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gyruss: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Gyruss (c) 1983 Konami.

A single player shoot-em-up in which the purpose is to fly through the solar system, destroying waves of alien attackers, before finally reaching Earth. Planets that must be passed before Earth is reached are Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

It only takes two warps to reach Neptune, but all of the others, including Earth, take three warps to get to. Each time the player reaches a planet, they will be faced with a Challenge Stage. A bonus stage in which players try to destroy as many aliens as possible to accrue points. After reaching Earth, there is a Challenge Stage, followed by a very fast 'three warps to Neptune' stage. After this, the levels and the background music start over.

Gyruss' superb gameplay, in which the player ship rotates around the edges of the screen and fires 'inwards', is heavily influenced by Atari's 1981 classic, "Tempest". While the design of the Alien ships themselves is similar to those of Namco's also legendary "Galaga" series.

- TECHNICAL -

Game ID : GX347

Main CPU : Z80 (@ 3.072 Mhz), M6809 (@ 2 Mhz)

Sound CPU : Z80 (@ 3.579545 Mhz), I8039 (@ 533.333 Khz)

Sound Chips : (5x) AY8910 (@ 1.789772 Mhz), DAC, (6x) RC (@ 1.789772 Mhz)

Players : 2

Control : 8-way joystick

Buttons : 1 (FIRE)

- TRIVIA -

Released in March 1983.

Also licensed to Centuri for US manufacture and distribution (April 1983).

After working on the successful "Time Pilot", Gyruss' designer, Yoshiki Okamoto, went on to create "Gyruss", which, although a success in its own right, was released at a time when the arcade craze was starting to die down. This may explain why the game didn't shift the units it really deserved. After its release, Okamoto asked for a raise, or he would quit. He was duly fired when he turned up for work the following day.

One of the most memorable features of this game is its soundtrack, which consists of an extremely catchy synthesized rendition of Bach's 'Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor'.

Anthony Fodrizio holds the official record for this game with 41,090,450 points.

A bootleg of this game is known as "Venus".

Alfa Records released a limited-edition soundtrack album for this game (Konami Game Music Vol.1 - 28XA-85) on 25/06/1986.

- SCORING -

Shooting a ship : 50, 100 or 150 points.

Destroying a whole formation of enemy ships before the next wave attacks : 1,000, 1,500, 2,000, 2,500 points.

Bonus for clearing a sector (having not destroyed a whole formation) : 1,000 points.

Shooting the three glowing spheres : 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 points.

Bonus for shooting each ship on the chance stage : 100 points.

Bonus for shooting all 40 ships on the chance stage : 10,000 points.

- TIPS AND TRICKS -

* You can get double fire if you shoot the sun-like enemy that appears in front of you surrounded by two blue pod-like enemies - try to make this a priority.

* To make getting double fire easier, try to stay at the bottom of the screen until the 'pod and sun' formation appears as it will appear right in front of wherever your ship is after all enemies have entered and they start attacking.

1) There must be at least three enemies left in the level for the 'pod and sun' formation to show. If you lose a life and three enemies are left, the 'pod and sun' will show up one more time, but if you lose a life after that, they will not show any more until the next level. After you get double fire, the sun enemy will be replaced on later levels with another pod. Destroy all three for some bonus points.

2) If you have only one enemy left and cannot seem to destroy it, just leave it alone and eventually it will just leave and the level will end.

* Each level begins with four formations entering. If you destroy enough of these, a fifth formation will enter. As you pass each planet, more formations will enter towards the top of the screen. Learn to control your ship at the top as it will come in real handy on those Mars and Earth warps.

* When formations enter from the edge of the screen, they will not hit you if you are right where they enter. You can use this to your advantage to take out the formation with little or no trouble - just watch out for asteroids.

* Asteroids will always appear in your path - they cannot be destroyed and must be avoided.

* The 'bee-like' creatures with the force field will always appear from the center and move outward. The force field will destroy your ship if you touch it. Destroy one of the creatures to disable their force field.

* Learn the formations of the enemy attack waves during the normal stages, to enable you to collect the bonuses for destroying whole waves of attacking ships.

* Learn the formations of the enemy attack waves during the chance stages, to enable you to collect the bonuses for destroying whole waves of attackers and the 10,000 for destroying all 40 ships.

* The three glowing spheres always appear aligned with where you are located on screen. Remember to avoid any bullets when they appear.

* You can fire bullets ahead of enemy ships and then move aside to destroy them and avoid their shots.

- STAFF -

Programmed by : Toshio Arima

Designed by : Yoshiki Okamoto

Character by : Hideki Ooyama

Sound by : Mashahiro Inoue

- PORTS -

* Consoles :

Colecovision (1984)

Atari 2600 (1984)

Atari 5200 (1984)

Atari XEGS

Nintendo Famicom (1988)

Nintendo Famicom Disk (1988)

Sony PlayStation (1999, "Konami Arcade Classics")

Nintendo Game Boy Advance [NA] (Mar.2002, Konami Collectors Series - Arcade Advanced)

Nintendo Game Boy Advance [JP] (May.2002, Konami Collectors Series - Arcade Advanced)

Nintendo Game Boy Advance [EU] (Jun.2002, Konami Collectors Series - Arcade Classics)

Microsoft XBOX 360 (2007, "Xbox Live Arcade")

* Computers :

Atari 800 (1984)

Commodore C64 (1984)

* Others :

Konami Arcade Advanced Plug 'n Play TV Game (2004 - Majesco)

- SOURCES -

Game's rom.

