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arabian: MAME ROM Information.


History:

Arabian (c) 1983 Sun Electronics.


You'll have 1001 hours of fun with the ARABIAN upright game! You are the adventurous Arabian prince, and your goal is to rescue the princess from her palace. Use the joystick control and the KICK button to move through perilous passages. Sail the seas, crawl in caves, and fly magic carpets - you'll be challenged by 4 increasingly hard waves of play! Score points on the way for picking up the letters in A-R-A-B-I-A-N, and get a bonus if you pick them up in order!


Arabian is a 'video book' with a happy ending! The attract mode introduces the story, and animated storybook 'pages' let you experience the Arabian Prince's adventures. Use the 8-position joystick to jump, super-jump, walk, crawl, or climb in all directions. Tap either KICK button (are you right- or left-handed?) to kick your enemies out of the way.


The player controls a young Arabian Prince who must rescue his Princess from the castle tower where she is being held prisoner. Evil Genies in brass jugs, swooping Rocs, and purple ghostly creatures called Oscars will try to stop him along the way. The Prince scores points for kicking Oscars or Rocs, picking up lettered jugs, or spelling A-R-A-B-I-A-N. The Prince loses a life when he's hit by a smokeball, falls off a ledge, flying carpet or vine, or gets caught (touched) by a Genie, Oscar, or Roc.


The Prince must successfully complete 4 levels to rescue the Princess (4 levels or 'pages' equals 1 section). Each level is introduced with the turning of a page, which shows a distant view of the upcoming playfield. Each playfield has 7 lettered jugs that must be picked up before the player can advance to the next level, but he must avoid or KICK evil Genies, Oscars, and Rocs that will try to stop him.


Page 1. Page l turns, revealing a ship. The Prince must work his way to the crow's nest at the top of the mast before the vessel reaches the shore. As he climbs up the rigging, Rocs and Oscars dive at him in an attempt to knock him down. The Prince must KICK them out of the way to survive. While contending with these rascals, he must also try to collect all the jugs with letters on them. Beware! The jugs hold devilish Genies which can appear at any time and throw smokeballs at the Prince. Once a Genie has materialized, the Prince's kicking power cannot be used against him and he is unable to collect the jug so he should avoid the Genie. However, the Prince may collect the jug while the Genie is in smoke. When the Arabian has collected all the jugs and reaches the top of the ship, Page 2 introduces the second level of the story.


Page 2. Now the Arabian has arrived on shore. To reach the Princess he must complete a cave maze under the cliff. Low-hanging rocks and climbing vines force him to crawl and climb. The Prince must still dodge Rocs, Oscars, and the Genie's smokeballs. And he must still collect the brass jugs. When he reaches the top of the cave, he must try to collect the letter N jug.


Page 3. Now the Arabian Prince must scale the walls of the castle. As flying carpets whiz by, the Arabian must jump from one to the next, taking care he isn't knocked off his present perch by another carpet flying too closely He can duck to avoid them, but his timing has to be precise or he will take a tumble down to the ground. He must still dodge Rocs, Oscars, and the Genie's smokeballs. The player must beware - sometimes a pair will merge into one super Roc bird or super Oscar!


Page 4. The Prince has at last entered the castle. The Princess beckons him from high in the tower. To reach her, he must ride atop some flying carpets and pull himself up ropes - all the while collecting the brass jugs and kicking meddlesome Rocs and Oscars. When he reaches his loving and grateful Princess, the 2 fly happily into the sunset on a magic carpet.


Once the player has taken the Arabian through a section (all 4 levels), the next section begins. But the action gets faster, the Genies are angrier and fling more smokeballs, and there are more intelligent and challenging Rocs and Oscars. Even the brass jugs are rearranged so that it becomes more difficult for the player to spell A-R-A-B-I-A-N in order.


- TECHNICAL -


Cabinet dimensions : 71'' (180,34cm) High x 26,75'' (67,95cm) Wide x 25,25 (64,14cm) Deep.

