TMNT sprites and future work (Patreon)

The second part of TMNT's video system is now working well enough to show the title screen and a few MAME VRAM captures properly !

There might be some glitchy edge-cases related to scaling that I will have to look into, but basically everything is now implemented with no deviation from the real hardware. The NeoGeo core required a few modifications to "simulate" delays that were used in the custom chips. Konami were nice enough to design their chips without relying on delay cells :)

The base system was already partially tested months ago when the tilemap chips started working. The core was able to pass the self-test screen in simulation. Now I need to connect the audio subsystem, which shouldn't take long thanks to the availability of Jotego's YM2151 and uPD7759 cores.

I'm hoping to release the complete core before the end of the year.
Since work on TMNT is already all "paid for", there won't be any other paid post concerning this project.

Regarding future work on retro hardware, I'm planning on letting go of specific platforms to focus on original chips and boards, leaving the porting/adaptation work to others. This is solely because I prefer reverse-engineering and creative work than anything else. As I've written before, money is one thing, but a big part of my motivation is derived from the excitment of discovering new things and understanding how they work.

In the following months I'll list the chips and systems that are within my reach for reverse-engineering. I'll make it clear that I won't be writing cores for specific FPGA systems in the future. I'd also like to change the pledge tiers to allow some of you to decide on what I should work on next.