The Dumping Union got the chance to acquire an obscure Japanese system by Sammy. It's a cartridge based platform for some cute medal games for kids. The gameplay is very simple: just one big flashing button to push at the right moment to try and catch some funny animals.

The two working games at the moment are Animal Catch:








and Itazura Monkey:








Each cartridge contains two flash roms (code+samples and graphics). The main board has not been found yet, but I figured out that the hardware is a variation of the one running GeGeGe no Kitarou. I wrote a driver for that a few months back, and it's based on a graphics chip by Taxan (256 color sprites with zooming).

There are three more carts dumped, but each one requires its own ROM/RAM banking scheme and memory map (just to prevent the operators from reflashing an old cart with new games), so they do not work yet. Also, the sound chip is unemulated. Anyone fancy writing a sound core for the OKI MSM9810 sample player? It would help Funcube also .

Thanks to Gnoppi, john666, Gerald (COY), Smitdogg and The Dumping Union.







Source: www.lucaelia.com