Superboard, Keno and Slots

The PE+ machine has at least two varieties of motherboards. The basic board I have been emulating and the superboard version. The superboard has an additional socket on it for "game data". The superboard is backwards compatable with most or all of the non-superboard games (those that begin with PP or PS etc). The superboard specific games generally are in the format of XPnnnnnn or XSnnnnnn with game data roms in a format of XnnnnnnP or XnnnnnnS. (P for poker and S for Slots)

Internally, the super board maps the game data rom in all the external addresses the non-superboard had not used. After tracing the schematics, I determined the addresses are $1000, $3000, $5000, $7000, $9000, $B000, $D000 and $F000. So even though the game rom is stored on a 64k chip, only every other page actually can contain data. This essentually adds 32K of information to the superboard romsets.

With these changes added to the driver, I can now support the rather large list of superboard roms too. The slot pictured above is the Triple Triple Diamond Video Slot (XS000006) romset for the superboard. The slot driver uncovered some additional issues with video processing that I had not encountered before. Once I figured out the issue, the slot reels lined up nicely and the gameplay was correct.

Another romset now supported is the Deuces Wild Video Poker (XP000019). It is similar to many of the video poker romsets but has a few different graphics and gameplay with 2's being wild.

Lastly, I added support for a non-superboard version of Keno (KE1012). The romset I have has a bad dump of the CG files so there is some residue on the screen on some of the larger letters. The game uses a lightpen for input, so I had to add lightpen support, but it seems to be working just fine now.

At this point I am finding some small issues with the coin hopper timing when the machine tries to payout coins. I sometimes get a hopper empty or coin-out timeout message. It appears I will need to do something similar as the ABC optics for the coin-in mechanism, but not as complex. Some initial code appears to work on the non-superboard romsets.