---==========================--- KEM -- Killer Emulator Frequently Asked Questions KEMFAQ For KEM version 1.1 $Revision: 1.10 $ $Date: 1997/07/12 16:46:32 $ ---==========================--- KEM written by: Mike Cuddy FAQ written by: Jeff Mercer ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What's In This FAQ ------------------ Section I - Beginner Questions o What is KEM? o What games does KEM support? o Future game support o What do I need to run it? o How much is it going to cost? o Where do I get it? o How do I use KEM? o Where do I get the ROM images? Section II - Problems o Hey! When I run KEM it just hangs on the credits screen! o KEM is really slow and I have a Pentium. What's wrong? o How/Where do I get VESA 2.0 drivers? o Some games are still slow wit VESA 2.0, how come? o Every other line of the graphics in some of the games is missing, why? o Why do some of the games have extra graphics on the edges of the screen? o I'm not getting any sound/KEM locks up when it tries to do sound. o Sound for Tron (or other game) doesn't seem right, how do I fix it? o The sound doesn't seem to synch correctly, what can I do? o Most of the Bally/Midway games give a "Sound Board Error" but still give me sound. How come? o How come I can only enter two initials in Tron & Satan's Hollow? o Rampage doesn't have any sound/Locks up on me. What's wrong? o Discs of Tron: When I get to the level that the discs move up and down, the game hangs! o Discs of Tron: I can't start a 1 player game! The 1P start button always starts a 2 player game! o Journey: Isn't it supposed to play "Seperate Ways / Worlds Apart" during the concert scene? o Gyruss: Gyruss' music is missing it's drums! o I found an undocumented bug! How do I report it? Section III - Technical Stuff o Why is VESA 1.2 support slower than VESA 2.0 support? o What's the whole story behind the "Sound Board Error" messages? *** If you find a FREQUENTLY asked question not covered in this document, *** *** please E-mail it to riffer@afn.org for possible addition to the KEM *** *** FAQ. Thanks! (Serious questions only. Don't ask for ROM's.) *** ============================================================================== Section I - Beginner Questions ------------------------------ Q: What is KEM? A: "KEM" is short for Killer Emulator, an arcade game emulator engine designed and written by Mike Cuddy. An emulator is a program that can mimic the functionality of hardware (namely electronic circuits & chips) purely via software. KEM uses emulation with your computers hardware to emulate classic arcade video games, so you can play them on your PC. WooHoo!! Q: What games does KEM support? A: Currently, KEM is capable of running the following games. All of these games are fully playable, have correct or nearly-correct colors, and nearly-full functioning sound: o Gyruss \ o Time Pilot >--------- Konami games o Pooyan / o Kickman \__________ Bally/Midway MCR/I board set o Solar Fox / o Tron \ o Satan's Hollow \ o Two Tigers >---- Bally/Midway MCR/II board set o Journey / o Domino Man / o Tapper \ o Discs Of Tron >-- Bally/Midway MCR/III board set o Demolition Derby / o Rampage >------- Bally/Midway UNIBOARD/Z80 board set * (No sound yet. May crash if you try and enable audio) o Blue Print Q: Wait, didn't I hear it was going to support "some other game"? A: As KEM is developed, many more games will be added. Support for MCR/I, MCR/II, and MCR/III systems has now been added. Games that will likely be added in the future include Spy Hunter, Bezerk, Frenzy, and others. See the KEM web page for more information. Q: What do I need to run it? A: There are both hardware requirements, and software requirements. Please be sure to read *all* of these! KEM is a DOS-based program, and will only run on an IBM PC or compatible. It should run under Windows95 in a DOS box (full-screen), and some have reported it runs under OS/2, but that is not a supported platform. The minimal system requirements: o Pentium CPU, 100Mhz or faster. KEM will *not* run properly on a 486. 