(Reupload) MAME Work In Progress - Time Traveler, further progress
Channel: Mog's Emulation Station
Date: 26/03/2022

This video is a follow-up to the previous upload, as well as the two attempts at uploading this video earlier this morning, but with mangled quality, cropping, and aspect ratio. I apologize to anyone who's gotten spammed with notifications about it as a result.

Time Traveler is, by and large, now working. There are the occasional questionable deaths and questionable moments, but at this point it's unclear to me if it's because I'm terrible at "games" that are ostensibly non-stop Quick Time Events, or if there are emulation bugs to be ironed out.

For example:
- I'm not sure if the number of times I had to shoot a given enemy in the "1998" world is supposed to be a thing or not, but given that I died when I stopped shooting and didn't die when I didn't stop shooting, I suspect it's intended.
- I'm not sure if the lengthy pause after a Time Reversal Cube is hardware-accurate.
- In general, the timing window for some of the deaths in the game seems to be razor-thin and woefully unfair.

In any case, improvements from the last video include:
- A proper layout file for showing the alphanumeric LED readout, Time Reverse button lamp and 1P+2P start lamps
- Fixed input hookups, allowing Time Reversal Cubes to be used
- More of the Pioneer LD-V4200 command set is implemented, including Step Forward/Backward, Multi-Speed Forward/Backward.
- Courtesy of Matt Ownby of the Dragon's Lair Project website, tests have been run against a Pioneer player of similar vintage in order to iron out some ambiguity in the documentation as to what circumstances cause a delayed response from the player, and what circumstances cause an immediate response.

A pull request has been submitted upstream to the MAME team, here's hoping that it makes it into the upcoming release of MAME 0.242!