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hvyunit: MAME ROM Information.

History:

Heavy Unit (c) 1988 Taito Corp.

A very rare and little known shooter from Kaneko with nice chunky sprites and very imaginative level design, also the music and sound effects are surely on a par with "R-Type".

- TRIVIA -

Developed by Kaneko.

- STAFF -

Software Section: S. Igarashi (TO-Y), Y. Yamauchi (UAY), T. Katoh

Art Design Section: K. Matsuoka, T. Tajima, H. Ichikawa, A. Funatsu, T. Okimoto, A. Yazaki

Music & Sound: T. Watanabe, S. Aizu

Hardware Section: H. Nagayoshi, H. Mikami

Management: H. Kikuchi

Director: H. Kaneko

- PORTS -

* Consoles :

NEC PC-Engine (Dec.1989)

Sega Mega Drive (Dec.1989)

Sega Mega Drive (Dec.1990, "Heavy Unit - Mega Drive Special")

- SOURCES -

Game's ROM.

MAME Info:

0.129u6 [Tomasz Slanina, Corrado Tomaselli]

0.129u5 [Tomasz Slanina, Corrado Tomaselli]

Bugs:

- All set in hvyunit.c: Enemies stop appearing during Stage 5-2. DRG (ID 04172)

WIP:

- 0.141u4: Hurray Banana, Tormod, hotaru, Dna Disturber, F. Marsaud, N. Francfort, Smitdogg and The Dumping Union added clone 'Heavy Unit -U.S.A. Version- (US)'. Renamed (hvyunito) to (hvyunitjo).

- 15th March 2011: Smitdogg - We got Heavy Unit U.S.A. Version. It seems pretty rare, I've never seen it before. From the rom labels it seems to have some pretty big changes. Lots of them are labeled differently from current sets in MAME, not just 2 as you might expect. I don't know what all the differences are yet.

- 0.141u1: Brian Troha and Guru corrected coin mode and coinage for Heavy Unit (World).

- 0.141: Phil Bennett, Dr. Decapitator and Andrew Gardner fixed Heavy Unit - Game now playable. Hooked up KANEKO MERMAID protection MCU and removed obsolete simulation code. Also updated the driver to use a state class. Added I80C51 (6MHz) CPU4 and rom mermaid.bin (3584 bytes). Changed 'Unknown' dipswitches to 'Unused'.

- 28th December 2010: Andrew Gardner - A few months ago, Phil Bennett took it upon himself to tackle the Kaneko MCUs Dr. Decapitator photographed and gave to MAMEDev. I'm as good as the next guy at typing in bits, so I offered to help. The doc's images were nice, allowing us to type in all the data in a short amount of time. Phil figured out how to convert the bits to bytes, and quickly got DJ Boy to talk to the newly-typed-in (dumped) MCU. Often times, looking at the disassembly of a ROM gives a person a pretty good sense of the quality of what we have typed. Things were looking good, but there were a few errors. A little bit twiddling fixed these errors, but looking back at the original die images made us very concerned - sometimes the disassembly made Phil sure a bit should be a 1, but the die image was subtly blurry, and we both typed in a 0. Because of this, we asked for another set of images of the DJ Boy MCU from the Doc, and he very graciously gave us a higher magnification level. This new set of images was so good, it was no problem typing the whole ROM in again, and Phil hooked it up quickly and effectively. We had the same situation going on with the MCU in Heavy Unit. The doc's images were good, but not amazing. We typed them in, but asked for higher magnification images, knowing there may be some issues. Just the other day, the Doc sent us those higher resolution images. Phil typed in the images (I didn't finish my typing), fixed a couple of bits we had improperly typed with the lower-resolution images, and hooked up the MCU. The results should show up in the next release of MAME. In the meantime, David Haywood was kind enough to test out the emulation and record a video of MAME running the game Heavy Unit.

- 28th December 2010: Smitdogg - Heavy Unit MCU hooked up/working. Thanks to Phil Bennett, Dr. Decapitator & Andrew Gardner.

- 0.135u3: Fabio Priuli converted Kaneko Pandora sprite chip to be a MAME device and updated drivers accordingly.

- 0.131u4: Brian Troha updated dipswitches and added DIP Switch Settings list in the Heavy Unit driver. Added dipswitches 'Cabinet', 'Allow Continue', 'Bonus', 'Lives' and 'Unknown'.

- 20th May 2009: Guru - The 80C51 MCU from Heavy Unit has just been decapped. This is the ROM image, you can clearly see a large part of the lower section of the ROM is unused.

- 0.131u2: Angelo Salese fixed access violation in Heavy Unit.

- 0.130u1: Mamesick fixed Heavy Unit main CPU bankswitch. This fixes the enemy appearing in attract mode.

- 0.129u6: Changed description of 'Heavy Unit (set 1)' to 'Heavy Unit (Japan, Older)', 'Heavy Unit (set 2)' to 'Heavy Unit (World)' and 'Heavy Unit (set 3)' to 'Heavy Unit (Japan, Newer)'. Renamed (hvyunit) to (hvyunito), (hvyunita) to (hvyunit) and (hvyunitb) to (hvyunitj). Various improvements to Heavy Unit [Angelo Salese, Tomasz Slanina, David Haywood]: Added a very preliminary simulation of the protection, just enough to get the game to boot, not make it playable. Corrected CPU communication, IRQ/NMI generation etc. Fixed some video emulation issues (added tilemap scroll etc.). Corrected GFX rom loading (at least for the graphics used in attract mode).

- 27th February 2009: Angelo Salese - Started to look at the protection in Heavy Unit and did some video tweakery with Haze (still some scrolling issues, we'll hopefully fix that shortly). Notice that I don't promise anything about beating the protection in there, if this game was never properly emulated there's a reason...

- 0.129u5: Tomasz Slanina and Corrado Tomaselli added Heavy Unit (set 1) (Kaneko / Taito 1988) and clones (set 2) and (set 3).

- 20th February 2009: Corrado Tomaselli dumped Heavy Unit (set 2) and (set 3).

- 0.117: David Haywood moved "Pandora" sprite chip implementation to its own file. Updated Heavy Unit to use this new generic implementation.

- 21st February 2006: Tomasz Slanina - Heavy unit = heavy protection. Just a skeleton driver.

- 17th October 2003: Tomasz Slanina - Sprites (game logo is made of sprites) and text layer is done. TODO: bg layer, colors, sound

- 20th July 2003: Guru - Received Heavy Unit from R. Belmont.

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Romset: 1732 kb / 13 files / 568.4 zip

MAME XML Output:

<description>Heavy Unit (World)</description>

<manufacturer>Kaneko / Taito</manufacturer>

</input>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</dipswitch>

</game>

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