Years ago, i had the experience of rom injection with the 3DS when i found out about one of the tools, so i managed to inject games like Sonic Advance for example which it were my first time finishing it, recently this interest came back to me when i turned out curious about VC's older support
Months ago, i was reading about the Namco System 21 board, seeing the advent of Air Combat 22 which is a Namco Super System 22 game being re-released last year, so far most recent Namco re-releases were focused on Namco System 22 and sub branches, so is much unlikely when System 21 will be given support and it'll probably take years until it happens unfortunately, during my searches i was reading about Solvalou(from the Xevious franchise), and noticed it had a re-release on VC, but i didn't gave much attention before as i don't remember where exactly i read, but someone said about not being such an "great port"
Recently after looking about Cyber Sled, which is also a System 21 game, i've entered into a loop hole to found that System 21 was in fact supported by VC, ranging from Cyber Sled, Solvalou and Starblade, on tests i've did, Cyber Sled and Solvalou ran fine on the graphical and perfomance aspect(and from far i heard Cyber Sled is one of the most optimized System 21 games in MAME, as Starblade and Solvalou still got considerable issues), but Starblade ran with some graphical glitches, until i started to experiment
Replacing Cyber Sled's rom with Starblade's one, which is simply hotswapping as you can say, i made a surprising discovery that :
-BIOS screen will be shown, seeing the default games would even hide that during normal boot
-Influence of the game's bookkeeping would mirror(Starblade being 1 coin, while Cyber Sled is 2 coins, same for controllers[Starblade/Solvalou using motion controls, while Pro Controller is used on Cyber Sled])
-But the most important, graphical bugs from Starblade's current emulation state would be mostly fixed in Cyber Sled's architeture, by both being Namco System 21 games
Few examples of that :
https://streamable.com/3pj39q
https://streamable.com/ccx39a
So far i found very optimistic, so i wanted to go into the next step, which would be injecting a game that wasn't released for VC, which is the case of Air Combat, but currently, my roadblock went about the rom image itself, LZ.bin is a more or less known format, and while it found about being "LZ11", it won't result in nothing during decompression with tools i tested so far, which part of that can be explained seeing some raw data can be seen inside the bin(i.e. Starblade), but still, i'd assume it wouldn't be such easier as "just pack all the raw data from a MAME rom in a bin file", seeing in comparsion with Starblade and Cyber Sled, their MAME dumps and the VC rom files are much different
Mostly is a very niche interest i know, but it were personally a goal i'd be interested to acheive in some way, seeing recent milestones the Ace Combat Community recently got, with Ace Combat Xi, which were a iOS game that for a long time was system locked, finally being able to be played, Ace Combat 6 having better perfomance improvements with the recompilation project efforts, alongside Ace Combat Infinity, a game that previously wasn't able to even play the offline modes, being able to be playable in both modes after 8 years by recent efforts, so during this long term goals, Air Combat so far is yet one of the games with considerable caveats on MAME, seeing it won't be fixed in a near future by the code of the same being much problematic unfortunately, and by far the last game remaining, seeing after that an extra milestone would be related to a lost media Ace Combat old mobile game, which at the current time wasn't archived at all by being only available in a region locked application store from the time
(EDIT : recently looked out, and it went out of my radar that System 21 emulation of MAME in fact improved, kinda of a surprise it were occuring during last month, in case if this thread turns out redudant or not, feel free to close it, but if a interest for System 21 injection still exist, it'd be still welcome)
Years ago, i had the experience of rom injection with the 3DS when i found out about one of the tools, so i managed to inject games like Sonic Advance for example which it were my first time finishing it, recently this interest came back to me when i turned out curious about VC's older support
Months ago, i was reading about the Namco System 21 board, seeing the advent of Air Combat 22 which is a Namco Super System 22 game being re-released last year, so far most recent Namco re-releases were focused on Namco System 22 and sub branches, so is much unlikely when System 21 will be given support and it'll probably take years until it happens unfortunately, during my searches i was reading about Solvalou(from the Xevious franchise), and noticed it had a re-release on VC, but i didn't gave much attention before as i don't remember where exactly i read, but someone said about not being such an "great port"
Recently after looking about Cyber Sled, which is also a System 21 game, i've entered into a loop hole to found that System 21 was in fact supported by VC, ranging from Cyber Sled, Solvalou and Starblade, on tests i've did, Cyber Sled and Solvalou ran fine on the graphical and perfomance aspect(and from far i heard Cyber Sled is one of the most optimized System 21 games in MAME, as Starblade and Solvalou still got considerable issues), but Starblade ran with some graphical glitches, until i started to experiment
Replacing Cyber Sled's rom with Starblade's one, which is simply hotswapping as you can say, i made a surprising discovery that :
-BIOS screen will be shown, seeing the default games would even hide that during normal boot
-Influence of the game's bookkeeping would mirror(Starblade being 1 coin, while Cyber Sled is 2 coins, same for controllers[Starblade/Solvalou using motion controls, while Pro Controller is used on Cyber Sled])
-But the most important, graphical bugs from Starblade's current emulation state would be mostly fixed in Cyber Sled's architeture, by both being Namco System 21 games
Few examples of that :
https://streamable.com/3pj39q
https://streamable.com/ccx39a
So far i found very optimistic, so i wanted to go into the next step, which would be injecting a game that wasn't released for VC, which is the case of Air Combat, but currently, my roadblock went about the rom image itself, LZ.bin is a more or less known format, and while it found about being "LZ11", it won't result in nothing during decompression with tools i tested so far, which part of that can be explained seeing some raw data can be seen inside the bin(i.e. Starblade), but still, i'd assume it wouldn't be such easier as "just pack all the raw data from a MAME rom in a bin file", seeing in comparsion with Starblade and Cyber Sled, their MAME dumps and the VC rom files are much different
Mostly is a very niche interest i know, but it were personally a goal i'd be interested to acheive in some way, seeing recent milestones the Ace Combat Community recently got, with Ace Combat Xi, which were a iOS game that for a long time was system locked, finally being able to be played, Ace Combat 6 having better perfomance improvements with the recompilation project efforts, alongside Ace Combat Infinity, a game that previously wasn't able to even play the offline modes, being able to be playable in both modes after 8 years by recent efforts, so during this long term goals, Air Combat so far is yet one of the games with considerable caveats on MAME, seeing it won't be fixed in a near future by the code of the same being much problematic unfortunately, and by far the last game remaining, seeing after that an extra milestone would be related to a lost media Ace Combat old mobile game, which at the current time wasn't archived at all by being only available in a region locked application store from the time
(EDIT : recently looked out, and it went out of my radar that System 21 emulation of MAME in fact improved, kinda of a surprise it were occuring during last month, in case if this thread turns out redudant or not, feel free to close it, but if a interest for System 21 injection still exist, it'd be still welcome)