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Bellfruit - Question of Sport
Once I discovered that the Flare One chipset was also sold to arcade gambling machine manufacturer Bellfruit, I started to look for as much information as I could. My first lead was by putting two and two together when looking through Jon Dean's softography website and realising that he was involved in working on both the Konix and the Dave Lee Travis (an eccentric UK radio DJ) arcade game Treble Top. Looking for information for a fruit machine that's between 15 and 20 years old wasn't quite as easy a say a classic arcade game such as Street fighter for example. Still in the end I soon started finding little snippets of info here and there that lead to a better understanding of the use of the chipsets, and in which machines games were utilising the Flare chipset. As I've progressed and started talking to people and sharing information a better picture is building. I must say though that my attempts to contact Bellfruit directly for information have failed so far which is peculiar as this can only help to publicise them and their products more - but what the hey...
The arcade machine preservation project known as MAME has a spin off called AGEMAME which concentrates on the gaming machines that have been shunned by the MAME project because of their gambling nature but utilises the MAME system of emulating multiple hardware. AGEMAME is a project where the interactive pub quiz games get a chance to be preserved through emulation - The ROMS for these Bellfruit games have been dumped, but not everything was known by the project about the machines and how they worked as they used the custom flare chipset. I posted a link to the Slipstream technical reference guide I had to the AGEMAME forum, and not long after a Programmer called Phil Bennett responded and found them useful enough to take a stab at emulating the games.
I must say - I'm thrilled that there is real progress - here are some
screen grabs from Phil's Bellfruit slipstream emulator and they are
beautifully clear.
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I've now had a chance to find the ROMs and try it for myself and it's amazing to think that I can play what's effectively a Flare One on my PC. Question of sport is actually a very simple game and doesn't tax the hardware too much. It also doesn't make too much use of the custom hardware from the Flare chipset such as the DSP. Phil is now taking a crack at Inquizitor which is actually the first Bellfruit Flare machine running on a PCB codenamed Viper. The attract sequence for this game was written by Attention to detail, so there may be some chance that it does some more interesting things using the DSP that Phil can get his teeth into.
To see the initial report announcing the breakthrough, read this
http://www.mameworld.net/agemame/2007/03/02/remarkable/
Now lets hope that Jeff Minter finds a floppy disk with AMC 89 on it and
Phil might be able to get a Konix emulator up and running!
And to follow any further updates in the development of the Flare One
Bellfruit emulation, follow this link.
AGEMAME forum:
Technical Details
Example of a Cobra SWP (Skill with prizes) arcade machine PCB - hover over to
see the Flare one components highlighted
)
The games for the Bellfruit range of boards as far as I can asserctain are as follows:
Viper = InQuizitor
Cobra 1 = Question of Sport, Treble Top
Cobra 2 = ?
Cobra 3 = Radio Times, Telly Addicts, Top of the Pops
The Cobra 3 boards howerver don't use any Flare technology - they have standard off the shelf parts such as the MC68340FE16E variant of the Motorola 68000 processor running at 25Mhz, an Analog Devices ADV476KN35 CMOS Monolithic 256x18 Color Palette RAM-DAC, A dedicated Mpeg decoder chip presumably for playing back video clips from it's SCSI CD-ROM in the form of a ST Microelectronics STI3400 Video Decoder-Encoder Circuit - MPEG/H.261 VIDEO DECODER, a SCC66470CAB Video Output Graphics Controller - Video And System Controller(VSC) Philips Semiconductors and finally a Yamaha 8 channel PSG sound chip YMZ280B-F.
My attempts to contact bell fruit have been met with silence. It's worth
keeping an eye out on ebay and the like for them. I don't know to what extent
the Slipstream chipset was used in the Cobra boards, but I do believe that
they used a floppy disk drive which kind of indicates that it's possibly near
enough the complete konix board in the arcade machine. As far as I've been
told, the chip is the same as was used in the multisystem - so it wouldn't
take much to get multisystem code running on it if someone found some.
If you'd like to know more about the efforts to preserve fruit machines and
quiz machines that is being carried out, then the following forum is a geat
resource - they even have romsets (basically dumps of the game code) which
emulator authors could use to help emulate the Konix Multisystem.
Other bellfruit Flare one based machines being emulated
Quizvaders
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Every Second Counts
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