Konami Endeavour Series WIP

[Heihachi_73]

After many years sitting on just one complete preserved game, a Russian version of Enchanted Lamp, work has started on the preservation and emulation of Konami Endeavour games, also known as ES or ES500, with its PowerPC-based hardware dating back to circa 2001 where it mostly competed with Aristocrat's MK6 and IGT's I-Game platforms until it was superseded by the K2V.

The main issue with these games is that while the game and sound program data is on conventional EPROMs, but the graphics and sound resources are saved onto surface-mounted flash chips located on a separate board (FMU2), which are difficult to dump as it requires precision with desoldering, cleaning the solder off, dumping the data and re-soldering the chips back to the board as to not brick the original machines.

Recently, three New South Wales games were dumped: Rapid Fire 5, which is a variation of Black Rose (the ROMs were dumped months earlier, but now it has its accompanying flash data); Amazon Spirit, which is identical to Incan Pyramid; and Safe Money, which is based on Money in the Bank.

The games boot in MAME and be RAM-cleared and set up (as is common with non-US slot software, the games do not use setchips, however a memory clear chip is dumped), however there are still a few things left to implement in MAME so the games cannot coin up or be played yet. The new dumps narrowly missed out on the 0.258 release however, so they will be officially added as of 0.259, although the updated MAME source code can be downloaded through GIT.

Note: The Enchanted Lamp set has also been updated to work with the new code. Previously, the flash data for this game had been dumped through the edge connector of the PCB, resulting in a single large file; this data has now been de-interleaved and split into individual files in the same format as the more recent dumps.

Several other Russian games had their EPROMs dumped alongside Enchanted Lamp but lack their flash data, so the games are unable to boot. It is unlikely we'll ever see the flash data dumped from these however.