Portraits (c) Olympia 1983
A Illustrated story of the creation of a rare mamedriver.
extra files here
New findings!

Well, I needed to do something regarding portraits or it would seem like I was doing nothing (too late, eh?) So I went to the real cabinet to take a look at it (it's 20 kms in the wrong direction and I didn't have much time). It was well worth it though.
Wouldn't you know it, there was a 288 on the cameraboard aswell! these keeps poping up, so I'm not saying this is the last one. Found the Tilt switch, it is infact a slam tilt located on the inside of the coindoor. Furthermore there was these serviceswitches which are mentioned in the manual. I'm sure we have to add these aswell, and those might need to be present for the game to boot properly?.

Didn't have time to investigate further on how to get this game running in the cabinet. Hopefully next week?
24 Apr
ClrMame

Not much done on the driver lately, am trying to figure how the sprites work. They are located at location $9000-$9100 which is a memory area frequently accessed in the programcode, most of them are called in the same way but there are some differences, which could explain the weird offset problem.
Been busy at work and at home, and therefore not being able to fix what I setup to do this week, dump roms and check cabinet for instance. Life is cruel sometimes :)
Fixed an entry for Portraits in the testdrivers mame.67 CLRMame datfile. Now it doesn't complain to have an unneeded file :)
23 Apr
Sprites

While I enjoyed the wonderful springtime sun all weekend, Steve worked on the driver. :)
While the most of the sprites are now found and are working, there are still a lot of guessing involved. My dumper might have a little time over this week so we might get the color PROMs dumped, if luck have it the sound aswell. I have to go see if we can fire up the real game and get it running.


21 Apr
Controling the cameraman

Now we have the DIPs working (almost 100% verified), and the controls aswell. This means we can start the game and play :) . But it's a bit hard to see what you are doing since the sprites are missing. Steve worked a bit more and came up with this. The cameraman!
The game is looking better by the minute now, and we're learning new things all the time (at least I am). I even got a new HighScore :).

The game also seems to have a TILT mechanism, I have to look at the actual cabinet to see if this is the case. We at least managed to find a 'switch' that TILTs the game. The only reasonable explaination I have for this is that the camera is sensitive for movement, and therefore they installed a TILTs switch.

In other news: Both Steve and I are taking a vacation from this for a the weekend. I might put in some work to see if I can find more sprites or something, don't know for sure yet.
17 Apr
Highscore!

This might be something not all people have seen, the actual graphics from Portraits thanks to Steve!

The highscroetable from yesterday WAS infact the highscoretable. Yesterday Steve managed to work his magic a produce the graphics aswell. Suddenly we have reached a new milestone :). There is still a lot of stuff missing like, the background should be scrolling, controls to start the game, the sprites, the colors. but this is a huge step forwards. We also can see a instruction on how the game is played (It's Italian english:) ).

I might have found out what the weird reads/writes in memory is thanks to being able to see the graphics. clue? look at the picture from the first day, notice the round thingies?
16 Apr
Highscore?

After some more testing, and using something that doesn't work at all. I came up with the graphics that clearly shows that the text being written (left-to-right) during attract mode looks like it's the highscore table. What does this mean? well, for starters we now know that the game is writing the highscore in a correct manner, starting from the bottom with 10 and going upwards until it reaches 1. (Innovative,eh?).

Somehow with this weird settings I have now the text seems to be clearer than before. The third 'screen' shows some disclaimer of some sort. And the top is infact the text earlier seen in the screenshot of the original game.
What I also found was the picture of the guy in this picture. It's pretty hard to destinguish but it's there. I didn't see it before because the colors was messed up.

We didn't manage to get the game booted allthough we did try. We havn't given up, we're trying another day with new ideas.
15 Apr
16x16 or 8x8?

Dead end? after some discussion and testing late into the night it looks like we didn't progress any. The colors we decided are for another day, and now we have started to look into if the characters are 16x16 instead of 8x8. this is a first test that doesn't look too shabby. Another thing I now understand is that we need to know how the game knows which part of the memory map that is put onscreen, now it only uses the first 256 chars. With a 16x16 char it shows double that. It feels like we're treading in darkness until we get a better idea of what it should look like.
Next on the agenda, fire up the game and take a whole lot of pictures and movies. Stay tuned.
14 Apr
Palette chip?

Of course this would happen. I'm chipblind it seems, found a new chip on the CPU board, it's the same one as I found yesterday. Wonder what else I may have missed? At least we now know how to dump it. So it shouldn't be a problem.
11 Apr
First Graphics

Now we're getting somewhere. Got a new c-file from Steve, which had the grahics working. Now this is all scrambled and the colors are totally wrong (see yesterday as to why). But it's the first time we can see what's happening. On startup some text are written to the screen, this is believed to be the highscore list, after that some graphics are displayed in various formats. We are in the attract mode. Now we need to figure out what graphics goes where.
As for the colors we need a pinout for the chip, it's a TI 74S288N. So if anybody knows anything about that chip please contact me [edited because we found out how to dump it].
I've also managed to take this logo from the graphics banks. The colors are all wrong, but it clearly shows we're on the right track.
10 Apr
Colorblind

Somehow I managed to miss this tiny little PROM, the color PROM. It doesn't look like other PROMs and when I did a search for it on www.ti.com I drew a blank. After some more search results on our favorite search engine I managed to find out that this PROM was used in among other games Crazy Kong. Now it's a matter of getting it dumped. It's only a 32 bytes but quite important for a correct color representation of the game.
I will have to see if my romdumper can handle a chip of that size, and there is also still the matter of the soundroms.
Managed to fix the DIP switches.
09 Apr
First Progress

Today was a good day, started with me setting up this webpage and fixing upsome pictures and manuals to it. Used an old script of mine to make it a bit eaier to add news.
When I got home I opened my mail and found a mail with 2 modified drivers for portraits. Loaded them in and compiled and SUCCESS! We got our first viewable progress, Not much but we can see the dips and change them. Still a bit of work to get the dips working. will be looking at that tomorrow. Awesome day!
08 Apr
Contact !

Got in contact with a mamedev who has agreed to help me out in this project. Things are looking up. Mame still crashes.
07 Apr
First View

Tried to get in touch with some mame contacts. I have some leads on how to get this thing of the early stages. After a bit of fiddeling the game now shows the disclaimer and the information screen. How cool!
05 Apr
DIP switches galore

Started messing with the DIP switches, and succeeded in adding them. Wasn't too hard once you figured out how it should be done. The problem now is to figure out if they're in the correct memory location. Had a bit of a problem with the coinage settings, somehow they don't compile correctly. Switch tables here and here
04 Apr
Rom dumping

Managed to dump the ROMs today, all except the sound ROMs. made a zip file and added the crc-check to the now compilable driver. I started compiling the mame32 and it's always cool to see the rom without the red stopsign :)
It compiles but doesn't start. The game just crashes mame. Here are the correct crc's for this game.
03 Apr
Beginning of a driver

Started up making a driver using dday.c as a template for the driver. It's done by the same manufacturer and uses the same CPU, so I though it would be a good choise.
tried but couldn't compile the source. Have to look into that.
02 Apr
The first steps

Found out that this game was a rare most wanted rom by the mameteam. Searched the internet for more information about it, found next to nothing.
So I decided to try to make the driver and get it added to MAME myself. Being a total newbie on how the inner workings of a PCB is I started to browse the net for info on how to proceed, and found precious little on the subject.
As luck would have it I'm part of the Visual Pinball community and I asked around a bit to find out some more. I got some leads which I followed up.
31 Mar
First look

Aquired Portraits, a rare italian arcade game.
30 Mar
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