Machine's picture.

Arcade Retro Lounge; http://tips.retrogames.com/

MAME Info:

0.29 [Nicola Salmoria]

0.20 [Mirko Buffoni, Michael Cuddy, Nicola Salmoria]

Artwork available

WIP:

- 0.144u7: Kanikani updated Gyruss dipswitches.

- 0.140u3: Darran added clone Gyruss (bootleg). PCB has stickers stating "TAITO (NEW ZEALAND) LTD".

- 12th December 2010: Smitdogg - Darran dumped the Taito New Zealand version of Gyruss.

- 0.135u3: Fabio Priuli added driver data struct to Gyruss.

- 0.130u1: Couriersud adjusted volume and removed DC component from sound in the Gyruss driver. Fixed Gyruss audio regression. Measured RU and RD on AY-3-8910.

- 0.128u3: Stephane Humbert added DIP locations for Gyruss and clones.

- 0.128u2: Stephane Humbert fixed dipswitches for Gyruss and clones.

- 0.124u4: Couriersud added discrete sound for filtering ("konami"-style) and mixing in Gyruss. Replaced DAC/6x RC Filter sound with Discrete.

- 0.123u5: Robiza fixed graphic garbage for one frame.

- 0.123u4: Gyruss update [Zsolt Vasvari]: Tilemap conversion, sprite multiplexing done properly and driver clean-up.

- 0.122u8: Zsolt Vasvari removed colortables from Gyruss and a number of other drivers, as part of a larger move to phase out old-style colortables. Improved colors in Gyruss with the RESNET code. Fixed gfx1/2 rom loading. Changed palettesize to 320 colors.

- 0.122u6: Changed I8039 CPU4 clock speed to 8MHz.

- 11th March 2007: Mr. Do - I figured i'd step up and take care of some raster stuff that has been waiting for awhile. As Gyruss bezel has always been in my top-ten list, I hit that one first. Let me know how you like it. Thank you to Anoid for the scan.

- 0.111u5: Buddabing added save state support to Gyruss.

- 26th August 2006: Mr. Do - Added Gyruss bezel from MAME.net and Mean Arena. Some of these decent stuff are so-so; some are REALLY good.

- 0.94u2: Nicola Salmoria rebalanced Gyruss volume.

- 0.93u1: Nicola Salmoria rebalanced Gyruss sound.

- 0.93: Added 6x RC_Filter.

- 0.56: Removed 3rd coin slot.

- 0.37b12: Accurate emulation of sprite multiplexing in Gyruss (also emulating the slave 6809) [Nicola Salmoria]. Added M6809 (2MHz) CPU2 and fixed CPU2/3/4 roms addresses.

- 0.34b3: Francesco Caporali added RC filter emulation to Gyruss. This improves some sound effects, e.g. the force field noise.

- 0.34b2: Nicola Salmoria added clone Venus (bootleg 1983).

- 22nd August 1998: Malcor dumped Venus (1983).

- 0.33b7: Added proms ($0, 20, 120 - palette, sprite lookup and character lookup).

- 0.30: Full emulated sound in Gyruss [Nicola Salmoria]. You can remove all the samples, they are no longer needed. Also, music tempo should now be correct. Due to the increased emulation overhead, it now runs slower than before. To improve speed, you can use the new -sr option (see below) to lower the sample rate. Tatsuyuki Satoh, Fabrice Frances, Nicola and Pete Ground completely rewritten the 8910 emulator and interface. This affects a lot of games, but the one which benefits more is Gyruss: It now plays many sound effects which were missing.

- 0.29: Nicola Salmoria added Gyruss (Konami). Nicola Salmoria fixed sprite/character priority in Gyruss. Accurate colors in Gyruss [Tim Lindquist, Nicola Salmoria]. Changed 'Gyruss' to clone 'Gyruss (Centuri)'. Renamed (gyruss) to (gyrussce).

- 0.27: Changed the 8910 sound chip emulation interface to allow updates more frequent than 60 per second [Nicola Salmoria]. I also increased the sampling frequency to 44.1kHz. These changes provide dramatic improvements in sound quality, which you can appreciate in e.g. Gyruss and Pooyan. The price to pay is slower execution. To make things worse, I had to (hopefully temporarily) remove some optimizations, so the above games will probably not run as well as before on slower systems.

- 0.20: Mirko Buffoni added Gyruss (Centuri 1983). Yes!! Finally I wrote a driver for Gyruss, one of my favourite games and one of the reasons why I started emulation. Big special thanks to Michael Cuddy (GYRUSS emulator), without help and information this game would probably never be done; and to Nicola Salmoria that fixed some of the sprites bugs that turned me mad and cleaned the code! Changed 8910intf to support 5 PSGs (Gyruss have them!). Known issues: Some of the components of spaceship do wraparound the top of the screen for a while. Dunno if the original machine does.

ARCADE RELEASE: Gyruss (Konami) - 1983/May

LEVELS: 22

Other Emulators:

* CottAGE

* FB Alpha

* JEmu2

* Retrocade

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Romset: 93 kb / 15 files / 41.3 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>Gyruss (Konami)</description>

<manufacturer>Konami</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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