Better Tms34010

[plfx]

I implore the gods of emulation to come down from on high and give us a better emulation core for the TMS34010 chip. This was the first commercial programmable graphics accelerator and serves as the main CPU in most Midway cabinets from back in the day.

Right now the emulation is software-level in MAME4ALL, so it's pretty impractical to try to play the any of the many Y-, T-, and Wolf-unit games, like classic MK all the way up through UMK3, or Rampage and NBA Hangtime.

Does anyone have the iron will to tackle this?

 

[Gab1975]

I don't think that the games based on TMS34010 will be ever playable on Caanoo (trough MAME4All)... maybe trough a specific Wolf-unit emulator...

 

[StarG]

The TMS34010 chip looks quite CPUish upon first sight. Seems it is a capable integer muncher*. What instead of the CPU would be able to handle it? As MAMEs emulation seems state based i guess an option would be a (possibly static) ARM recompiler. However i did not find any clues about its clocking. Seeing it had a metallic heat spreader that time i guess it had some power dissipation

* also seems the first reference for a SIMD design to me.

 

[plfx]

@StarG

I think in most cabs it was running at a lower voltage than it generally could, though that's just a presumption, and if it had a serious cooling block on it I'm probably wrong.
I had assumed so because its original purpose was for graphics acceleration and it had the ability to draw arbitrary primitives, but was just being applied for sprite-based graphics in the cabinets. But in a cab they probably wouldn't have cared. I'm too embedded-minded.

EDIT: Also it could take a purpose-built floating-point coprocesso (TMS34082), but this is not present in any cabinets I know of.

Specs for Wolf:

Midway Wolf Unit hardware
Main CPU : TMS34010 (@ 6.25 Mhz)
Sound CPU : ADSP2105 (@ 10 Mhz)
Sound Chips : DMA-driven (@ 10 Mhz)
Screen orientation : Horizontal
Video resolution : 400 x 254 pixels
Screen refresh : 53.20 Hz
Palette colors : 32768