built is 3,171,004 which is more like it (I think the main difference is due to the IPs not updated).
So now I have to figure out how to build a working core.
Your info regarding docker seems to be a good solution but I am a Windows user both at work and at home (for software available only on Windows). I recently installed Zorin OS in a virtual machine, it is based on Ubuntu so it should work but I don't know much about docker and never used these containers so I would have to learn how to proceed.
But this thing about IPs having to be updated bothers me and have for some time as it happened before on some MISTer cores.
Trying to figure it out I created an empty project and this is the contents of the qpf file:
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #
#
# Quartus Prime
# Version 17.0.2 Build 602 07/19/2017 SJ Lite Edition
# Date created = 11:51:06 January 28, 2022
#
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #

QUARTUS_VERSION = "17.0"
DATE = "11:51:06 January 28, 2022"

I compared it to the qpf from github and first noticed the core had been built under Linux (I prepared my post in notepad and when I pasted it it was all messed up so I opened it in notepad++ and noticed that EOL was Unix style, not Windows style).

Here is the qpf from github:
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #
#
# Quartus Prime
# Version 17.0.0 Build 595 04/25/2017 SJ Lite Edition
# Date created = 11:18:26 April 18, 2021
#
# -------------------------------------------------------------------------- #

QUARTUS_VERSION = "17.0.2"
DATE = "11:18:26 April 18, 2021"

The different Build versions are certainly due to the fact that one is the Windows version and the other is the Linux version but there is this strange difference:
Windows:
Quartus Prime Version 17.0.2
QUARTUS_VERSION = "17.0"
Linux:
Quartus Prime Version 17.0.0
QUARTUS_VERSION = "17.0.2"

I don't know what to think about that.

[pgimeno]

After your first post I built the core, renamed my previous rbf to zerowing_ok.rbf and installed the newly built rbf but got the same results.

In my experience, renaming does not help; you have to actually move it out of that folder.

For the size of the rbf I knew that you cannot get the exact same size but usually the difference is in bytes, not 400KB like between the release core and the core I built.

I've seen these kinds of differences between compilations.

[Flandango]

The project code, as it stands at this moment, is utilizing Q13 for two IPs. To fix this on your end so you don't get the warnings, edit zerowing.qsf (make sure you don't have Quartus up with this project) and adjust these two lines from 13 to 17:

Code: Select all

set_global_assignment -name QIP_FILE sys/pll.13.qip
set_global_assignment -name QIP_FILE sys/pll_audio.13.qip

to look like:

Code: Select all

set_global_assignment -name QIP_FILE sys/pll.17.qip
set_global_assignment -name QIP_FILE sys/pll_audio.17.qip

[jca]

After your first post I built the core, renamed my previous rbf to zerowing_ok.rbf and installed the newly built rbf but got the same results.

In my experience, renaming does not help; you have to actually move it out of that folder.
...

the mra refers to zerowing.rbf, not zerowing_ok.rbf.
In any case I followed your suggestion and guess what ... it works
It does not make sense but your suggestion is correct. What is going on with MISTer?

[jca]

@Flandango
Thanks, I feel much relieved as it did not make sense that the core built under Linux worked and the core built under Windows did not work when using the same version of Quartus on both systems. It happens that the Windows core was working but I had renamed the old core instead of moving it out the way. I guess the core was initially developed for a different cyclone which required Q13 and upgrading the IP is not just simply using a new IP but may require modification to the HDL. I think it is what happened when I had this upgrade warning when I tried to compile the Multicomp core: I first changed the IP which was a PLL and the resulting core was funky. When I reverted to the original HDL and ignored the warning the core was OK.
I think it is better to ignore the warning and if the core compiles without error it should be OK.

[zakk4223]

After your first post I built the core, renamed my previous rbf to zerowing_ok.rbf and installed the newly built rbf but got the same results.

In my experience, renaming does not help; you have to actually move it out of that folder.
...

the mra refers to zerowing.rbf, not zerowing_ok.rbf.
In any case I followed your suggestion and guess what ... it works
It does not make sense but your suggestion is correct. What is going on with MISTer?

The code that tries to find the rbf file based on the MRA's reference would look for anything that matches "zerowing." or "zerowing_" and use the first one it finds.

It does this so it can find both zerowing.rbf and zerowing_20220128.rbf etc

[jca]

Thanks. If I had renamed the old core zerowing-ok or zerowingok it would have worked and I wouldn't have learned this crucial detail. Good to know for next time.

[pgimeno]

the mra refers to zerowing.rbf, not zerowing_ok.rbf.
In any case I followed your suggestion and guess what ... it works
It does not make sense but your suggestion is correct. What is going on with MISTer?

