Today, October 1st, is the day where the RetroChallenge officially starts, and I'll explain a bit about the current project involving the Midway 8080 hardware, the 2048 game and the development status of the 8080 assembly code.

Looking at the arcade specifications, the Midway 8080 system is a black & white arcade hardware, has a 260x224 display, and the first game made for the hardware was Gun Fight (and the first arcade game using a microprocessor instead of being discrete logic). But the hardware is better known as the one which powers Space Invaders, there are even tutorials about how to make a emulator for it.

However Gun Fight and Space Invaders aren't the only arcade games on this system, other games listed are Boot Hill (a sequel to Gun Fight), Sea Wolf, Laguna Racer, Clowns, Amazing Maze, and others.

Amazing Maze one player mode (second player controlled by computer)

Now for the explanation of the 2048 game, it's a sliding tile puzzle game created by Gabriele Cirulli in 2014, the objective of the game is to create a 2048 tile on a 4x4 grid, and the input is the arrow keys. It was hugely popular in that year, but nowadays isn't so popular anymore. Here is a image of the game in DuckDuckGo when you search for 2048 game:

Playing the 2048 game (and failing at it)

The Midway 8080 system uses the Intel 8080 CPU, so it'll need a 8080 assembler. I'm using the zasm assembler, and a fun fact, you can use Z80 syntax to write the code (but not the Z80 extra opcodes), I compared the Z80 syntax with the 8080 syntax and I found the Z80 syntax nicer and better to understand.

For running the generated binary, first I assemble the code, split the binary into two 2048 bytes files, then I replace the Amazing Maze ROMs for the custom ROMs. MAME will complain about the checksums, but you can ignore it and run the new generated binary. I'm limited to 4K ROM size though, so I have to be careful to not exceed the size.

For the moment I managed to draw the screen and read the coin input, for the next days I'll implement some sort of state machine to manage the insert a coin mode, the game itself, and maybe the attract mode.

Testing the coin input action (it took a while to make it work)