Sat Sep 13 07:04:11 EDT 2014

NMK004 ROM Dumping, Part 5: The Release

This post is the final part of a series. I highly recommend reading the previous articles, or this one may not make much sense: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.


The time has finally come for the release. This will be my final post on the NMK004 dump. As of this post, the patches have been added to MAME, and will definitely be included in the next stable release.

Let's start out with what everybody has been waiting for, the NMK004 internal ROM dump. You may obtain the dump here: http://daifukkat.su/files/nmk004.zip.

Next, I'm also releasing my dumping tools. This is split into two repositories, both hosted on bitbucket. OPNCAP is located at https://bitbucket.org/trap15/opncap, and nmk004-trojan is located at https://bitbucket.org/trap15/nmk004-trojan.

Lastly, I have a special secret extra bonus, but you'll have to put up with story time for a bit. A few months ago, I bought a Hacha Mecha Fighter PCB off of eBay. I knew it looked somewhat strange, being mostly EPROMs instead of mask ROMs, and lacking the NMK-110 protection MCU that's usually on the PCB. When I got it, I realized almost instantly that it had to have been a bootleg conversion from Thunder Dragon. After playing and comparing to PCB recordings of a genuine board, I knew that what I had was gold: an unprotected version of Hacha Mecha Fighter. I never bothered to dump it until I started on this project, but I felt now was the right time. So I dumped the program ROMs and sent them off to Haze to have them added to MAME. As expected, it works perfectly in MAME, and now it's possible for anyone to play it properly. In the future, I'd like to actually figure out the protection on Thunder Dragon and Hacha Mecha Fighter, but having unprotected versions works just as well.

You can get this ROM set from http://daifukkat.su/files/hachamfb.zip.


Title screen of Hacha Mecha Fighter

The following MAMETesters bugs may now be closed:

Last but not least, I'd like to give some shout outs to those who made this all possible:

As a cute little aside, I've uploaded the work log I kept while doing this. Maybe somebody will find it interesting. There's a lot of content, lots of information on my thought process, a few diagrams and tables, stuff like that. Pretty unfiltered though, so don't be offended by anything I have written. http://daifukkat.su/files/NMK004-WORK-NOTES.txt


Posted by trap15 | Permanent link | File under: arcade, nmk004, mame, emulation, reverse_engineering
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