Eye catcher, and possible emulation?

I noticed during development that the so-called eye-catcher graphics (the spinning NEO-GEO graphics and SNK logo) had completely random tiles on my Donkey Kong demo. This piqued my curiosity so I decided to look into how it is actually rendered.

The standard eye-catcher graphic

Turns out that the animated graphics can be either rendered by the BIOS, or the game itself (or not at all), depending on a flag set in the cartridge header. Either way, the actual tile data must be supplied by the cartridge - there is no graphic data in the BIOS itself!

The official documentation mentions as much, but doesn't give a lot of detail on exactly what is required. So I did some more digging in the BIOS disassembly, together with some experimentation with my demo. I discovered that the spinning logo is - not surprisingly - rendered as a series of sprites, and it uses a bank of (somewhat less than 256) tiles whose MSB is read from the cartridge header. As for the remaining text and copyright symbol; these are rendered from the FIX layer ROM on the cartridge and comprises various tiles interspersed with the more commonly-used ASCII characters.

So in order to clean-up my demo, I injected 256 sprite tiles from Baseball Starts Professional (surprisingly, NGH-001 - aka, NAM-1975 - renders its own eye-catcher) and set my cartridge header appropriately. Then I simply replaced the entire FIX ROM with that from the same and viola - a nice clean eye-catcher animation! Nothing exciting, but at least it's one more mystery solved for me.

In the mean-time I've been slowly plodding through the Donkey Kong disassembly, since the version I received - whilst extremely helpful - isn't quite as complete as I'd like. And since I'm using IDAPro to produce a Z80 source file as a starting point (I'd like to re-assemble it at a different address and see if it still runs in MAME), I'd like to ensure that it's as complete as possible since once I start adding 68K code to it, there's no going back.

It is a daunting task but I can see how, in some cases, a brute force approach - for some areas of the code - is sufficient. And that's no doubt what has happened with the 6809 conversion. But perfectly valid, obviously, as it runs beautifully on the Coco!

However, I'm starting to wonder whether an emulation might actually be possible on the Neo Geo. No doubt it would have to be hand-crafted in 68K assembler, as compiled C-code is just not going to cut the mustard on a 12MHz 68K. But maybe, just maybe, an assembler core with hand-patched graphics routines will do the job!?! I'm not sure, but I'm hoping to find out, as I'm now aware of possibly two (2) Z80 cores written in 68K assembler; one in a TRS-80 emulator on the Amiga, and another (yet to be confirmed) on a WIP Phoenix emulator on the Neo Geo.

A Z80 core would make life a little easier for sure, and open up the possibility for more arcade ports on the Neo Geo. Or maybe a TRS-80 emulator for it??? ;)