486's are *not* supported. o Fast SVGA card and VESA 1.2 or VESA 2.0 support. Either the card must have VESA support built into its BIOS, or you must have a VESA driver for your SVGA card. You can get VESA support for most video cards by checking out the Scitech homepage: URL: o 8MB of RAM if run under DOS. 16MB of RAM if run under Windows95. The emulator will likely run with less RAM, but it may not be as efficient. o *At least* 256K of RAM cache, 512K strongly recommended. While the game will run if your system doesn't have a high-speed RAM cache, it will perform poorly. A Pentium without RAM cache is crippled. Hardware that is not required, but makes the emulator more fun: o Wingman Warrior. This is the only joystick currently supported. For more information on this joystick, check out: URL: o A SoundBlaster sound card, or SB compatible. KEM currently works properly with SB 16 (classic and PnP), and SB 32 cards. It may work with other SB cards, and SB compatible cards in many cases, but may require tweaking certain command options. ** KEM MAY NOT WORK WITH SOUNDBLASTER-PRO COMPATIBLE CARDS ** ** SINCE THESE CARDS DO NOT SUPPORT THE "AUTOINIT" DMA ** ** TRY USING THE -** And finally, you *must* have the ROM images from the arcade games to be able to play them! A ROM image is a file containing a duplication of the data stored in the ROM chips of an arcade games motherboard. The ROM chips hold the program code for the game, as well as graphical and sound data. If you have one of the arcade games that KEM emulates, or at least the board or ROM chips for it, you can dump the ROM images to a file, or download them from one of a variety of archive sites. *** ROM IMAGES ARE NOT INCLUDED WITH KEM AND NEVER WILL BE, EVER!! *** *** ROM IMAGES ARE NOT INCLUDED WITH KEM AND NEVER WILL BE, EVER!! *** *** ROM IMAGES ARE NOT INCLUDED WITH KEM AND NEVER WILL BE, EVER!! *** Q: Sounds great! How much is it going to cost? A: Nothing. KEM is free, and always will be. In fact, if you paid someone money for the KEM program, you were scammed big-time. Q: Where do I get the emulator? A: You can get the KEM emulator from the official KEM homepage: URL: Or from an approved Arcade Emulator mirror, such as: URL: If you find KEM on a CD-ROM, *DO NOT USE IT!* It is an illegal copy and may have been tampered with. Do not trust it. Worse: KEM is updated frequently, a with new games, and bug fixes. A version not downloaded from an official source may not be the latest version and may contain potentially system threatening bugs. Q: How do I use it? A: The KEM emulator program comes with documentation on how to install and use the emulator. Check the README.TXT file that comes with the KEM .ZIP package. If there is no file included, you should download a new copy of the package from the official site, and notify Mike Cuddy about where you got the archive with the missing files. Q: Where do I get the ROM images? A: As mentioned in a previous answer, you can dump the ROMs yourself if you have the necessary equipment. You will probably find it easier to obtain them from an Arcade game ROM archive. There are several of these on the Internet, and many pointers to them. Check out Yahoo or Lycos and you will probably find them. It must be noted that you are NOT legally entitled to the ROM images if you do not own the arcade games, or at least a set of the physical ROM chips in some functional form. Section II - Problems --------------------- Q: Hey! When I run KEM it just hangs on the credits screen! A: The first time that you run KEM (or if you delete the KEM.REG file), it forces you to watch the credits, once, all the way through. Once the credits have run through one time, you can press any key. If you want to see the credits again, you can access them from the configuration menu (press while in the emulator) Q: KEM is *really* slow on my machine! I have a Pentium 100 (or higher). What's wrong? A: Many video cards have built-in VESA 1.2 support. KEM will run in VESA 1.2 mode, but will perform significantly slower than if you have VESA 2.0 support. If you can, install a VESA 2.0 driver for your video card. KEM will automatically use VESA 2.0 if a driver for it is installed. Q: How/where do I get a VESA 2.0 driver?! A: First off, check to see if a VESA 2.0 driver was included with the support software for your video card. If not, check with the manufacturer of the video card. They may have a VESA 2.0 driver available that could not be included with the driver support software for your card (you can do this by checking their web page, or calling their tech support number). Note that some companies offer actual upgrades to the BIOS on the video card as a chip replacement. If you can't get a VESA 2.0 driver from the manufacturer of your card, don't worry there are still alternatives. Your best bet is to check out a