
(If any mods think this post should be locked, so be it.)
I am looking for experts on the following:
- CPS1.5 and CPS2 tile differences/gfx rom re-ordering
- CPS1.5 qsound.. Can't get it to run even with proper i/o mapped on the 68000 side.
So, after seeing neocps1 did his work and said it was just a fake, just a joke, i figured i would take a stab at it. Surely, it couldn't be so hard.
After an evening of looking where things stop, start, loop and hang in the mame debugger, i have The Punisher booting on cps2 hardware.
At least, in MAME. On real hardware it probably would hang on the qsound init, since it hangs in MAME as well on some return code.
Still waiting on my multicps2 to arrive soon, this will allow things to be checked on real hw much faster

I am by no means an 'expert' but i managed to get this far by a few NOP and memory range patches.
GFX rom encoding is now a major hurdle, even if i load the roms as they are on CPS1 i can see they are garbled in the GFX space.
Also it's clear there are no sprites. From the videos on youtube i could see this problem also existed in Neocps1's first attempts. But at least he had proper backgrounds.
So, what is done:
- CPS C board check causes game to hang at start, fixed
- RAM error (why?) causes game to hang at start, fixed (maybe sprite related?)
- Game enters test mode, loops around options (inputs), fixed (but not correctly, more a dirty hack.)
- 1p.2p joystick inputs fixed. Still need service/test/coin start 1 2 fixed, but can start and enter game now.
- Qsound i/o is patched to CPS2 but it fails to play any sounds, with decrypted kabukiless rom
- All patches done on the 'dead battery society' romset for usa, there is a ton of checks in the original it seems.
No romset available yet, but again, there is not much to see/hear. Take a look at what i have so far:
(GFX roms are a placeholder set from another game..)