As a sidenote, to document this issue, i've added it to the google
code project as an "issue".

I believe that anyone can add more issues as they are found.

-s

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Scott Lawrence <yorgle@...> wrote:
> 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
>



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