Time Pilot '84 for MiSTer

[lomdar67]

Time Pilot '84 for MiSTer

An FPGA implementation of Time Pilot '84 by Ace, ElectronAsh, Enforcer, and Kitrinx

https://github.com/Ace9921/Arcade-TimePilot84_MISTer

[bazza_12]

many thanks to all involved

[Alkadian]

That's awesome, thanks for the heads up!

[jca]

Thanks to the developers.
I have no problem with the set 1 but no luck with set 2 besides a buzzing sound.

[Ace]

Thanks to the developers.
I have no problem with the set 1 but no luck with set 2 besides a buzzing sound.

Was it you who I was talking to on Twitter who had issues with the initial release and Set 2 just booting with a constant buzz? It should be working properly with the watchdog update from two days ago. Make sure you're using merged ROMs as well.

[zakk4223]

I cannot get this core to boot any version of the game. There must be something I'm missing.

I've stripped my Mister down to bare de-10 (no i/o board, no sdram etc). I've built a brand new SD card from scratch (using mr fusion, on a different SD card than I usually use). I've verified the tp84.zip CRCs match the ones in the MRA file. I've run the main mister from console and it reports all roms are found and load successfully.

This is the screen I see:

https://imgur.com/a/INzkvyV

I guess the only other thing to try is a different power supply?

[Hodor]

I cannot get this core to boot any version of the game. There must be something I'm missing.

I've stripped my Mister down to bare de-10 (no i/o board, no sdram etc). I've built a brand new SD card from scratch (using mr fusion, on a different SD card than I usually use). I've verified the tp84.zip CRCs match the ones in the MRA file. I've run the main mister from console and it reports all roms are found and load successfully.

This is the screen I see:

https://imgur.com/a/INzkvyV

I guess the only other thing to try is a different power supply?

I had the very same error screen the first time I booted it. If I recall correctly, I resolved the issue changing the rom with the Mame 0.221 release -non merged set-. Be aware though that I have placed the game inside _Arcade/mame/tp84.zip

On the other hand, I´m suffering continuous resets while using the last release of the core -20200713-. If I run the previous one the problem disappears. Anyone with the same issue?

[jca]

Thanks to the developers.
I have no problem with the set 1 but no luck with set 2 besides a buzzing sound.

Was it you who I was talking to on Twitter who had issues with the initial release and Set 2 just booting with a constant buzz? It should be working properly with the watchdog update from two days ago. Make sure you're using merged ROMs as well.

No Twitter for me. Core version is from 07/13. I do not know anything about Mame and have no idea what are these merged and non-merged roms. I tried a few Tp84a roms without success. I will investigate further.
Thanks.

[RealLarry]

No problems at all here with Arcade-TimePilot84_20200713.rbf, both MRAs (set1 and set2) and using tp84.zip from mame 0.222 merged.
My MiSTer is setup with I/O board, 128MB RAM and an USB->DB9 board, using HDMI and a PSU with 5V/DC 2A.

[rhester72]

Concur - whatever's wrong, it doesn't seem to be the core. I tried 0712 and 0713 and had no issues.

[jca]

No problems at all here with Arcade-TimePilot84_20200713.rbf, both MRAs (set1 and set2) and using tp84.zip from mame 0.222 merged.
My MiSTer is setup with I/O board, 128MB RAM and an USB->DB9 board, using HDMI and a PSU with 5V/DC 2A.

You do not mention tp84a.zip. From the Set 2 mra I understood I needed both tp84.zip and tp84a.zip. The problem I have is I cannot find tp84a.zip for 0.220-0.222.
Is there something I did not understand?

[RealLarry]

No problems at all here with Arcade-TimePilot84_20200713.rbf, both MRAs (set1 and set2) and using tp84.zip from mame 0.222 merged.
My MiSTer is setup with I/O board, 128MB RAM and an USB->DB9 board, using HDMI and a PSU with 5V/DC 2A.

You do not mention tp84a.zip. From the Set 2 mra I understood I needed both tp84.zip and tp84a.zip. The problem I have is I cannot find tp84a.zip for 0.220-0.222.
Is there something I did not understand?

tp84a.zip ? No, I'm very sure that it's not necessary as both MRAs only refers to tp84.zip :

Code: Select all

# grep "zip" Time*
Time Pilot '84 (Set 1).mra:     <rom index='0' type='merged' zip='tp84.zip' md5="None">
Time Pilot '84 (Set 2).mra:     <rom index='0' type='merged' zip='tp84.zip' md5="None">

And these merged MAME zip's already contains all possible versions of PCB's ROM's; that's what merged means
Have a look at https://docs.mamedev.org/usingmame/aboutromsets.html and you'll see...

