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Yes that's where my sentiment with this lies. My personal feeling is Chris would want us to keep FME alive, to keep his flame burning through the scene he made possible, via all the means Reg outlined in his original post to this thread. But, honestly, I don't think he'd want people mucking about with the code he worked on for 23 years. He never shared the source code in all that time, and I think we can draw a pretty simple conclusion from that. V20.1 is a magnificent, amazing piece of software, that brings us all such joy on a daily basis. We should be grateful for that, and respect Chris's legacy. I understand where miroslav is coming from in his post above, but for me, MFME ends at V20.1, where the scene goes from here, with V20.1, is up to the rest of us.

After listening to all that Chris's MFME should be left alone to go with him, he wouldn't want anyone tinkering with his work especially when no one can code like him. Even if his family gives the green light someone would mess with it and fuck it all up, nah, rather keep the status quo. He lost his life and we lose the updates, so what to updates, besides there is lots more to work on too. I'd rather have Chris back with no updates to MFME than the other way around. We have been given a precious gift and that should be cherished not desecrated or hacked. Who here truly speaking can put all the 1000's of hours into something like Chris did AND stay committed to such a mountain of tasks, that is what you have to truly ask.

Even though the intentions are good, I don’t think we should be talking about hacking mfme, let alone releasing a hacked version on the forums. It just doesn’t seem right to me, personally. J

Yep mate, with a shader it's possible to do specific stuff like that For instance you could have a shader to turn all green-ish pixels in an image black, or change all pseudo-silver coloured pixels to have a reflection of the room/lights behind etc. So configurable custom shaders will be the ultimate way to go for some of these effects. To the layout designer though, when the shader is done, the coding will be hidden away The parameters will just be tweakable in realtime with named sliders to configure the desired look for that machine (e.g. Glow Bleed 0 --------|--- 1 ).

This little link maybe of interest to some of you retro fans... Old Computer Magazines

I agree I don't think there should be any more versions of MFME. I think here we are talking about not hacking MFME but improving it with the code legitimately gained and in someone's hand who could possibly do that. But I don't believe Wizard would want that. Things that work with it like game managers or tools that work to improve layout design outside MFME tools fair enough. It's actually a shame Wizard, won't get to see that stuff, being done to work in conjunction with MFME.

My feelings are that MFME V20.1 should be left as it is. It is the last version Chris gave us before he sadly passed away, let's leave as it it because Chris lives on in the emulator he created by himself, and it is something we have to remember him by.

I wonder if there's a link between the fact I used to love playing various fruit machine simulators (including the Codemasters ones on my various Speccys) while growing up that led to my gambling issues in later life? Didn't help that dad was in the military and even managed the club machines in the mess With regards to old magazines, we had subs for YS and Crash!, pretty sure I'll have the final issue(s) of them somewhere, probably in a box with a bazillion cover tapes. Did find my old '1st' Speccy recently which is a weird huge machine, apparently a 16K unit upgraded to 48K? Dad was an engineer so no doubt upgraded it himself, based on the case wouldn't be surprised if he made that too. My last Speccy was the 128K +2A 'James Bond' back, had a lot of fun going back through all my games on that and listening to the awesome soundtrack updates you got on the 128K machines. Haven't been brave enough to plug it in, from memory of the day it died though, it just gave mixed up coloured squares when turned on, so I'd not be surprised if it was a RAM / ROM / CPU issue. Many happy memories of the days where a child could actually buy proper video games with pocket money on the high street.

Bizarrely... even way back then in the 80'S.. I had a fruit machine game for my Dragon!! Used to love that Dragon - separate tape deck to load. Used to buy my games from Tandy - remember them?

My only worry is that his family have no emotion invested in his life work and worst case scenario is that they could just sell mfme source code to the highest bidder. I'm not saying that will happen but if it did then you can bet your bottom dollar that someone would monetise it somehow. Which would go against all that Chris stood for with his 'free' emulator. If it's an option then I'd rather it be here at it's spiritual home, in the hands of respectful coders that we have here at present. We have a couple of actual coders on these forums. One is a life long friend of mine who is actually creating a 3D wrapper of sorts for mfme and pretty much got proper FME into MAME by creating an MFME layout converter tool. I can vouch for JP 100%. He is a coder so understands the actual time involvement on such projects. J

You would have been a very rare breed, owning a Dragon. Never ever used one myself, not even sure I have ever played a Dragon emulator. Nearly everyone in my school during the 8 bit era, had a Spectrum or C64, a couple of people had Vic 20's and BBC's At it was always about games back then, if you didn't have a Spectrum or C64, you were considered unlucky to have anything but one of those. In the case of anyone with a BBC, it was assumed, it was more a family computer than their own and that the kids could only use it for homework.

Is it possible to use the actual reel symbol as a lamp mask with maybe some glow bleed? This is for future thoughts mate, I know you are working on the primary workings before you polish bits Totally love this though mate, really interesting stuff, fantastic skills J

I've had another bash at the reel lamp effect. I went a bit overboard on the 'warmness' of the lights (these Tuppenny Nudger type machine's reel lamps seem to be a lot brighter/whiter on the youtube videos)... but I do like a nice cosy bulb glow! In the long term it'll want a custom shader, that will give a much better effect than this quick job, but I'm just getting things 'good enough' for now, so I can keep progressing the prototype.

Damn, thought Razzle & Escort were going to make an appearance here!