Circus Charlie & NGP Color

Very busy three weeks working on many, many items. Some of them involved changes to many cores. 515 files have been edited in the source code since the last JTFRIDAY, so plenty of work. The main achievements are:

A new classic game core: JTCIRCUS for Circus Charlie. Circus Charlie is an action game published in by Konami in 1984, the NES version is very popular. The player controls a circus clown named Charlie in six different circus-themed minigames plus a hidden stage named water trampoline.

Charlie's movements are very simple, moving left, right and jumping, but the emphasis in this game is on the timing of the jumps, which makes the game more challenging. Normally tagged as an action game, you could argue it is a timing game.

Story: The head of the Dream Circus wanted his only daughter, Jenny, to marry the swellest guy. It was supposed to be you, Charlie of course... but then a wacky guy drifted in from somewhere, and he's also an exceptionally good trapeze artist! If you fail in this show, your beloved Jenny will be lost to your hated rival.

The Charlie Circus PCB board was donated by Fulvio, one of our Patreon directors. Compared to the emulated version in MAME, the sprites are updated at the right time (MAME is one frame ahead. Report filed), video frame rate and dynamic audio filters are correct too.

NeoGeoPocket color games boot, although most of them still present problems. Metal Slug 1 seems to be working fine. Please do not report problems with games. We know the compatibility is low and we are working on it. The way the core works is like the monochrome one: the first time you boot you need to go through the setup. After that, if you use the virtual power button, you can swap cartridges without going through the menu again. The NGP firmware is the one responsible for showing the annoying menu. There might be a hacked version of the firmware that bypasses this menu.

Summary of all changes:

• New core: JTCIRCUS, compatible with Konami's Circus Charlie

• Parodius support moved from JTSIMSON to new core JTPARODA. This was part of a refactoring we did to take xmen out of JTRIDERS. No, xmen is not available yet, we need to work on it a bit more.

• Support for new MiSTER IO boards: The new IO boards with 24 bit analog VGA output were released a while ago and they are not compatible with old cores. We have updated all JT cores to the latest MiSTer framework.

• Screen tearing on System 16B with latest MiSTer firmware is now fixed

• Artifacts on JTCPS2 when quickly swapping games should be good now

• Horizontal sprite lines in Sunset Riders do not go blank anymore

• MiSTer: JTNGP core renamed to NeoGeoPocket and moved to consoles folder. Beware of placing a boot.rom file games/NeoGeoPocket with a dump of your console's firmware

• PCEngine 2/6 button support on Analogizer (Pocket) fixed

• NGPC does not hang up anymore when loading a cartridge.

• JTFROUND: video timing adjusted to match the right horizontal blanking position of the original

• WWF SuperStars: completed schematics of the CPU board. Work started on graphics board.