Cabinet weight : 307 lbs (139,3 kg)


Game ID : TVG13


Main CPU : Z80 (@ 3 Mhz)

Sound Chips : AY8910 (@ 1.5 Mhz)


Players : 2

Control : 8-way joystick

Buttons : 1


- TRIVIA -


Released in June 1983.


Chuck Futtrell holds the record for this game with 219,750 points on November 24, 1984.


Bug : Pixels are missing from the top of the '5'. This is a fault common to the code of the original ROMs on all of the boards (both Sun and Atari).


- SCORING -


Kicking a monster off screen : 100 points.

Killing 2 monsters with one kick : 600 points.

Killing 3 monsters with one kick : 1,600 points.

Killing 4 monsters with one kick : 3,600 points.

Kick Super-Roc or Super-Oscar : 1,000 points.

Kicking a mutant blob : 2,000 points.

Collecting a pot : 500 points.

Spelling ARABIAN : 2,000 points + 2,000 points x section number.


- TIPS AND TRICKS -


Hints for Game Play :

* The player can still complete a level even if he collects the jugs out of sequence. But if he collects jugs in sequence to spell A-R-A-B-I-A-N, he'll score many more bonus points.

* Kicking a Roc or Oscar into other Rocs or Oscars awards higher points.

* When a Genie begins to appear, the player should move to an area which allows him to avoid the smokeballs the Genie will throw!

* Try to kick off the monsters in pairs for more points. They don't have to be close together : one hitting another knocks the other off screen.

* Don't move through a crawlway when there is a blob regenerating on the other side. You move much slower when crawling, can't kick and chances are you won't make it through in time.

* You can kick monsters slightly above and in front of you if you kick when jumping.

* If you jump onto a ladder you land on it half way up and can then continue climbing, thereby getting you up quicker.

* You can't jump when there are vines above you as you cling to them.


- PORTS -


* Consoles :

Nintendo Famicom (1985, "Super Arabian")

Sony PlayStation (2001, "Memorial Series Sunsoft Vol.1: Ikki & Super Arabian")


* Computers :

Commodore C64 (1984, "Tales of the Arabian Nights")

Amstrad CPC (1985, "Tales of the Arabian Nights")


- SOURCES -


Game's rom.

Machine's picture.

Arcade Retro Lounge; http://tips.retrogames.com/




MAME Info:

0.35b13 [Gerald Vanderick]

0.19 [Jarek Burczynski]


Artwork available


TEST MODE:

- To enter test mode, press F2 and then F3. To test sound press P1/P2 start simultaneously. P2 start + P1 Button 1 will take you to the color test screen. Then hit P1 start + P1 Button 1 to go to the level test screen. P1 Button 1 will take you to the next screen from then on.


WIP:

- 0.141u1: Phil Bennett fixed Arabian halts after several cycles of the attact mode.

- 3rd January 2011: Andrew Gardner - A few months ago, Pete Ogoun decapsulated a MCU from the game BanBam. The images were very crisp and clear, and it took less than an hour to stitch them together. Phil Bennett reminded me that Nicola and Ernesto had previously decoded the same type of MCU, so the knowledge about how to convert typed-in bits to bytes was already in our archives. Meanwhile, s_bastian on the mameworld boards was busy configuring his online data entry tool to get some help from the masses. He completed some new features on his tool, and the following users typed in all of the bits from the photographed ROM: etabeta, robiza, Frankie, Gonario, sev, bernoulli, mrdriller, Zer0, BrianT, MASH, Stick, MooglyGuy, Mosquito2001, TE, bdam and s_bastian. Armed with the redundant data from the typing project, it was confirmed that Phil and I had typed a few bits incorrectly. I fixed these bits in the dump, ran Ernesto's decoder on the bits, stuffed the ROMs into MAME, and let the MCU rip. The disassembly appeared quite nice; the code traced well, and there did not appear to be any questionable instructions. The MCU was, however, very difficult to hook up to BanBam. I had made some good headway into figuring out how the MCU was connected, when Phil discovered the same MCU was very likely used in Arabian. Luckily, we have the schematics for that. The schematics turned out to be mostly legible and correct, and Phil successfully hooked BanBam's MCU into Arabian. This appears to work 100% and is documented in the whatsnew.txt for MAME 0.141. Hooking the MCU into the Arabian driver was somewhat convoluted though, so it isn't much of a surprise to us that we haven't quite succeeded with the BanBam hookup yet. It will come in due time, and we will likely be able to close the book on the BanBam MCU sometime in the not-so-distant future.

