The Fuuki FG-3 and Asura Buster: The late 90's say Hello

One thing I’ve talked about a few times on this blog is that over the course of the 1990’s, 2D arcade hardware became something you could take for granted; in fact, today you can run pretty much any 2D game you want on an incredibly cheap Raspberry Pi. Some of the later boards we’ve looked at include the lower-end Namco ND-1, the IGS PGM2, and the high-end Cave CV-1000, which used a blitter and framebuffer approach. Let’s look at a monster of sprites and tilemaps from a more modest company at the end of the 2D era: the 1998-2001 Fuuki FG-3.

Behold

The Fuuki FG-3 arrives in the form of a large green circuitboard. But it’s surprisingly spacious compared to a lot of boards we’ve looked at here; all the components are on the top side, with the exception of some bodges near the JAMMA edge connector. Also, the JAMMA edge isn’t plated, which is kind of a bummer, but very common.

On the underside, the ROMs for the board are mounted on their own board. In theory, this could imply that new games could be marketed as ROM boards alone. In practice, I don’t know if that happened, or if it would actually work, or if there are game-specific modifications to the top board as well. Something to try if I get my hands on an Asura Blade.

CPU

The Motorola 68EC020 that powers this board is a beefy CPU, and I want to praise it, being used to the Motorola 68000. The ‘020 was a big upgrade over the Motorola 68000, with a 32-bit data and address bus. (The EC020 had a 24-bit address bus like the 68000, which is fine for this purpose) It was used in machines like the Amiga 1200. 20MHz is a decent speed; noticeably faster than the 14MHz Amiga 1200.

But, this is hardware from 1998, and Commodore is dead. We have to look at the wealthier competition. The Sega System 32, their ultimate 2D arcade hardware, which had had its last release in, oh, 1995, was powered by the NEC V60 RISC CPU; clocked a bit slower, but had an onboard 64-bit floating point unit. Floating point calculations were a big deal for the pseudo-3D games the System 32 was based around. But… Fuuki used this to play fighting games. The Capcom CPS-3 system from 1996 had a 25MHz Hitachi SH-2 RISC CPU. Probably competitive with the ‘020, at least, and I don’t believe the SH-2 had any advantage for floating-point math, because it’s not important here. Anyway, SNK Playmore was pumping out solid fighters for its 12MHz 68000-based Neo Geo MVS hardware as late as 2003, so let’s not talk about the CPU too much.

Audio

In accordance with the ancient tradition, the audio section of the board is powered by a Zilog Z80, which communicates with a Yamaha audio synthesizer chip. This is all familiar territory by this point.

The audio synthesizer is one that we haven’t seen before, the YMF278. (With a tiny Yamaha DAC to the left of the crystal oscillator) It has the “OPL” logo, but this is the OPL4, which combines an upgraded version of the OPL3’s two-operator FM chip with a PCM sampling that can play up to 24 simultaneous sounds. This functionality was also used in PC sound cards for wavetable MIDI support. This was the last true “OPL” generation; end of an era.

The other thing to note about the audio is that Fuuki screwed it up; the positive and negative polarity speaker output are reversed. (It’s worth noting that JAMMA edge connectors expect amplified audio, like the type you’d plug into non-powered speakers) If this causes problems for your supergun (like it does mine), you might need an adapter like this.

Video

The video section is highly consolidated; we’re well past the days of implementing logic like this in easily analyzable discrete logic, for reasons of both increased complexity and anti-piracy. There are three large surface-mount chips:

• Fuuki FI-002K
• Fuuki FI-003K
• Mitsubishi M60067-0901FP

Interesting, these three chips are all mentioned as present in the FG-3’s predecessor, the 1995 Fuuki FG-2. The FG-3 appears to have similar video capability, but with a more powerful CPU and the newer Yamaha synth chip, and sprite bankswitching.

I’m also not certain if the Mitsubishi chip is actually related to video; the MAME source simply categorizes it as “other”. My assumption is that it’s probably some form of programmable logic specific to this board, as I can’t see any other reports of it.

The sprite and tile capabilities are nothing to sneeze at, though with some interesting decisions. Sprites are framebuffered by at least two frames, which adds input lag; tilemaps are framebuffered by an additional frame over sprites. There are four scrolling background layers, and up to 1024 sprites with zooming, each made up of four 16x16 tiles.

This sounds pretty good, but it’s worth noting that I compared it to the Capcom CPS-3 above; the CPS-3 has more complex zooming capabilities (able to zoom the whole framebuffer, not just sprites) and more complex graphical effects. The CPU isn’t the key differing factor for things like this; it’s the capabilities of the graphics chipset that would really make someone notice that Capcom’s hardware is superior.

But I bet Fuuki’s game was a lot cheaper, too.

Get busted, Asura

Asura Buster has a pretty solid attract mode, in my opinion. As you can guess from the “Three Years Later” and the opening with “Asura 2”, this game is a sequel: specifically, to 1998’s Asura Blade, which used the same FG-3 hardware. And if, “Battle, Destroy, Grapple” didn’t clue you in, it’s a fighting game, as was its predecessor. And generally 99% of 2D arcade games in the 1990’s. This isn’t a mission pack sequel, though– nearly all the returning characters have significant changes, and new characters introduced.

The game is sort-of weapon based, with an appealing cast of characters you can choice freely from, including fighting game staple archetypes and some more unique ones like the child necromancer Alice. Though in the playthrough I recorded for this post I just chose the sword-wielder Rose Mary.

One thing worth noting is something that the astute probably already noticed in the technical section: no provision is made for a “kick harness”, so this game is limited to five action buttons per player. In fact, as you can see in the very thin operator’s manual, it uses “proper” JAMMA, so it only has three: a punch, a kick, and a “strong attack”. It’s very similar to Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, minus the Fatal Fury plane-switching mechanic– and I love Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, so this works very well for me.

I’m not going to talk much about the fighting mechanics. They seem good to me, and at least in 2022 there were people still playing it, too, if this wiki is any sign. I will say one thing I like about Asura Buster is that there seems to have been some effort into giving it a solid single-player experience as well, with some fun full-screen bosses. These are where the hardware really shines.

The hardware also shows its limitations. Here’s a conversation scene, there are a few of these throughout the game. You can notice a few things:

• Dithering is used for transparency; it’s actually quickly alternating on each frame. This looks… fine on a CRT, but it’s not “true” transparency.
• There’s a glitched line across the screen. These appeared seemingly at random during dialogue sequences, but not anywhere else.

Nothing that’s a deal breaker– it’s a conversation screen, not the action– but I’m not sure what the cause is. Perhaps it’s writing each character’s palette to the screen and those are some equivalent to the Genesis and Master System’s CRAM dots?

In any case, the game is very enjoyable and colorful, making good use of features like parallel scrolling background layers, just like you’d expect from its era.

As is not uncommon with Japanese arcade purchases, this came with some art and control explanations for installing it in a candy cabinet. These look used, so this board likely got some play in the past, as opposed to being a new old stock one.

Get Fuuki’d

Fuuki’s website is technically still online… with a 2006 copyright date, with every link from the main page broken except for the “Game machine sales”, which just says that sales have been temporarily suspended since 2011. So, I don’t think Fuuki is actually still in business, really. Which is too bad; Asura Buster is pretty decent.