program called Display Doctor by SciTech Software. It offers VESA 2.0 support (plus acceleration functions, benchmarking, etc) for literally hundreds of different video cards. It's a commercial package but is reasonably priced and a free, uncrippled demo is available. Check out: URL: For those of you who have a video card that uses an S3 video chip set (such as a Number Nine brand card), there is a Freeware VESA 2.0 driver available called S3VBE that you can download. The URL is: URL: There is also an S3 accelerator program that works in conjunction with the S3 VESA 2.0 driver to speed up the VESA 2.0 banked modes. Q: Some of the games (Gyruss, Pooyan, Time Pilot) are *still* really slow. What's going on? A: Those games use a different resolution display mode and do not perform well at all in banked video modes. If you don't have Linear Buffer support for your video card, they will be slow. Remember, KEM is still in beta. It is virtually all C and is far from optimal. In Mike's own words, "it's a pig." Q: How come every other line of the graphics seems to be missing for the Konami games? A: This is explained in the README.TXT file that comes with the KEM program. To briefly summarize, this is done intentionally to speed up the emulation display. If you wish, you can alter the .GAM file for a game to use a full display driver. Please see the KEM README.TXT file for more information. Q: Some of the graphics in the games keep going over the edges of the display and don't get cleaned up properly. Is something wrong? A: In many cases, this is actually the way the game functioned. Arcade game designers would simply hide these flaws by making sure the display over the monitor covered up the edges of the screen. You can fix this by changing the video driver used by the games in their respective .GAM files. Note that this will make the emulation run slower. Consult the KEM README.TXT file for details. Q: I'm not getting any audio, but I have a SoundBlaster compatible card. ... and ... The emulator locks up when it tries to access my sound card. A: You have a couple of things you can try: o Hit F12 to increase the master volume level. Hit it several times to make sure the volume is set to an audible level. NOTE: You should do this while the emulated game is actually running. o Start the emulator with the "-a 0" option, to disable sound. o Buy a SoundBlaster 16 sound card. Q: The audio for Tron isn't right, especially the noise played when the text is printed out. How do I fix this? A: We believe the correct frame rate for Tron is 30 fps. Be sure to start the KEM emulator with "-f 30" to get the correct update time. Or, better yet, use the included batch file 'TR.BAT' or "Fps = 30" in INI\MCR.INI. Some may find this speed is still off, and may want to try adjusting the FPS value. Also, make sure you are using VESA 2.0 and not VESA 1.2 drivers. Q: The sound still doesn't seem to play correctly, and doesn't synch with the video correctly. A: Your computer may not be fast enough. Try running the emulator with the option "-K 1" to have it skip drawing every other frame. You should see significant speed increase and you may get better sound/video synch. Q: When I start an MCR/II or MCR/III game such as Tron, it says the sound board couldn't be initialized. Yet I get sound! How come? A: The message is being given by the emulated arcade game, not the emulator itself. While KEM does emulate the sound hardware of the MCR/II games quite well, it's not perfect. So when the arcade game does its self test, it thinks the sound board isn't working. Note that it's not looking at your soundcard in your PC, but a non-existent sound card existing solely in your computer's memory. Spooky, eh? :) Q: Hey! How come I can only enter two letters for my initials in Tron and/or Satan's Hollow?! >:( A: This isn't a flaw in KEM. Those arcade games only allow two letters for initials in the high score table. Don't blame Mike. Q: Rampage doesn't have any sound. ... and ... When I try and turn on sound in Rampage, it crashes. A: As of the writing of this document, KEM doesn't currently emulate the sound for Rampage. If you attempt to turn sound on, it will crash. This is documented in the KEM README.TXT file. Q: On Discs of Tron: When I get to the level that the discs move up and down, the game hangs! A: Yes, this is a known bug. Mike's working on it. Q: On Discs of Tron: I can't start a 1 player game! The 1P start button