beatmania III running & playable on MAME (please read the description!!)

EDIT/NOTE: much of the description is outdated here. if you wanted to play this right now, just grab any relatively recent copy of MAME and make a visit to your local redump archive of ROMs and CHDs and you'll be able to play beatmania III juuuust fine. for the sake of archival, though, i'll leave the original description here.

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a recent PR for MAME (https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/...) has been introduced that refactors a very large portion of the firebeat driver, the PCB used for beatmania III, pop'n music, ParaParaParadise, and KEYBOARDMANIA games. before then, practically none of the games were running. however, as of recent, this PR resolves many issues with the original driver, and has allowed for the beatmania III series to run, fully working, with a few things not quite implemented. this has also resulted in a new set of dumps of hard drives, ROMs, etc. being made, invalidating a lot of the older dumps that used to be around, and also dumps for games that never had them before, such as the very first beatmania III!!

the following issues are of note:
pop'n music will not boot as of yet due to how it lacks support for DVD CHDs.
for all beatmania III and all pop'n music games, the game will be locked behind a randomly generated password you were meant to attain from KONAMI. this is easily resolved thanks to a RTC password generator created by the same person who did the PR: https://987123879113.github.io/firebe...
effectors don't seem to work yet in bmIII. this also breaks FAST PLAY by not having audio at all during gameplay with it active
the spectral analyzer/SPE-ANA theme/frame in bmIII doesn't work on this PR, however it is being worked on
floppy disk drive isn't implemented yet. as a result, unlocks can't be attained through the usual methods.

aside from that, the game runs amazingly well and i'm so glad to finally see this in working order. you have no idea how happy i am that to see this. i would highly suggest reading the PR link above if you want to see more in-depth explanations, or just want to check out the code.

as of writing, this PR is not merged into the master branch yet, and as such, isn't on any current mainline builds of MAME. however, if you'd like, you can download MAME's dev tools, the PR's branch of source code, and compile it yourself.

https://github.com/987123879113/mame/...
https://www.mamedev.org/tools/

i'd recommend building with only the firebeat drivers to save you a lot of headache of compiling times. your command of choice when using the mingw64 environment you're provided with by MAME's window build tools is
make SOURCES=src/mame/drivers/firebeat.cpp TOOLS=1 REGENIE=1

that's about all i have to say. enjoy the video, and enjoy this very new version of beeeeeatmania!

timestamps:
00:00 - launching of MAME, boot test fast-forwarding
00:22 - RTC password generation and entering
01:51 - quick game settings & RTC config
02:37 - attract mode
04:10 - gameplay of kobako (basic) mode, including the game's tutorial
12:25 - game credits, aka mnemoniq
14:19 - gameplay of shikomi (hard) mode, including foot chart gameplay and fumbling around with the controls after i realized the foot lane was on the left side oops
20:07 - gameplay of tsunagi (expert) mode, the game's free-form course/nonstop mode where you can pick your own songs
26:44 - game credits, featuring me messing around with the keysound samples you're allowed to toy with

like my vids? consider throwing me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/infinitephantasm