Demons and Dragons - Part 3

Well, it's playable now. It's got robotron-style movement, with seperate controls for moving and firing. Moving actually uses an analog joystick, which can allow speed control, but I haven't actually hooked that up yet.

The only thing that's really missing is sound. It writes sample numbers to a port, so there must have been an additional audio board. Hopefully we can dig up more info on this, if the board and/or ROM images still exist anymore.

Demons and Dragons - part 2

Well, as it turns out - the one piece of Professor Pacman hardware that I didn't emulate is used by D&D. The good news is - I got it working tonight! Now profpac passes all self-tests, and demndrgn runs into the game portion. I need to map the controllers and dips now, since I can't control the player yet.

Right now there is no sound, but it sure seems like it was supposed to have speech! There is a part where a wizards head fills the screen, and his lips move. I wonder what's up with that?

Anyways - pretty neat stuff

Update: in-game screenshots...

Demons and Dragons

This is a prototype game that is supposed to run on Professor Pacman hardware, or something very similar. I got it run a little bit...but it's not playable yet.

Xen

I've been watching the Xen project for a while, and I think it's probably time I tried it. I like to play around with experimental OS's like Plan9 from time to time. I'm also hoping to build some custom Linux kernels for a work project.

Xen is Open Source software that allow you to run multiple OS's concurrently, with little loss of performance. It achieves this by actually requiring the OS to be slightly modified to work with Xen. As a benefit, any OS can take advantage of Linux device drivers, as well. As a side effect, it means no repartitioning is necessary to try a Xen-compliant OS.

Unfortunately, MS won't let the Xen-ified WindowsXP be distributed, but other OS's are coming around. The Linux 2.6 kernel is already ported, and some distros are starting to bundle Xen in now.

It will be interesting to see if this is a fad or the way of the future.

Midway Tornado Baseball

I got one of these PCB's yesterday. The ROMs look intact, so hopefully this will help with the "No good dump known". The auction claimed that it didn't work when powered up, but I'm betting that's mostly due to the missing CPU chip. :)