1985 World Cup

History

The most popular soccer game in the 80's arcades was released by Tehkan, the former name of Tecmo in 1985.

There were two types of cabinet of it: upright one which had a uniform shape when viewed from the side and table one which had a step or gap between the control panel and the table. Many people were injured by over-enthusiastic trackball operation, hitting their little fingers hard or pinching them in the gap.

The game was controlled with a trackball, which was rare for a competitive game, allowing the player a high degree of freedom in terms of the direction of movement, the angle at which the ball was kicked and the strength and weakness of the ball. The development team simplified the controls so that players could run with a trackball and kick with a single button. No ‘offside’ and ‘fouls’ rules either, making the gameplay better suited for an arcade.

When playing against the CPU, you face a different country on each stage. Character data was thoroughly constructed using a ‘behaviour programm’ based on the playing characteristics of each country at the time. The game was also attractive because it was possible to play not only against the CPU but also against human opponents. Tehkan manufactured this cabinet in order to launch Gridiron Fight (known as All American Football) in February of that year, which unfortunately was not very popular in Japan, this game was developed to clear the stock of the Gridiron Fight cabinet.

The game was subsequently made into a series, but from the second game onwards the controls were changed to lever controls rather than a trackball. Was this change due to severe trackball damage and wear and tear?

Technical Trivia

The original board uses a trackball but bootlegs use a joystick. The conversion is done by replacing the spin counters on the PCB by fixed values. These values were not the best choice and would produce the player speed to differ depending on the direction.

The core currently reproduces the bootleg hardware, including the imperfect direction speed. This is a feature not emulated in MAME, so some people may find it nostalgic. There is a way to correct the direction speed on real hardware. On the next update, we will have analog control support, to mimick the trackball gameplay.

I have extracted the schematics for the bootleg and compared them to an original board. The only difference is the above mentioned trackball-joystick conversion. The schematics are missing a handful of minor signals that I will get to for completeness. It is currently over 95% completed.

Patches to MAME done after our research so far

• mamedev/mame#12934 (comment)

Other Updates

• Fixed regression error introduced in September to JT1942: display bug on CRT and scores are misplaced vertically and wrap around to bottom of screen

  

• JTWWFSS (compatible with WWF SuperStars) promoted to public core

• JTMIDRES (compatible with Midnight Resistance) promoted to public core (Pocket, already public on MiSTer)