Not as smooth sailing as I'd have hoped but I finally got to see some less than stellar results on the NGCD. In fact it took several hours on a Saturday night, and thereafter plenty of minutes sneaking into the study to finally see something on this (Sunday) evening, and finally even managed to burn a CD to try on my newly acquired top loader unit.
Although I had built Bey's Phoenix emulator for the NGCD, and even built it for the MVS, I hadn't gotten around to trying Donkey Kong on the NGCD before. I expected to have to do a few tweaks, but after hours of tweaking I was still getting a blank screen! My main suspect was the PRG file header, and in the end I even filled in the vectors and several dummy routines for every interrupt - to no avail! I was getting nowhere.
I turned to Raine, whose 'console' implements a debugger of sorts. It crashed so often it was almost useless, but I did at least discover that the game was loading properly and then wiping itself soon after booting. Based on that evidence I had a very strong suspicion that there was an issue in my use of the BIOS interface routines.
Next I discovered - to my surprise - that the Neo Geo CDZ driver in MESS was reported to work properly, which filled me with a great hope that I could debug my code as I have been doing all along on the MVS under MAME. Alas I couldn't for the life of me get any CD image to work, let alone Donkey Kong, and finally asked for help on the official MESS forums. After some feedback and further mucking about, I could finally get MESS to load a CD image and debug it!
I discovered that it wasn't even executing the 1st VBLANK interrupt before rebooting, and then trapped a call into the USER routine with a parameter that doesn't happen on the MVS. Turns out I wasn't exiting properly and after fixing that it actually ran! Corrupt graphics, but it ran!
After pondering the graphics and hitting a brick wall for an hour or so, it occurred to me that perhaps my NGCD sprite file was out-of-date... and to my relief I discovered that was indeed the case! When I did my last re-ordering of the sprites (for rotated and non-rotated versions) I neglected to copy the updated NGCD sprite file into my Neo Kong development environment. I rectified that and - viola!
So it was with much excitement that I burned an ISO and popped it into my console. I watched it load and then... damn! The graphics looked 'right', they were recognisable, but they flickered severely - all over the screen! I could actually start a game and control Mario, but it was unplayable.
I should note that it displays perfectly under NeoCD/SDL, Raine and MESS!
Oh well, back to do more research. I do recall something about sprite placement and certain areas that should be left clear... I ignored it at the time as I wasn't seeing any issues but obviously now I need to go back and re-read it properly.
Still, technically it's the first program that I've ever written that I've seen running on real console hardware, and that's something!
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