Game & Watch Core

[MrSniffles]

Looks like @pierco over on twitter has been working on a Game and Watch core!

[Moondandy]

This is a nice preservation project, hopefully he pulls it off and is able to do the full library.

[LamerDeluxe]

I saw that, that is really great. There are lots of LCD handhelds and VFD tabletops that are not going to work forever.

[jumpbeatshoot]

Excuse my ignorance, but how will it load games? Game & Watch doesn't have roms, right?

[LamerDeluxe]

I guess it would be a core per game, like the arcade games, it might need its own category.

[Sigismond0]

MAME G&W ROMs of some sort, so they're out there. I'd expect the core to be similar. You'll likely have to supply the MAME ROM and background art for each game.

[wark91]

in one of the creator twitter, it said it will propose a script to adapt games & watch datas from mame to use them of the core.

[Pierco]

Yes this is correct, I made a script that merges the ROM, background image and the mask for LCD segments. I was fixing some bugs with the MCU last week and I will now start working on sounds. It should be a straightforward task as the piezo buzzer signals are also generated by the MCU.

[Moondandy]

That's great news! Do you plan to support all the G&W games, and do you think the core could be developed to support other non-G&W LCD games?

[Pierco]

Only SM510 games are compatible so it should theoretically work with:

Turtle Bridge
Fire Attack
Snoopy Tennis
Oil Panic
Donkey Kong
Mickey & Donald
Green House
Donkey Kong II
Mario Bros
Rain Shower
Life Boat
... and other SM510 non-G&W games

I will try to implement the SM511 later.

BTW, audio is working now

My current problem is the joystick configuration. There's a layout of 3x4 possible keys so the only solution I've come up with is to encode the configuration into a few bytes in each game.

[Moondandy]

Nice one, good effort! Be nice to try the Zelda game down the line if that is possible in the future.

Seems people made some homebrew SM510 games
https://atariage.com/forums/topic/28257 ... ame-watch/

[MrSniffles]

First release is up... https://github.com/pcornier/GnW_MiSTer

Thanks Pierco!

[rhester72]

Erm...sorry for the newbie question, but where does one locate the necessary .bin files?

[jca]

On Github if you go to tools instead of release you will find one sample bin file and a generator (without any explanation)

[kathleen]

This is an amazing news, thank you Pierco for your hard work, G&W is all my youth.

[LamerDeluxe]

Just tried it yesterday with the DKjr bin, which is my favorite G&W game. Really cool to be able to play these handheld games on MiSTer!

Is there a reason why the graphics have a low resolution? Can you get a higher resolution by creating your own bin?
The game seemed to respond sightly slowly and it sounded a bit different from a piezo speaker.

I'm really looking forward to be able to play the handheld games I like on MiSTer and try ones I've never played.

[Pierco]

Thank you, I'm glad to see you tested it!

About low res images, this is because of the LCD, which does not allow for a tile based approach for VRAM. Unfortunately, the limitation of block ram on MiSTer forced me to use low res images. Maybe a FPGA guru can jump in the discussion and help? Can I use the SDRAM to create a VRAM pixel based? Will it be fast enough? I'm not sure.

About sound, it has been quickly implemented. I compared with the original device and it's very different for now. I will try to fix it but the priority is the MCU, which still has bugs, for example in DKjr bats never appear.

[mrtomato]

I have Romset with roms with *.mgw format - how to convert this for BIN?

[ZigZag]

I have Romset with roms with *.mgw format - how to convert this for BIN?

I haven't tested yet but it seems you can extract the mgw using 7z. The extracted file had no extension so would need renamed to *.bin I guess.

[mrtomato]

I have Romset with roms with *.mgw format - how to convert this for BIN?

I haven't tested yet but it seems you can extract the mgw using 7z. The extracted file had no extension so would need renamed to *.bin I guess.

I only tested only game provided with core, but also found there some tutorial for conversion, but only for Windows. Since I am not using Windows right now I have no idea what enter format roms should have for conversion to BIN. But i will test if simple renaming my roms to BIN work.

[Moondandy]

Hopefully a kind person will make a pack of the compatible rom files, I had a quick look and couldn't find any roms.

[mrtomato]

Hopefully a kind person will make a pack of the compatible rom files, I had a quick look and couldn't find any roms.

I've donwloaded this romset https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ouABwh ... 86rko/view but games are in *.mgw format. I do not have any idea how to convert them to BIN.

[Sigismond0]

Once the core is complete and the conversion tool is documented, I'm sure someone will make that happen.

[eightbit]

This is awesome news! I am really looking forward to this core for sure!

[Moondandy]

Thanks for the files Mr Tomato, what guide were you looking at?

[mrtomato]

Thanks for the files Mr Tomato, what guide were you looking at?

I found that on GitHub page there is some html file to "port" games but, I am looking for clean way to convert roms from that pack that I posted to BIN files.

https://github.com/pcornier/GnW_MiSTer/ ... ster/tools

Also read me isn't completed yet for now how to use this, so core author posted one game that for now is playable by this core

[Moondandy]

Haven't seen any mention of this but Pierco released this core of Scramble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFq4X3c_DAc

https://github.com/pcornier/TomyScramble_MiSTer

Hopefully will be added to Main soon, would be the first real update in awhile.

[Moondandy]

Another one for testing:

https://github.com/pcornier/EpochGalaxy2_MiSTer

[rhester72]

I assume there's no way to get it to display vertically on a horizontal HDMI display?

[Moondandy]

That sounds like a good feature request.