In the last 2 or 3 days I’ve been trying to boot Night Slave for the PC-9821 on MAME. I managed to do it on standalone MAME after receiving a lot of help from /emugen/ in 4chan. It’s a very convoluted process but it works. However, retroarch makes this whole operation probably impossible. First big problem is the fact that I can’t boot into pc9821.zip via the retroarch menu, it just crashes. The only way to boot in is by using this command:
retroarch.exe -L cores/mame_libretro.dll "pc9821 -rp D:\Jogos\Arcade"
Where D:\Jogos\Arcade is where I store my MAME roms, obviously. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if everything just worked afterwards but it doesn’t. The game comes in .HDI format (which MAME doesn’t support) or 10 .FDI files. To make the game work, someone on the 4chan thread managed to copy every file from the game’s 10 floppys (taken from pleasuredome softlist torrent, which doesn’t boot automatically) and creating and storing all the files in a new, blank .chd file. Secondly the system needs something that autoruns and this is where the we also need a DOS floppy disk. We need an OS just so we can change directory to the game’s hard drive and boot it.
So the process is like this: 1 - Boot pc9821 2 - Press scroll lock to get partial input emulation 3 - Press tab 4 - Go to file manager 5 - on the first floppy insert the DOS system 6 - on the hdd insert the game’s chd
So now it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HBXu8Aq.png At this point all is fine but then I can’t go any further
7 - Enable IDE BIOS
Before reseting I need to turn on IDE BIOS but retroarch mame’s core doesn’t seem to have it(?) Standalone: https://i.imgur.com/7HIm3f7.png Retroarch: https://i.imgur.com/L9xwMVM.png
Without this I can’t change directory the game’s chd
8 - press reset
This is where retroarch crashes. On standalone MAME is resets the system and inserts the floppy and the hard drive. I need to reset else it won’t work. The drives won’t be loaded or at least I don’t know another way of doing this.
On standalone MAME all I need to do is wait for DOS to boot, go to the DOS command line, type “C:” and then NIGHTSLAVE\NS.bat and the game boots DOS: https://i.imgur.com/NEZd5TD.png Command line and change to C: https://i.imgur.com/1v2gOMe.png Boot game: https://i.imgur.com/iwyxepV.png
If anyone wanna help me out and try this out on retroarch here are the files http://www23.zippyshare.com/v/enx8hfYN/file.html
I’d also like to mention that the retroarch core might have some sound issues. After booting pc9821 there’s a very loud crackling noise that standalone MAME doesn’t have.