- 0.141: Phil Bennett hooked up Arabian MB8841 MCU, this fixed the missing bird at top of the screen. Removed obsolete simulation code and assigned MB88xx interrupt sources unique vectors, as expected by the Arabian MCU program. Added MB8841 (2MHz) CPU2 and MCU rom.

- 8th October 2010: Smitdogg - Phil B. has been working on Arabian which used an MCU that was similar to or possibly identical to the one used in Banbam. Ogoun decapped the Arabian MCU but hasn't made pictures yet to compare.

- 0.139u2: The Dumping Union corrected the rom labels for Arabian and clone Arabian (Atari).

- 10th August 2010: Smitdogg - Arabian arrived for decapping.

- 8th July 2010: Smitdogg - We bought an Arabian board to decap the 8841 MCU with internal ROM.

- 0.135u1: Fabio Priuli added driver data struct to Arabian.

- 0.132u2: Tafoid fixed Arabian hangs in demo or play.

- 17th February 2009: Mr. Do - Kiltron got extra busy this past month: Arabian artwork.

- 0.129u1: MooglyGuy added savestate support to Arabian and clone.

- 0.128u2: Stephane Humbert fixed dipswitches for Arabian and clone.

- 0.123u2: RansAckeR simplified some control definitions in the Arabian driver.

- 0.122u8: Zsolt Vasvari removed colortables from Arabian and a number of other drivers, as part of a larger move to phase out old-style colortables. Changed palettesize to 8192 colors.

- 0.112: Roberto Fresca added DIP locations to the Arabian driver.

- 0.37b16: Aaron Giles fixed colors and other things in Arabian. Changed Z80 CPU clock speed to 3MHz, visible area to 234x256 and palettesize to 64 colors.

- 5th June 2001: Aaron Giles cleaned up and fixed the Arabian driver.

- 3rd October 2000: Nicola Salmoria fixed Arabian graphics.

- 0.35b13: Gerald Vanderick added Arabian (Sun Electronics 1983). Changed 'Arabian' to clone '(Atari)'. Renamed (arabian) to (arabiana).

- 4th May 1999: Gerald Vanderick added another Pac Man clone and an Arabian clone.

- 20th April 1999: Zsolt Vasvari sent in an Arabian update with proper rotation support and better colors.

- 0.30: Aaron Giles support dirty rectangles in Arabian.

- 0.26a: Morten Eriksen added high score saving to Arabian.

- 0.25: Minor modifications to Arabian palette.

- 0.21: Arabian has better colors now.

- 0.20: Brad Oliver found a lot of bugs around the code, fixed Arabian video driver.

- 0.19: Jarek Burczynski provided a preliminary but playable driver for Arabian (Atari 1983). Colors are wrong, but it support sound already. Control: Arrows = Move around, CTRL = Kick and F1 = Enter test mode.


LEVELS: 4


Music:

- Attract mode: Mozart - Turkish March

- Page intro: Ludwig Van Beethoven - Symphony No 6. Op 68 - 1st Movement

- Levels 1 & 3: Rimsky Korsakov - Scheherazade

- Levels 2 & 4: Rimsky Korsakov - The Young Prince and Princess


Other Emulators:

* FB Alpha


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Romset: 66 kb / 9 files / 36.6 zip




MAME XML Output:

