On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Franklin Bowen <franklin@...> wrote:
> I am still lurking on this group too. I am a coder though so my only
> interest is understanding the graphics representation within the ROMs.
>
> If I wanted to extract the graphics from Robotron, how do I do it? Do I
> need to create a configuration file? Or does one already exist?

Ahh... You'd think by now that I'd actually have a solution for this
particular problem... ;)

Robotron, Joust, Sinistar... all of those classic Williams games (
http://www.klov.com/manuf_detail.php?manuf_id=1729&orig_game_id=9347&sort=3
) don't use sprite hardware like Pac-Man and such use. Most of the
games back then had specialized hardware for taking graphics out of a
special rom and putting them on the screen. Williams games instead
used bitmaps within the program roms themselves, as far as I can
remember. (it's been a few years since I looked into this.)

Turaco leverages off of this sprite mechaism... well, really it
leverages off of the implementation in an old version in MAME to
accomplish sprite decoding/coding. Since MAME never implemented a way
to pull those graphics out of the williams games, turaco has never
supported it. That's not to say it would be impossible, far from it,
but making this implementation is a non-trivial effort.

As an aside, I got approached by one of the arcade redistributors (who
shall remain nameless) a few years back asking about the Williams
roms. They were offering me a chunk of cash and/or some of their
products to make the changes to Turaco to support a few of the
Williams games. It turned into a contract proposal to change the
graphics myself, then change a bunch of text strings in the roms to
remove various credits and such. I felt that this was disrespectful
of the original authors and declined it... so that never actually got
implemented in Turaco.


So in a nutshell; to change Williams games graphics, there's no
facility to do that with any of the Turaco tools, nor is it possible
currently to write a driver to add the functionality, sadly.


I'll put it on the list of "things to be done at some point" in the
Turaco to-do list.

-s

--
Scott Lawrence
yorgle@...
http://www.umlautllama.com