Let’s Get Ready to Rumba?

Opening Question: Why didn’t they call this Rumba Lumba?

Anyway, Corrado Tomaselli managed to locate a copy of this old 1984 Taito game gathering dust in a warehouse in Italy. Having identified the game as a long lost Taito Rumba Lumber, the owner agreed to loan it, so that it could be studied for emulation.

The hardware is a 3 board setup, with 2 boards common to Taito’s Fairyland Story, but with a different video board. Unfortunately this means the game is protected by a 68705 MCU, a common occurrence for early Taito games.

The gameplay is fairly straightforward, you move around the single screen map, which is initially filled with trees and in order to clear a path for yourself you must chop down the trees, this requires 2 hits with your axe.

Each level has a bird flying around the screen, this bird will only fly over the trees, not the empty spaces. A level is cleared when you restrict the bird to only be able to move between 4 or less trees. If you can isolate it to a single tree you get a bigger bonus than if you leave it with 4. The birds can breathe fire at diagonals, so be careful around them.

Other enemies will also spawn from eggs and hunt you down. If you spend too much time in a single spot, or narrow passageway a mole will dig up out of a hole next to you and then home in on you, so you need to keep moving!

There are stone wheels scattered about, which can be thrown in a straight line, and will clear all trees and normal enemies in their path.

The bird may leave the playfield through any one of the 4 exits, and reappear on the opposite side of the screen. The player doesn’t appear to be able to do this.

What Taito protected in this case appears to be the behavior of the bird when it leaves the screen. At the moment, as soon as the bird leaves the screen it gets stuck, offscreen, rendering the level ‘broken’. The lives counter is also protected, granting you infinite lives at the moment. Some sprite animation sequences are also protected, when the player throws a wheel they become invisible for a few frames, likewise the death sequence doesn’t show fully.

I’ve also had some issues with the colours on the text layer, which may or may not be protection related.

Compared to other Taito games, this, on the surface, looks like a fairly light protection, but it will need further investigation to make sure the device isn’t doing anything else before the board is returned. Sadly Decapping isn’t an option in this case, because it results in the destruction of the chip, and the board is only on loan.

*edit* colours fixed, i overlooked some banking which was already in the driver


old shots with broken colours below






Source:mamedev.emulab.it/haze/