Playing with the Arcade Board on Apple2e

I thought I'd see what the Arcade Board would do on the apple2e driver. If you didn't know what it is, it's a card that has a tms9918 graphics chip and a sound chip.

So the arcade board prefers to be in slot 4.

./mame64 apple2e -sl4 arcbd -flop1 Amparcade_1983_Third_Millenium_Engineering_Corporation.do


and once it boots, you can run the basic demos.




But just for fun, let's see what modifying the TMS9918 memory will do, so we launch mame with the debug.

./mame64 apple2e -sl4 arcbd -flop1 Amparcade_1983_Third_Millenium_Engineering_Corporation.do -debug


If you CTRL+C the basic demo, the animation stops.

So let's open a memory window and choose the TMS9918 vram space:



and I've written bytes 68 6A to memory positions 00 and 01
and 69 6B to memory positions 20 and 21, which has the effect of changing the tiles to the letter M.



and you can see the M in the upper left: