Alien Star: Lack of Gottlieb Support in Altsound?

[droscoe]

I am running the latest build of VPinMAME from the master repository.

I was recently asked to look into an altsound issue for Alien Star (Gottlieb 1984). The problem, as described was that the sound playback was erratic; sometimes sounds would play and other times, not. Which sounds played or not played seemed random.

The first thing I noticed was that the query to core_gameData.gen is returning a zero (0). This is not correct. The value that should be returned is GEN_GTS80A. Looking into the code (gts80games.c), I can see that the ROM is correctly identified and configured as GEN_GTS80A. I also verified that all of the ROM checksums matched. The game runs fine when not using altsound and all sounds play correctly and consistently.

Somewhere prior to calling the altsound code, the hardware gen is getting lost. Additionally, there is no code in the legacy preprocessor to support any Gottlieb system commands. This would need to be added, but without a correct hardware gen value in core_gameData, this is not possible.

[droscoe]

Ok, this is my mistake. The value is not getting lost. The only issue is that there is no preprocessing code in the legacy altsound to handle Gottlieb ROMs. Closing