I was under the impression that it somehow(?) scans all files for the internal core name, rather than the file name. And quite often (Murphy's law at play?) it chooses the wrong core.

According to what was said above, however, it's still filename-based, which surprises me somewhat because it also picked the right RBF when I used Arcade-xxxx_date.rbf - I haven't checked the code though, maybe it explicitly removes the Arcade- prefix.

[zakk4223]

the mra refers to zerowing.rbf, not zerowing_ok.rbf.
In any case I followed your suggestion and guess what ... it works
It does not make sense but your suggestion is correct. What is going on with MISTer?

I was under the impression that it somehow(?) scans all files for the internal core name, rather than the file name. And quite often (Murphy's law at play?) it chooses the wrong core.

According to what was said above, however, it's still filename-based, which surprises me somewhat because it also picked the right RBF when I used Arcade-xxxx_date.rbf - I haven't checked the code though, maybe it explicitly removes the Arcade- prefix.

The first thing it tries is to match Arcade-zerowing. or Arcade-zerowing_

[lamarax]

For those who're itchy to play "Zero Wing" (not "Out Zone" yet I'm afraid), and still haven't been able to make it run, try this:

zerowing.zip

(1.27 MiB) Downloaded 293 times

Just dump the .mra's directly under _Arcade and the .rbf inside _Arcade/cores. It's a couple of iterations behind, but it's working

[AmanoJacu]

I was trying to manually install the Zero Wing core from github, I had some trouble with the rom, then I realized the update_all now donwloads it, so I ran it, and get it all working (got the zerowing1.zip file from somewhere else and put it in the mame folder). However, the start button wouldn't work, it would act as coin, no matter how I set controls up.

So I decided to delete the .rbf and .mra files, and run the update_all again. However, they wouldn't download, I guess it didn't work as I expected (after deletion, I thought it would notice they weren't there and re-download), so I got them from github again. The game works, but as before, no way to start the game, the start button is just the same as coin.

Any help? Thanks!

[Skeeter]

(not "Out Zone" yet I'm afraid)

For Outzone, I just renamed a few things. It's far from perfect but at least you can give the game a go.

[jca]

What is everyone talking about?
You have to forget about the initial release. Delete from your MISTer zerowing.rbf, zerowing.mra, zerowing1.zip and the zerowing.rom if it is what you used.
Download the new mras from github, there are 4: 2 for the _Arcade folder with one being for OutZone and 2 for alternatives. Running mame getter or update all with mame getter enabled to get the 2 zips. The core in the release folder is not the right one, it is an older one, so you have to build it yourself.
I do not see any problem with the coin and start buttons. I am not a real gamer and usually die within a few seconds so I cannot tell how well it runs but it runs.

[jca]

Here is the rbf I built. Do not keep any zerowing style core from previous test or you will have some surprises, see previous posts. I took me a day to have my "non working" core work thanks to all who helped figure it out.

[AmanoJacu]

Here is the rbf I built. Do not keep any zerowing style core from previous test or you will have some surprises, see previous posts. I took me a day to have my "non working" core work thanks to all who helped figure it out.

OK, I was using the rbf in the github /releases folder, which is from 5 days ago and as you said, is outdated; and the mra in the dev/rom, which called for the rom zerowing1.

After reading your posts, I downloaded your rbf, changed the mra to the "Zero Wing (2P set)" in /releases, changed the rom to zerowing.zip; and now it all works, including the start button, so thanks!

For Outzone, I just renamed a few things. It's far from perfect but at least you can give the game a go.

I downloaded it and managed to make it work OK, including all buttons, so I could play, thanks!

[jca]

Guys, before posting just read this thread, everything is there and for OutZone you can run it with the core I provided. May be the OutZone provided earlier is better but it is hard to know as Skeeter did not provide much information.

[xblade]

Great Scott! They did it.

Truxton and Hellfire are runnable.
Keep in mind, it is too early for release yet.

If you want to try, pull the latest git changes and build your own rbf.

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IMG_20220130_090714.jpg (3.4 MiB) Viewed 10656 times

[Skeeter]

Whoa...Truxton already. I had to try this.

Graphical glitches aside, seeing Tatsujin running now is amazing. Hellfire seems pretty solid, loving this core.

Now I can retire the Outzone rbf.

[AmanoJacu]

Congrats for all the great work! If you attach the RBF (and the MRA, or at least say which one from the github to use) of any of these games like Truxton and Hellfire, I'll give them a try.

[xblade]

Here you go.

It is rba I am using now.

The mra files are located at dev/mra path from root of your zerowing github clone folder.

Do not forget to pull to the latest.

[Milspex]

Maybe someday Dash Yarou will be playable! Fingers crossed