Gauntlet II Semi-Works - How to troubleshoot?

[Biggles]

Hey all - got my DE-10 a couple of days ago, and I'm having what seems to be a weird issue - and I am not sure how to troubleshoot it... maybe someone here can help point me in the right direction.

Trying to make Gauntlet II work. When I run it, I get a blank screen at first - but have the music. After the initial theme song plays, I get a screen with the text and scores and some hilighted areas - but no "background" graphics (no floor tiles or walls or characters or such).

I was guessing this was a rom issue, so after doing some reading I got update_all.sh, and it grabbed the roms - but no joy. So I read some more and tried creating /media/fat/_Arcade/mame and putting the gaunt2.zip rom there - also no joy.

The rom seems to match the name in the msa, and the content of it matches a rom that was attached to another thread here.

I know the mame roms location has changed over the last year - is there some definitive way to find out what MiSTer FPGA (or the Gauntlet_20201217.rbf core) thinks is the location for the roms? Is there any sort of error log that the rbf emits?

Worth noting - this is a nekkid DE-10, no RAM card, that should arrive in a couple of days, but from what I read the Arcade cores don't use the RAM expansion. I'll be able to find out experimentally if that fixes things shortly.

Other cores seem to work - "Pacman (midway)" works, as does Asteroids and Crazy Climber. It might be just this core with the issues...

Has anyone seen this behavior, or does anyone have advice for other avenues I can look down?

[dshadoff]

Don't assume that the arcade cores don't use the SDRAM (some of them definitely do); there may not be a detailed breakdown document anywhere though.

[Biggles]

I think you're correct - I did a few more tests, and its older arcade games - presumably with smaller roms - that seem to work.

My memory card should arrive today - fingers crossed!

[LamerDeluxe]

I remember Rampage, Journey and the TRON games not working correctly before I received my memory module. There will most likely be more new arcade games not working without one since then.

[macro]

I'm fairly sure Gauntlet II needs SDRAM to fit all the rom data in.

[powerfulpowaz]

Gauntlet II 100% requires a memory expansion. It's not clear on GitHub unless you were following development. https://github.com/d18c7db/Gauntlet_FPGA/issues/13

[d18c7db]

All three supported games (Gauntlet, Gauntlet II and Vindicators II) in fact require SDRAM to store the graphics data. Readme has been updated.