Official Twitter Account. Archiving all things soft/hard/paper for Battletech Pods. Not affiliated with FASA Corporation, Catalyst Games, VWE, or Pirahna Games.
Joined February 2021
- Tweets62
- Following13
- Followers43
- Likes58
Pinned Tweet
Here is the Battletech Center Pod Version 3 software! Look in the description of the archive for details on extrraction and notes.
archive.org/details/vwe-rele…
Amazing news! After collaborating with someone in the reverse engineering community, we have figured out a way to potentially bypass the A/ROSE card entirely! Not only that, we have been able to identify almost all the chips on the various boards! We are now collaborating with->
various sources to obtain the boot ROMs and other essential information from known 3.0 Pod owners. AFAIK, all the chips are off-the-shelf, aside from the Amiga boot ROMs, which we are in the process of obtaining. The off-the-shelf chipsets are available in MAME, and should be->
While emulation would be great, I think the best solution as of now would be to take assets from the software archive I was able to recover and using videos and first hand knowledge, recreate the game in an engine like Unity or Godot. The ultimate goal would be a completely ->
every mech. The hard part, is emulating the hardware networking and control systems. Unless you have a pod near you, you basically have no way to network capture the ArcNet commands. You also wouldn’t be able to test hardware streaming compatiblity for the pod-side hardware->
as I understand it, @VirtualWorldLLC is looking into this route currently, so maybe something will come of it. Without an actual working A/ROSE card, schematics, or other source, emulation progress is essentially dead. Wish I were more optimistic, but it’s all we can do for now
Obviously it would be difficult, but unless it’s absolutely impossible, I think the best course of action for pod preservation, would be complete server emulation. Unfortunately that would require packet captures for hardware that’s almost unobtainable. The easy part would be
Kinda working on reviving this project again. Progress has halted since my local source has gone AWOL. Current rights holders are decently far from me so I have to rely on them for stuff (which I’m very grateful for their cooperation)
Updated the archive with some more manuals and promo materials. Also included in this dump is some hi-resolution merch posters that were sold at the various BTC's click this link for access to the archive: archive.org/details/@battlet…
Going to try to start this project up again. just need to get in contact with a few people for updates!
I think we all know where this is going. House Steiner sends their regards. Maybe they can use @VirtualWorldLLC Battletech pods for interface training
Still nothing to report on the archive. Schematics haven’t been scanned in yet, and the high-res imaging project hasn’t started due to a personal issue in my sources family. Don’t want to bother them while their grieving
