MAME Emulating a Sonic the Hedgehog Popcorn Machine (polygon.com)

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:27AM from the all-things-to-all-hedgehogs dept.

New submitter AmericaCounterweight writes: Polygon is reporting that the MAME development team has unearthed and emulated one of the most obscure pieces of Sonic heritage: a popcorn machine. MAME developer David Haywood reports that contributors "purchased the PCB for another novelty Sonic item, this time a SegaSonic Popcorn Shop, a popcorn dispenser machine with a video display. It runs on the Sega C2 board (Genesis type hardware)." This follows news from earlier this year that the MAME team would be switching to a true Open Source license for the project and concentrating on more than just arcade games. MAME project coordinator Miodrag Milanovic also recently appeared at the BalCCon2k15 event to speak about MAME, the current direction of the project, and software preservation.

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Re: I appreciate the mame guys by timrod · 2015-10-27 05:37 · Score: 3, Informative

Actually in some cases, there were arcade boards that had planned obsolesence built into them. All of the Capcom Play System boards (CPS1, CPS2, CPS3) had various forms of what was known as a "suicide battery". In some boards this was a battery powering a RAM chip that contained a decryption table for the game. Once the battery died, the RAM would lose the decryption tables and make it impossible for the board to work. Others had a "suicide battery" that powered the game's graphics hardware, and needed a hardware-level fix (beyond just replacing the battery) to get the game working again. Sega also had their own suicide battery system for some of their hardware, but Capcom was the biggest offender.
MAME bypasses all of this suicide hardware, and from what I recall some of the people on the MAME project worked on some of the software-level fixes necessary to get the older boards working again.