ADUFRAY

I was visiting the local arcade recently and saw they had one of my favorite games, Tapper. If you’re not familiar, in the game you play as a bartender and have to serve beverages to unruly guests. I believe the original game was sponsored by Budweiser, featuring their logo and slogan prominently throughout the game. I really enjoy the outdated sensibility of it. At the time there were even other official editions of the game for family-friendly arcades where all the references to beer are switched to Root Beer.

The version of the game at this arcade, however, was different still. All of the character sprites had been replaced with various Simpsons characters! The color pallete was original, and they didn’t adjust the largest Budweiser logo to say Duff, but it was pretty entertaining nonetheless. When I got home, I wondered if I could get this ROMhack working on my Batocera (v38), MAME-based multicade arcade cabinet.

I wanted to keep the original Tapper working as well, so the very common guidance of simply replacing your tapper.zip with the new ROM set didn’t really fit my needs. While checking out Arcade Italia’s Arcade Database (which is an excellent resource!), I saw all the different clones of the game. Rather than replace the original, I could just replace one of the clones I didn’t use. tapperg looked like the perfect candidate, its title being “Tapper (Alternate Graphics)”.

When I tried loading the ROM, however, I got a lot of errors about missing files. After some research, it became apparent that the Simpsons ROMhack version was based on a very early ROMset, perhaps as early as MAME v0.60 from 2002. (The files in the .zip are dated 2006.)

fg1_a7.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg0_a8.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg3_a5.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg2_a6.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg5_a3.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg4_a4.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg7_a1.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)
fg6_a2.128 NOT FOUND (tried in tapperg tapper)

It seems the tapperg clone ROM wants the files named slightly differently than how the parent tapper has the dumps named. The tapperg ROM only first appeared in MAME ROMset v0.198, and its file structure has not kept up with the parent ROM tapper. tapperg has kept the file structure from the 0.195 - 0.197 era tapper. Further, the SimpsonsTapperRoms dumps I found seemed to be based on much a much older structure!

ROM (tapper equiv.) | MAME ROMset
--------------------+---------------
tapper              | 0.198 - 0.282
tapperg             | 0.195 - 0.197
SimpsonsTapperRoms  | 0.60 - 0.145u6

So, to name the files appropriately, I took these steps:

#!/bin/sh

mkdir tapperg
cd tapperg/
# on your own for finding this ;)
unzip ~/Downloads/SimpsonsTapperRoms.zip

mv tapbg0.bin tapper_c.p.u._bg_0_5f_12-7-83.5f
mv tapbg1.bin tapper_c.p.u._bg_1_6f_12-7-83.6f
mv tapsnda7.bin tapper_sound_snd_0_a7_12-7-83.a7
mv tapsnda8.bin tapper_sound_snd_1_a8_12-7-83.a8
mv tapsnda9.bin tapper_sound_snd_2_a9_12-7-83.a9
mv tapsda10.bin tapper_sound_snd_3_a10_12-7-83.a10

mv tapfg0.bin fg0_a8.128
mv tapfg1.bin fg1_a7.128
mv tapfg2.bin fg2_a6.128
mv tapfg3.bin fg3_a5.128
mv tapfg4.bin fg4_a4.128
mv tapfg5.bin fg5_a3.128
mv tapfg6.bin fg6_a2.128
mv tapfg7.bin fg7_a1.128

mv tappg0.bin tapper_c.p.u._pg_0_1c_1-27-84.1c
mv tappg1.bin tapper_c.p.u._pg_1_2c_1-27-84.2c
mv tappg2.bin tapper_c.p.u._pg_2_3c_1-27-84.3c
mv tappg3.bin tapper_c.p.u._pg_3_4c_1-27-84.4c

zip ../tapperg.zip *

Now I have “Tapper (Duff, Simpsons graphics)” running natively on my Batocera v38 multicade along side the original! (And the Root Beer one, because why not?)