always starts a 2 player game! A: Yes, this also is a known bug. Mike's working on it, too. Q: Journey: Isn't it supposed to play "Seperate Ways / Worlds Apart" during the concert scene? A: Yes, it is. The real game used a cassette recorder to play the chorus of the song. You need to put a file called "sepways.snd" containing the sample you want played; this sample will be looped, and the whole thing will be loaded at startup. The sample should be 22KHZ, 8-bit SIGNED sample. Q: Gyruss: Gyruss' music is missing it's drums! A: In order to reduce archive size, the 1.1 version of KEM doesn't ship With gyruss drum samples. There is an archive of drum samples available on the KEM home page: http://www.fensende.com/kem/drums.zip Q: Help! I've got a MATROX Millenium and when I run KEM it looks like my vertical hold is broken! A: KEM has a known problem with the MATROX millenium in it's default video mode of 800x600. Other graphics modes will work (but may be slower, or cut off some of the screen). You can try the -D option to disable hardware double-buffering or try a different graphics mode. Run "KEM -M" to list the available modes, and then use the "-x" flag with the desired mode. i.e.: "KEM -x 0x101 -g tron" or simply: "tr -x 0x101" If you find a mode you like for all games, you can put the line "SVGAMode = " (i.e.: SVGAMode = 0x101) in a file called KEM.INI. Q: I have found a bona-fide bug! How do I report it? A: First, make sure that you've really found a bug. If you can, verify that it happens on another machine. Most problems that KEM has are related to slow machines. Does the problem go away when you turn off audio? Does the problem go away if you use "-K 1" to skip a frame? If so, then it's not a bug in KEM; your machine is too slow. Also, check the KNOWNBUG.TXT file to see if Mike already knows about the bug; PLEASE DO NOT REPORT KNOWN BUGS! Don't e-mail Mike with the bug; he currently gets about 200 to 500 mail messages _PER_DAY_ and the bug report will more than likely get lost. If, at this point, you are still sure that you have found a bug, go to: URL: and click on the "Submit a Bug" link. Please be sure to fill out the form as completely and accurately as possible! Section III - Technical Stuff ----------------------------- Q: Why is VESA 1.2 support slower than VESA 2.0 support? A: The VESA 1.2 specification for Super VGA modes does not include any standards for accessing a video cards memory as one linear (or flat) memory chunk. So when KEM needs to send the buffer representing the game display to the video card, it has to do it using bank switching, which is a much slower method than linear memory access. Bank switching literally requires more code instructions be used to produce the same result. For more information on the VESA specifications, check out their webpage: URL: Q: What's the whole story behind the "Sound Board Error" messages? A: Mike wrote a pretty full emulation of the sound hardware for the Midway MCR boardsets. However, in order to get the sound to sound right, and to synch properly with the video, he has the virtual sound board run at a higher clock rate than the actual sound hardware runs at. When the emulated machine does it's diagnostics, it can't communicate with the sound board as its running faster than is expected. So the emulated game correctly decides something is wrong with the sound hardware (it didn't respond to diagnostic requests), and reports the error. Fortunately, this doesn't stop the game from sending its commands to the sound hardware, so we still get full sound for just about all the games. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jeff Mercer may be contacted electronically: EMail: riffer@afn.org WWW : http://www.afn.org/~riffer/ Michael Cuddy may be contacted electronically: EMail: mcuddy@FensEnde.com WWW : http://www.FensEnde.com/Users/mcuddy/ The official KEM Home Page is located at: WWW : http://www.FensEnde.com/kem/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This FAQ is copyright 1997 by Jeff Mercer and Michael Cuddy. All rights are reserved. This FAQ may be freely distributed as long as it is *not* modified and no fee is charged for the distribution or accessing of the document. Permission to include this FAQ with the KEM emulator and/or ROM images on a CD-ROM is hereby explicitly DENIED, under all conditions. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ $Id: faq.txt 1.10 1997/07/12 16:46:32 mcuddy Exp $