[jca]

Thanks, now I understand what merged roms are. I suspected I needed tp84a.zip as the Set 2 mra contains things like:
<part crc="e97d5093" name="tp84a/388_f05.8j"/>
So it looks like I need to find a tp84.zip which also contains a tp84a.zip or a tp84a subdirectory.
OK, I just checked one of the last tp84.zip I got and indeed, after unzipping it, I find 2 subdirectories: tp84a and tp84b. I think it is time to ditch Peazip as it does not show these directories when opening the archive, 7-zip does and has also the advantage of supporting rar archives. Another plus of 7-zip is that it allows to zip a very big number of files while Peazip fails.
I will test this new tp84.zip later after work and report the results.

[zakk4223]

I even tried swapping to a different power supply; still doesn't work. At this point the only thing I haven't swapped is the DE-10 itself. Again, all roms are good, CRCs match and MiSTer debug output show no errors in loading each rom (even when forcing it to load via CRC only). So strange.

[dshadoff]

I cannot get this core to boot any version of the game. There must be something I'm missing.

I've stripped my Mister down to bare de-10 (no i/o board, no sdram etc). I've built a brand new SD card from scratch (using mr fusion, on a different SD card than I usually use). I've verified the tp84.zip CRCs match the ones in the MRA file. I've run the main mister from console and it reports all roms are found and load successfully.

This is the screen I see:

https://imgur.com/a/INzkvyV

That's exactly what I see too. But the screen flashes alternating between that and a screen filled only with brown/gold characters.
Almost looks like the kind of pattern you might see on an arcade board at boot time, but it never progresses.

[dshadoff]

Oh, guess what... I had been ignoring the 20200712.rbf release all this time, thinking it was out of date.
The 20200712 release works; the 20200713 is broken.

[zakk4223]

OH wow. Same here. I thought I'd tried the 20200712 release and it was broken too, but I guess not. Just booted up fine.

edit: This core makes the low-lag mode of the scaler really mad on my display. Black screen, although I can still see my capture card struggling to display an image. Oddly enough the 'match core frequency' mode works great on my display (it's a freesync/VRR display with a pretty wide vsync range) so it's not entirely the vertical refresh rate of the game giving it fits.

[Hodor]

After further testing this is what is happening to me either with the first release of the core or the last one.

Sometimes it works a few minutes but it begins to reset eventually and sometimes only resets. I´ve tried with both releases and sets with no luck. No problems with other arcade, computer or console cores though.

[Ace]

This core makes the low-lag mode of the scaler really mad on my display.

My TVs don't like it either, likely something about how the game's sync is generated. I've had other Konami boards act up on some TVs as well, so that might have something to do with it.

Sometimes it works a few minutes but it begins to reset eventually and sometimes only resets. I´ve tried with both releases and sets with no luck. No problems with other arcade, computer or console cores though.

I'm just sitting here scratching my head as to what is happening when my own MiSTer and several others are working with Time Pilot '84 without issue, both with Set 1 and Set 2. Is your MiSTer up to date and are your merged ROMs (you must have a tp84a folder inside tp84.zip for Set 2) located in games/mame? The 20200712 release constantly resetting like that doesn't make sense as that's the kind of behavior you'd typically see with the watchdog circuitry as Konami's watchdogs are incredibly strict and will trigger a reset at any little thing that goes off. That release doesn't even have the watchdog logic implemented, but the 20200713 release does.

I need to know how widespread this reset issue is and if it's not caused by user error because if this is a situation like the initial release where some MiSTers exhibited graphical errors when other didn't, this is going to be a real problem.

One more thing: this core doesn't use SDRAM at all, so don't do anything with this when troubleshooting.

[jca]

With the proper rom both Set 1 and Set 2 start properly. I did not do any real test yet, just testing that both sets started properly. This is with the 07/13 version of the core on HDMI 1080P.

[zakk4223]

And to add to the confusion, both dshadoff and I couldn't get a good boot on the 20200713 version, but have no issues with the 712 version.

