MiSTer FPGA Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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/

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

Thanks Pierco!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

mrtomato wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 1:56 am 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.

ZigZag wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 7:43 am

mrtomato wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 1:56 am 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.

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

Moondandy wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 4:12 pm 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.

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

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

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

Moondandy wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 9:46 pm 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

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.

Another one for testing:

https://github.com/pcornier/EpochGalaxy2_MiSTer

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

That sounds like a good feature request.