Trying out a new thing this year - renting Lego instead of buying... Honestly I just like the building bit so this works quite well for me!

Travel woes aside, Finland sure is lovely this time of year 😄

Merry Christmas to all that partake... No retro dev for me this holiday as I've popped off to somewhere a bit colder than the UK!

Here's a classic example of the last 10% trap - realised I hadn't tested the cocktail cabinet mode, so forced the screen flip on to see how it looks. Oh dear 😢 Even more annoying that it would probably be used by 1% of the 1% of MiSTer users who'll even try the core, but I gotta try and fix it 😅

Turns out it worked just fine, but I did have to initialise the video system values to the ones Vanguard usually sets at runtime or there was no display output! Makes me think this homebrew probably wouldn't run on a real board 🤔

Next on the sound front was the music - probably the most fun part of building this core. It's a surprisingly simple wave generator built using a bunch of timers, controlled by frequencies read from a ROM. Didn't quite get the pitch/speed right for this test but it's certainly ... recognisable 😂

After working out some of the visual bugs (definitely not all) I started work on the sound, which is usually my absolute nemesis 😅 The majority of the sounds are reproduced with samples, as is the case in MAME - handy because I could just copy my sample player code from Carnival! (volume warning?)

After a bunch of banging my head against tilemaps (problematic because of a sequence of static RAM lookups that happen far faster on the original hardware than I could manage with BRAM on MiSTer) things were definitely looking better...apart from playing as a trio of hotdogs 😂

This was the first video output from the simulation where something recognizable was happening. Pretty grim!