The other avengers

There have been developments related to CAPCOM's Avengers (1987). A copy of the Trojan schematics appeared on the internet a while ago. It included a sheet for an MCU (microcontroller unit) that was not used on Trojan. Looking more into it, this was for Avengers. Recently too, a dump of this MCU also appeared on the internet. Dumping MCU ROMs is often done through silicon die shots. You have to identify each bit visually and we are talking of 32768 bits. If you are looking for an evening's passtime, here is a good one.

With this new information, I looked at my JTTROJAN files and made changes to make it a multi-game core. Both Trojan and Avengers are very similar. The bootleg version of the game (without the MCU protection) works well. Find it in the alternatives folder. But the original versions, with the MCU, work correctly too, but they do require a dump of the MCU ROM. Without it, the game backgrounds will not look correct.

This game is kind of CAPCOM's Commando but using only your fists and footworks to defeat the powerful gang enemy ‘Geshita’ and rescue six kidnapped women. There are six stages in total, with a different boss at the end of each stage.

Boss Strategies

• Stage 1: Hit the boss with one kick just after he throws the iron balls at you, not when he is swinging it, and run away.

• Stage 2: The boss splits into three. If you move the protagonist to the top left corner of the screen, he will not be attacked. Keep turning and kicking at that spot. When the boss splits into three, the real one does not flash.

• Stage 3: If you attack the boss, the ball-spitting man, from his bottom left, the balls are less likely to hit you.

• Stage 4: Stay at the beginning of the suspension bridge and lure the boss into attacking you. Dodge and kick back.

• Stage 5: Attack the boss, the snake charmer, by moving forward getting closer and closer. Then the boss will repeatedly move in and out of the swamp, so attack him from the side.

• Stage 6: The final boss ‘Geshita’, his weak spot is behind him. Lure Geshita out from the right by shifting the protagonist downwards slightly, then quickly kicks him sideways and escapes immediately upwards.

There are also hidden rooms, check out our X post about them.

I was considering whether to move JTTROJAN back to beta for the addition, but it is a small one and I think it would be confusing to move a core back to beta after releasing it. So this new game comes out directly as public. Let me know if that is the choice you like as a patron member, please.

Reference MAME Version

The MAME version used as reference for ROM filenames has been moved from 0.251 to 0.261 in order to include changes related to Avengers.

Advancing MAME automatically generates MRA files for other cores too, like:

• Hyper Street Fighter 2 (Japan) revision 040123

• X-Men vs Street Fighter (Japan) revision 970113

Midnight Resistance

I had forgotten in the last JT Friday that the JTMIDRES core, compatible with Data East's Midnight Resistance had not been ported to the Analogue Pocket yet. It is added now as a new beta core. Go into the settings menu to adjust the rotation sensitivity to your preferences.

Other updates

• JTCIRCUS public: There was only one issue reported about the Circus Charlie (already addressed) and there are no plans to add more game to this hardware. Hence, JTCIRCUS core is promoted to public.

• JTCPS1 layer priority changed to fix Carrier Air Wing and Three Wonders, at the price of arguably breaking Nemo. Thanks to paulb-nl for the patch.

• Brightness support added to JTRIDERS, this is noticeable at the end of each boss fight

• Screen orientation fixed on JTSHOUSE for horizontal games. You may need to delete old save files as the fix consists of adding default values to these files so the correct flip setting is applied

• Fixed color for the bottom half of the background in JTVIGIL, this was noticeable in the last stage of Vigilante

• Made video output for Toki-compatible core now has a more standard timing

• Added display modes to Analogue Pocket cores

• Added a third button to start 1P/2P VS CPU matches on JTWWFSS

• Removed the lock that kept JTDD always in turbo mode

• ZIP files for beta cores will not be available on the Discord channel anymore to simplify the release process. They will only be served through Patreon attachments and the JTBIN repository.

Coming Up

We keep preparing the xmen core. We have fixed some sprite scaling issues this week and we are working on the shadows at the moment. This is likely to be the next beta we publish. It may still take a few weeks to be ready.