TMNT MiSTer core beta release (Patreon)

The MiSTer TMNT core beta is finally available: https://github.com/furrtek/Arcade-TMNT_MiSTer 

M.I.A. Missing In Action also comes with the buy-one-get-one-free offer ;)
Can't say this game is comparable to TMNT regarding quality, but it does start up and is playable despite some background tile issues.

TMNT's main outstanding bug is the intro theme occasionally becoming noisy.

A bug affecting both games is also causing some big sprites to be partially displayed. Luckily this particular size of sprites isn't often used, so it doesn't really affect playability of the core in its current state.

There are also some less important bugs listed in the Github issues. All these will be taken care of in the near future.

Talking about the future: the subject of my next Patreon-supported big reverse engineering project will be the ✨ Super A'Can ✨.

It's an obscure Taiwanese home console inspired by both the SNES and the Genesis, designed by a subsidiary of UMC (a semicondutor giant well-known at the time for their 486 CPUs and clone Famicom chips). Because it was released near the end of the 2D-era, sales were minimal and only a handful of games were officially released before everything vanished from stores. The remaining stock was allegedly sent to recycling, or maybe just a landfill (another Atari E.T. story ?).

I had previously imaged both of the console's custom chips, the UM1618F (video) and UM6619F (audio and IOs), but the pictures turned up to be almost useless because of how small the silicon features were.

The dies were sent to John McMaster, who was able to produce much better images of the UM1619F chip. After trying to identify cells for a few hours (see picture), I was confident that reverse-engineering was possible even though the internal structure (ie the individual transistors) of the cells still couldn't be seen.

In contrast to all my previous silicon reverse-engineering projects which only brought confirmations, minor details and information for cycle-accurate emulation, this is undoubtedly going to be largest and the most helpful regarding preservation of all, simply because so little is currently known about the system.

This long project's first goal will be to extract the schematics from the UM1619F, extract its internal ROMs, and document how every bit of it works.

Now is the time to either jump ship, or to climb aboard this new adventure :)