NMK Sound

One of the longest standing hurdles in MAME emulation is the sound in NMK/UPL games like Mustang, Vandyke, GunNail, etc.

Those games use an custom CPU, labelled "NMK004", to drive the sound. It is still not known what kind of CPU it is, what's known is that it has 8 or 16kB of internal ROM which cannot be directly dumped, and which contains the whole program. The external ROM only contains data.

I am convinced that that the program contained inside the NMK004 is either always the same, or it has minor difference to handle protection - but the format of the data in the external ROM is always the same.

What I'm trying to do at the moment is understand the format of the external data. I have started with the easy part, that is the Oki 6295 samples control. I have found the command table, and the mappingd from command to 6295 sample number. This allowed me to make the games play the correct samples at the correct time so e.g. in Vandyke I hear a "swoosh" when I swing the sword and a "uumph" when I jump. I still haven't understood all of the control bits, so it isn't perfect yet, but it's a good start for a night's work.

I'm hoping that other games that use a standard Z80 instead of the NMK004 will use similar logic to drive the sound (though I have already verified that they don't use the same data format as the NMK004).

Of course the YM2203 part will be much harder since it won't be just a matter of playinga few samples here and there, but I will have to fully understand how the data translates into music and drive the YM2203 accordingly. However there's nothing stopping it in principle, so I am confident that eventually I or someone else will be able to add full sound to these games.