Luca Elia WIP: Skimaxx

The news of Luca Elia WIP.Some WIP screenshots of the water-ski simulator Skimaxx. This game, manufactured by ICE in 1996, featured a dedicated cabinet with an hydraulic board to stand on:





The developer said:
Yes... it's another Kyle Hodgetts special .

For the emulation, I built upon the current driver by Phil Bennett, adding graphics, inputs and sound:

the PCBs use 2 x 68EC030 @ 40MHz and a TMS34010 @ 50MHz, a CPU with dedicated instructions for pixel-level processing and graphics primitives.

Since MAME lacks a proper 68030 core, the driver uses two 68020s instead. Not a big deal, since the '030 only adds the MMU (not present in the EC model anyway) and split data and instruction caches over the '020.

The first 68k drives the game logic and builds up the display lists for the other CPUs. The TMS draws the text overlay, while the second 68k draws everything else with the help of a blitter.

The blitter is an FPGA (programmed at boot by the 68k) that does rotation and zooming, but one line at a time. Thus it requires the CPU to do most of the work, including walking the high-color screen buffer pixel by pixel!

The stereo sound is driven by 4 x M6295 (sample players) that output digitized music and speech.


Source:lucaelia.com