Game:

Sango Fighter (1993)

Duration: 3:28

1,279 views

22

After a considerable amount of reverse-engineering effort on the part of SuperCTR, Olivier Galibert, as well as myself, enough information has been teased out to add rudimentary sound support to the Super A'Can driver.

The Super A'Can was a Taiwanese game console that was originally made in the mid 90's. It was a colossal failure at the market, with a small number of different game cartridges ever released. Due to this, there is a remarkably small landscape on which to work out the expected hardware behavior based on the accesses made to the hardware by each game.

The hardware itself is based around a Motorola 68000 main CPU, with a UMC "UM6618" custom IC for video hardware, and a UMC "UM6619" custom IC for audio hardware. At this point, the UM6619 has been determined to contain at least a 6502 core as well as the sound hardware core. It is theorized that the UM6619 may also contain some amount of ROM, containing both initial program for the embedded 6502 which performs the initial cartridge security check, as well as initial system bring-up, along with the instrument patch for the characteristic harp patch which is played during the boot logo. Without this data, the boot logo animation is notably silent.

There is still much work to be done: Envelopes are not fully understood, voice samples are missing in Sango Fighter, and there are several audio-related registers where the intended behavior is not fully clear. Nonetheless, this is a major step forward in preserving this incredibly rare (and incredibly expensive) console.

Other Statistics