I wonder if there are slight differences between DE10 production runs that might be causing timing issues? Will happily run any test cores if you need to star t doing that to narrow it down.

BTW: if you change the set 2 MRA rom section to say 'zip="tp84a.zip|tp84.zip" it will work with all the various split/merged etc sets out there. Might lighten the support load a bit too.

[Hodor]

[...]

I'm just sitting here scratching my head as to what is happening when my own MiSTer and several others are working with Time Pilot '84 without issue, both with Set 1 and Set 2. Is your MiSTer up to date and are your merged ROMs (you must have a tp84a folder inside tp84.zip for Set 2) located in games/mame? The 20200712 release constantly resetting like that doesn't make sense as that's the kind of behavior you'd typically see with the watchdog circuitry as Konami's watchdogs are incredibly strict and will trigger a reset at any little thing that goes off. That release doesn't even have the watchdog logic implemented, but the 20200713 release does.

I need to know how widespread this reset issue is and if it's not caused by user error because if this is a situation like the initial release where some MiSTers exhibited graphical errors when other didn't, this is going to be a real problem.

One more thing: this core doesn't use SDRAM at all, so don't do anything with this when troubleshooting.

Hello Ace.

Before anything else, thank you for your work on developing the core.

I think I´ve found the reason behind my issues -at least, partially. It appears that I had the two available releases inside _Arcade/cores so when Mister loaded the game it messed up whatever set I chose.

Once I´ve properly tested the cores, I find out that while the initial release works fine. the one that implements watchdog resets indefinitely.

I hope this new info helps to clarify things.

[LeftEmpty]

Hello,
The core displays at 60.6hz which is quite an extreme refresh rate (ie even my Barco monitor can't adjust to this if I don't open it and override its autosync). Is the original arcade game board that extreme?

Thank you for your work and cheers!

[Ace]

That is the normal refresh rate of the PCB (actually 60.55-60.58Hz depending on component tolerances). Konami PCBs of this era exceed 60Hz, sometimes even going over 61Hz as is the case with Jackal, which operates at around 61.08Hz.

BTW: if you change the set 2 MRA rom section to say 'zip="tp84a.zip|tp84.zip" it will work with all the various split/merged etc sets out there. Might lighten the support load a bit too.

I'll be doing that before putting the core on the main MiSTer repository.

[WolfgangBlack]

One of my favorites, played a little and it worked well!
Happy daze

[lroby74]

This release is not official? It's not present on core manager

[Zichio]

This release is not official? It's not present on core manager

No, it's not added to the official repo yet. If you look at the link in the first post, it points to Ace's github (the creator of the core).

It will be added to the official repo when it is ready.

[lroby74]

Thank you

[Ace]

I'm setting up to put the core on the official repo in the next 4 days. There have been problems with the watchdog timer triggering non-stop with the July 13 build of the core, so I made a new one earlier in the month that I haven't released yet which gives the option to toggle the watchdog on or off (the Time Pilot '84 PCB does this by means of a solder pad on the board that disables the watchdog when bridged). This build will be the one that gets posted to the main MiSTer GitHub.
This game has given me so many headaches between things randomly breaking during compiles to audio issues (couldn't get an SN76489 implementation that didn't exhibit audio errors and had to resort to tweaking the one from the Colecovision core to fix off-by-1 errors and its noise LFSR) to having a really hard time with the Konami 502 custom chip. It'll be good to officially get this core out and move on to the Sega System C-2 hardware. That said, I do still need to get my hands on a Time Pilot '84 PCB running Set 3 as this version has a completely different memory map to Set 1 and Set 2 on the primary CPU and I want to make a 1:1 model of this.
A note regarding future cores: I will always post them to my personal GitHub first as part of a public beta-testing period before bringing them over to the main MiSTer GitHub. Especially in a case like Time Pilot '84 where the game seems to exhibit unpredictable behavior on different MiSTers, it gives me a chance to iron out problems that I personally have never come across as I don't want to have something with my name on it that is experiencing major problems on the main MiSTer GitHub.

[TwinX]

Thank you for your work ace, appreciated. I have no konami 502 anymore. I do have a 503 if you like. Still waiting for track and field on mister.
I also have sn76489 chip somewhere. If any of that helps you let me know. Not sure if you know the guys from fpgaarcade? They have reversed engineered a lot.