I have recently reconfigured my arcade cabinet to use a Mister Multisystem Arcade FPGA board instead of a Raspberry Pi.
The main reason for this was so I could play lightgun games with the best accuracy possible. So I am running PlayStation games on the PSX core and using a SNAC adapter so the input has zero latency.
This is now working flawlessly with the CRT display in my arcade cabinet. So the next step was to play some games. I looked around for a list of light gun games and noticed that some games said they didn’t support GunCons and only supported the Konami Justifier light gun.
That was pretty disappointing, as I didn’t want to mess around with having to swap light guns over. I then noticed that there were some patches available for games such as Die Hard Trilogy that patch the original game to support GunCons.
I thought that was pretty cool, so I started at the top of the list with Area51. At this point, I found that there didn’t seem to be a patch available for Area 51 🙁
Failed at the first hurdle. I now wanted to play Area 51 simply because I couldn’t!
Well, after seeing some of the amazing stuff that people have been doing with A.I. recently, I thought I’d give Claude a chance at solving this problem for me. I asked it if it could do it, and it seemed pretty confident. So I grabbed the bin/cue file for the game, and it asked me to extract the PlayStation executable file from it and upload it.
Claude then sat and thought about things for about 5 minutes before spitting out a PPF patch for me to try. I downloaded ppf-o-matic, patched my game and copied it onto my Mister SD card.
The moment of truth. The game booted up, I pressed the A button to start the game and it just worked! I calibrated the guns in the menu and they were pinpoint accurate.
I have a love-hate relationship with A.I., but it’s things like this that show it is capable of some really cool things.
I have done a patch for both the EU release and the USA release. So if anyone else fancies playing Area 51 with their GunCon, then simply download the zip file below, extract it and apply the correct ppf to your BIN/CUE image with PPF-O-MATIC
Enjoy!!!