       <game name="arabian" sourcefile="arabian.c">
              <description>Arabian</description>
              <year>1983</year>
              <manufacturer>Sun Electronics</manufacturer>
              <rom name="ic1rev2.87" size="8192" crc="5e1c98b8" sha1="1775b7b125dde3502aefcf6221662e82f55b3f2a" region="maincpu" offset="0"/>
              <rom name="ic2rev2.88" size="8192" crc="092f587e" sha1="a722a61d35629ff4087c7a5e4c98b3ab51d6322b" region="maincpu" offset="2000"/>
              <rom name="ic3rev2.89" size="8192" crc="15145f23" sha1="ae250116b57455ed84948cd9a6bdda86b2ac3e16" region="maincpu" offset="4000"/>
              <rom name="ic4rev2.90" size="8192" crc="32b77b44" sha1="9d7951e723bc65e3d607f89836f1436b99f2585b" region="maincpu" offset="6000"/>
              <rom name="tvg-91.ic84" size="8192" crc="c4637822" sha1="0c73d9a4db925421a535784780ad93bb0f091051" region="gfx1" offset="0"/>
              <rom name="tvg-92.ic85" size="8192" crc="f7c6866d" sha1="34f545c5f7c152cd59f7be0a72105f739852cd6a" region="gfx1" offset="2000"/>
              <rom name="tvg-93.ic86" size="8192" crc="71acd48d" sha1="cd0bffed351b14c9aebbfc1d3d4d232a5b91a68f" region="gfx1" offset="4000"/>
              <rom name="tvg-94.ic87" size="8192" crc="82160b9a" sha1="03511f6ebcf22ba709a80a565e71acf5bdecbabb" region="gfx1" offset="6000"/>
              <rom name="sun-8212.ic3" size="2048" crc="8869611e" sha1="c6443f3bcb0cdb4d7b1b19afcbfe339c300f36aa" region="mcu" offset="0"/>
              <chip type="cpu" tag="maincpu" name="Z80" clock="3000000"/>
              <chip type="cpu" tag="mcu" name="MB8841" clock="2000000"/>
              <chip type="audio" tag="mono" name="Speaker"/>
              <chip type="audio" tag="aysnd" name="AY-3-8910A" clock="1500000"/>
              <display tag="screen" type="raster" rotate="270" width="256" height="234" refresh="60.000000" />
              <sound channels="1"/>
              <input players="2" buttons="1" coins="2">
                     <control type="joy" ways="8"/>
              </input>
              <dipswitch name="Service Mode" tag="IN0" mask="4">
                     <dipvalue name="Off" value="0" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="On" value="4"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Lives" tag="DSW1" mask="1">
                     <dipvalue name="3" value="0" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="5" value="1"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Cabinet" tag="DSW1" mask="2">
                     <dipvalue name="Upright" value="2" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="Cocktail" value="0"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Flip Screen" tag="DSW1" mask="4">
                     <dipvalue name="Off" value="4" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="On" value="0"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Difficulty" tag="DSW1" mask="8">
                     <dipvalue name="Easy" value="0" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="Hard" value="8"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Coinage" tag="DSW1" mask="240">
                     <dipvalue name="A 2/1 B 2/1" value="16"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 2/1 B 1/3" value="32"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/1" value="0" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/2" value="48"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/3" value="64"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/4" value="80"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/5" value="96"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/1 B 1/6" value="112"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/2" value="128"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/4" value="144"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/5" value="160"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/6" value="224"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/10" value="176"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/11" value="192"/>
                     <dipvalue name="A 1/2 B 1/12" value="208"/>
                     <dipvalue name="Free Play" value="240"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Coin Counters" tag="COM5" mask="1">
                     <dipvalue name="1" value="1" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="2" value="0"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Demo Sounds" tag="COM5" mask="2">
                     <dipvalue name="Off" value="2"/>
                     <dipvalue name="On" value="0" default="yes"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <dipswitch name="Bonus Life" tag="COM5" mask="12">
                     <dipvalue name="30k 70k 40k+" value="12" default="yes"/>
                     <dipvalue name="20k only" value="4"/>
                     <dipvalue name="40k only" value="8"/>
                     <dipvalue name="None" value="0"/>
              </dipswitch>
              <driver status="good" emulation="good" color="good" sound="good" graphic="good" savestate="supported" palettesize="8192"/>
       </game>
 
 


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