jerky
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Jan 13, 2021 8:05 pm

Kangaroo Security Chip Emulation Not Working

I raised this issue some time ago on MARP because of the way this emulation problem affects competitive gaming (Gorilla Leeching). The thread below goes into some debugging details about how the game code uses information from the security chip memory location to determine the Gorilla's appearance frequency:
http://forums.marpirc.net/viewtopic.php?t=15630

I thought I would check back in and see if anyone wants to investigate and resolve this long standing issue with Kangaroo's emulation.

To help explain the problem, this video shows how the Gorilla is supposed to behave on an arcade machine with the security chip working properly up through Level 4:
https://youtu.be/0sE5iE_U6ZQ

But the MAME emulation is clearly broken because the Gorilla comes out too soon and way too often like this:
https://youtu.be/WA0yanzNqxU

MAME player's can just wait for the Gorilla to appear at a predictable spot and then leech points off it until the timer runs out. Even without leeching the gameplay is different because of when, where and how often the Gorilla appears compared to the original arcade version.

This NEVER happens on an arcade machine with the security chip working properly.

I hope someone finally looks into this someday and finds a way to properly emulate this game.

Happy Gaming!

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