Electronic Games/Electronic Board Games + MADrigal Simulators

[seastalker]

I've enjoyed the MADrigal Simulators for years: http://www.madrigaldesign.it/sim/download.php ...and it has been ported to many platforms. These are a nice companion to the Game & Watch core, and I wondered if a port be possible for MiSTer. Maybe it can run like ScummVM on the arm side of things?

It's got a nice game selection (the Dungeons and Dragons game was a fave back in the day), and I find two titles I'd personally love to see:

1. The 'OTHER' DnD game: Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game (1980)
   https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/474 ... rinth-game

I could see this with an overlay of the board. You can genuinely creep yourself out as an adult with this game.

1. Electronic Detective (1979)
   https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/577 ... ive/images

I have both games and can not understate how fun they are! The original flexi-vinyl record is digitized and would be fun having the option for players to hear the audio file before a game with an image of the record on screen.

I RECENTLY did a teardown of Electronic Detective and it is a remarkably simple and tiny PCB (see pics): Two yellow wires go to the internal speaker, red and black go to the 6 batteries (AA). Metal wires are the electronic keypad. The board has only ONE IC chip to feed alphanumeric characters to the red screen like a calculator and make sounds.

The Texas Instruments chip states:
TMS0980NLL
MP6160A
DBT 8101
Philippines

Is this chip used in another core already? Maybe it was used in a TI Calculator?

IF someone were to make games like these available on the MiSTer, do you think the best approach make senses as an FPGA core with an overlay like the Altair 8800 computer core, or more of a simulator on the Linux side?

[Newsdee]

For MADrigal's simulators, best to use a RaspberryPi with RetroPie. The DE-10 Nano is not a good substitute for a recent RPi, and the installation will be streamlined for you. Anything else will require work to port and that same time and effort could be put towards more suitable alternatives such as:

• Emulate the game with the proper CPU and ROM data

• Simulate the game using the Game & Watch core

For the first one, the catch is often that these games require a decapping because the ROM is embedded inside the chip.
Fortunately that has already been done for Electronic Detective: https://seanriddle.com/0980.html
(I see MAME has a driver but not sure if it's playable)

The other option is to use the Game & Watch core. It is based on the SM510 chip, for which an assembler exists: https://github.com/trevorjay/marios-binary-factory
In other words one could create a custom .svg and code up the logic to run the game in SM510, and then the game would run on the existing core.
Not simple but at least it doesn't need fiddling with HDL code to build a core.

Either way I see the challenge is going to be to provide the "extras" the game came with, e.g. the cards, the paper sheets to write things into, etc.
It would be much nicer to provide everything in a nice UI; but that level of effort would probably only be done for a commercial release (say on Steam) than a hobby project.

[LamerDeluxe]

I would love to see more electronic games, LCD/VFD handhelds and tabletops on MiSTer. The Game & Watch core is fantastic, also on the Analogue Pocket. And we already have an Epoch Galaxy II and Tomy Scramble core.

I have a small collection of LCD and VFD games, a number of them are still fun to play. My first electronic game was Amaze-a-Tron by Coleco, a maze game for one or two players, it would work well using a mouse.

But indeed it would be a labor of love to make each of those cores, apart from retrieving the original code and replicating the electronics, they also need a custom graphics system, not having standard video output.

[FPGA64]

A lot of these games are in Mame. Mame also creates the artwork files that provide the overlays. So it should be possible to leverage this resource

[seastalker]

That is great news about the decap already done on Sean Riddle's page. If anyone is up for it, I'd be happy to help at the very least of HQ scans of the 20 character cards, player sheet, etc. At least for the DnD Labyrinth game, the playfield is FLAT. All these games you mention would indeed be fun on the Pocket as well. I might even be able to solder some wires to get audio out (RCA or 3.5mm) digitized samples of all the sounds and beeps.

[jordi]

Hero and princess from tandy was never preserved? I do have a working one

[Newsdee]

I'd say its worth preserving what you can, especially if nothing can be found online already.