JOTEGO

Vulgus Beta! plus 1942 update

Added 2019-09-21 08:56:24 +0000 UTC

A few months ago, Frédéric Mahé, one of our director patrons, asked me for Vulgus. I hadn't played it before. I soon learnt that it is considered the first CAPCOM arcade game. And when I played it, I found its difficulty curve to be unusually kind and it makes for a very enjoyable gameplay.

If you remember from previous posts, I bought the PCB while staying in Japan. Upon inspection, it is very similar to that of 1942. These are the two main differences:

- 1942 only supports vertical scrolling, Vulgus has horizontal scrolling too
- 1942 splits up the screen in two halves to display objects (that is how the logo effect is made). Vulgus doesn't

So this has been a rather easy job (at last!). Just verifying assumptions on the PCB and adapting the 1942 core so it can be compiled either as Vulgus or 1942. I didn't need to extract the whole schematics from the PCB. Just carefully compare the PCB with 1942 schematics and take some measurements. I'll make a post for it soon.

I have also updated the 1942 core with the following changes:

-Issue with corner of CAPCOM logo after 2nd round of attract mode fixed
-Noise sound channel issue fixed
-Flip mode for MiSTer (MiST already had it)
-SDRAM speed reduced to 48MHz (more robust, less power)

Grab your 1942 update from the attachment or the binary repository here. There will be a second post for $3+ tiers with the link to the Vulgus beta. Next core will be Popeye public release.