Higemaru! (Patreon)

QSound is still going to take a few weeks. So I was looking for a core I could get together in a single day to share with you guys today. I had several options and finally decided on this little title: Pirate Ship Higemaru! 

Although Vulgus is referred to as the earliest CAPCOM title, this one is definetely simpler in terms of hardware. No scroll layer. No overlaying of background over sprites. No DMA for sprites. A single CPU to run game and sound... But a big YES where it matters: great fun!

The original title is Makai-shima Higemaru, does it remind you of Makai-mura? That's not the only similarity with other titles. You can definetely see that designers working on this title went on to work on later CAPCOM games. The same applies to the hardware.

I based this core on 1942 schematics and the MAME driver for Higemaru. I don't have access to the board nor the schematics of Higemaru. But the puzzle pieces did fit well. I disagree with MAME implementation in a couple of places where I think that 1942 schematics are more relevant. So the screen rate is different from MAME and the time at which interrupts occur also is. I bet the core is extremely faithful to the original PCB, even if I haven't seen it.

It took only a few hours to get this working correctly. But it might have stolen more time during the week as playing it is a lot of fun. Ideal to play during on-line meetings where you only have to listen to!

By the way, this is a public release. No need for beta. Find the files in JTBIN or via the update script.