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Pink Sweets 1CC and Infinite lives tutorial

Pink Sweets is easily one of Caves hardest games, but on PCB there’s an infinite lives glitch that can be triggered, which trivializes the rest of the game.

This requires getting 4 extends without dieing, which is not much easier than a typical Cave 1CC. I got this a while ago, but finally took the time to record a quick commentary on how to trigger the glitch, if others are curious.

Extends spawn when you destroy 2500 enemies or destructible bullets, and then kill an enemy. This means you want to try to destroy as many destructible bullets as possible, especially on midbosses and bosses. This requires pretty careful planning.

Pink Sweets Infinite Lives Guide

On a good Stage 1 run, you should be able to get the zan counter to about 2000, triggering the first extend early on stage 2. If you trigger the first extend later in Stage 2, that’s not a huge problem since you can make up some on the Stage 2 boss, where I don’t care much about going for zan in this run.

S3 midboss is the make or break section of the run, since it’s very easy to mess it up, and it will sometimes give you random movements which makes it hard to trigger the deaths of side capsules when you want it.

For MAME practice, you can use the following lua script, to display the zan counter when playing, which simplifies routing. This will obviously not be helpful when playing for real on a PCB later as in the video above.

// Put this in pinkswts.lua
cpu = manager:machine().devices[":maincpu"]
mem = cpu.spaces["program"]
s = manager:machine().screens[":screen"]

function draw_hud()
 cnt = string.format("CNT : %d", mem:read_i16(0x0c4a3ab6));
 s:draw_text(225, 3, cnt);
end
emu.register_frame_done(draw_hud, "frame")

// And run game with mame64.exe pinkswts -autoboot_script pinkswts.lua

For completitions sake, here is my full 1CC using the glitch, but the rest of the run isn’t very exciting.

Pink Sweets 1CC (PCB)

The game itself is pretty interesting. It plays sortof like Yagawa’s earlier games, but is much less forgiving, and rank control isn’t as doable since you no longer get point extends.

Going for a non-infinite lives 1CC is very hard, and seems easiest by completely skipping item pickups and playing very carefully. It seems unlikely that I’ll get back to doing that, since this isn’t really one of my favorite games.

Stuff from the collection

Pink Sweets PCB
360 port. No infinite lives glitch on it, and not a great port. Arrange mode is fun though.
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Messing around with Cave PCBs

Other than playing arcade games, I also enjoy messing around with the hardware, and I’ve finished up a few small CV1000 related projects recently.

U13 CPLD Replacement

Analyzing U13 behavior

I reverse engineered the behavior of the U13 CPLD, and wrote a compatible bitstream, that can be programmed to EPM7032 CPLDs. This allows repairing boards where the internal flash has gone bad. An indepth description of this is available at the project page: https://github.com/buffis/cv1k_research/tree/main/U13_Research

Ideally, it would be better to use the original bitstream of the CPLD, but it’s read protected, and no public dumps are available, so this is the second best thing.

JTAG of CV1000 PCBs

I figured out how to use the JTAG port of the PCB’s to easily read/write the prog rom (U4) as well as the EEPROM. U2 reads/writes are also possible, but not recommended since they require some pretty sketchy bitbanging.

This allows for very simple dumping of U4, as well as upgrading to bugfix releases.

Upgrading a Mushihimesama PCB

I’m fairly certain that more than a few other people have also figured this out earlier, but the information was not public until now. More info is available at the project page: https://github.com/buffis/cv1k_research/tree/main/JTAG

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CV1K T-shirts

Picked up some of these Cave CV1000-B T-shirts from their online store. Buy them here! Very nice design!

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Why this blog?

I’ve been playing Shmups on and off for about 20 years, and have a decent collection, and felt I wanted to post a bit about it somewhere.

I used to be pretty casual about these games, and only recently got serious about 1CC’ing (one credit clearing) them, and have been recording videos of the gameplay sessions and putting it on Youtube.

This blog will probably be a mix of general thoughts about shmups, pictures of stuff from my collection, videos of 1CC’s with commentary and other content.

Mostly this blog exists due to me wanting to share some stuff around this hobby.

/ buffi@