Popeye Public Release (Patreon)

Get ready for a real classic arcade: simple gameplay yet very addictive! Ideal to play with the kids during Christmas. I am happy to announce the public release of Popeye.

Although the core is better than the beta version, particularly in sound, it is still not complete. That's why the OSD colour is yellow. It will become green, and finally grey as the core matures. I am releasing the source code so other developers may take part in it too. Here's the list of pending tasks:

* VGA output on MiST may not work on some screens
* HDMI output doesn't look great because of interlaced graphics
* Add support for protected games.
   I have tried a bit but somehow I don't get the interface right. Schematics and MAME code don't have the same interface and probably protection fails because my interface is wrong. When protection fails the game gets reset when you try to start playing
* Fix graphic glitch affecting one horizontal line on Popeye face
* Sky Skipper support. This is supposed to be easy to do but I think it requires its own protection module too. This game is a Nintendo rarety.
* Sprite issues
   1. The K of the title is missing, that's a sprite not a character
   2. There is horizontal line missing in Popeye's face
   3. Sprites are incorrectly rendered around the screen left and right borders
   4. Note that the sprite overlay is correct. Sprites do hide each other in this video hardware.
* Credits: the game starts with 90 credits. That already happened once and I fixed it but I don't remember the cause now.
* Interlaced video
   Only sprites are interlaced. It is possible to read the ROM data at high resolution directly without affecting accuracy of the main CPU/GPU interaction. It would be better to produce deinterlaced video in order to show it more cleanly in HDMI screens.

Source code is available here and the binaries here (or through the updater).