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I've not been up to doing much at all in the way of coding recently, hopefully slowly on the mend though And as such, I've been starting planning the next step in the 'Arcade Simulator' journey... Taking Arcade Simulator as our proof of concept (that we can run a large multiplayer arcade in realtime on a consumer PC with fruit machines and video games) - I think the plan should now be to build this into a fully open source project (hosted on github), that will be broken up into sub-projects. Just some initial thoughts on how this will be structured: This will be a large slow project! But at least we have now seen from Arcade Simulator that it is all actually possible, I honestly didn't know currents PCs were yet fast enough to run all those machines, back when I started it all As there will be separation between the 'apps', this will hopefully make it a bit more accessible for coders, for instance someone might be keen to work on the machine library app, but not be comfortable with 3d game coding, so that now won't be an issue. Also, this new project will be taking on the hard issues, such as people not being able to convert a fruit machine layout of their own from MFME format to something that can ultimately run in the arcade. I will still be using the existing 'MFME window scraping' technique for the extractor, as it does work, but I will add in various safeguards to try make it as safe as possible, things like: - scrape a layout a little slower - if a human generated mouse/keyboard input is detected, abort scraping - continuous 'window focus' watchdog strategies to detect desyncing during scraping - a warning popup to be ok'd that shows at start of every extraction; "This is experimental, while safeguards have been implemented, there is the potential for data loss, use at your own risk!" It will all take a long time to set all this up, and port the existing Arcade Sim systems into OASIS (especially assets that are licenced on a 'per seat' basis - in some cases I may be able to work with those asset creators on a solution to allow for use in open source, otherwise we need to roll our own)... but, the idea is that the project will ultimately no longer hinge on me doing it all! As now we have the working proof of concept in Arcade Sim, it makes most sense long term to build a future-proof platform - so if I were to meet an untimely demise in the future (RIP Chris) - the project could continue to grow and develop. The name OASIS came from the book Ready Player One "This is the Oasis. It's a place where the limits of reality are your own imagination. You can do anything, go anywhere. Like the Vacation Planet. Surf a 50-foot monster wave in Hawaii, you can ski down the Pyramids, you can climb Mount Everest with Batman. Check out this place. It's a casino the size of a planet! You can lose your money there, you can get married, you can get divorced, you can...you can go in there. People come to the Oasis for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be: tall, beautiful, scary, a different sex, a different species, live action, cartoon, it's all your call. Yeah, that's me...well, that's my avatar, at least until I feel like changing it. Except for eating, sleeping and bathroom breaks, whatever people want to do, they do it in the Oasis. And since everyone is here, this is where we meet each other. This is where we make friends." - Wade Watts talking about the OASIS

It's extremely upsetting It's not fair he doesn't get to see all the people he's made happy. My eyes are tearing up because I'm thinking about if he passed feeling like he wasn't done yet. He put all this effort into making MFME and he doesn't get to see all the happiness he's caused, it just isn't fair I hope in his final moments he felt complete, that he said to himself "There, I finished it. I'm ready to go", and then went to sleep with a smile on his face knowing he's made, and will continue to make, people happy. I hope he didn't feel like he wasn't ready. It's such a sad world. If anyone reads this who feels they're near the same fate, know you are loved. If you feel alone, know there's people out there who would gladly give you a big hug if they could.

Firstly, thanks to @johnparker007 for this excellent setup that he has done - honestly had a real blast making this video - the time was a literal time sink. For anyone that has not seen this, perhaps if you choose to watch this video - this maybe the day that you choose to give Arcade Simulator a play - everybody at DIF should do this. I know we are moving to Oasis in terms of what is going to happen - but this is the right time at least for me to do an series of these videos. I'll post updates if we have updates on Arcade Simulator moving to Oasis and keepp this chain of videos going. @johnparker007 your work has hit it out the park here. For anyone else trying this video, there is a little experiement in the intro - if you have never played Arcade Simulator before but remember arcades from old, please do this.

Not far off completion now main thigs to do are to go through all the games adding coin input and hoppers

So finally finished my small bartop icade conversion. The cabinet lent itself perfectly for the job although was certainly tough trying to squeeze everything in! So I bought off Ebay an ION Icade off eBay for £18, a HP 15" 4:3 touchscreen monitor for £12 and a Dell micro PC for £40. I ordered an Ipac, Pac drive and a load of buttons from Arcade World along with a Barcrest button and 5v leds off eBay. I had to cut the top pieces of the side panels off the icade to accommodate the monitor which I stripped out of it's casing. I wanted the sound to be pretty good as that's the best part for me, the nostalgic machine sounds and music so I fixed a 2.1 edifier PC speaker system to it. The sub on the top and the satellite speakers in the back as didn't want them sticking out. I simply used sticky back metal effect plastic on the sides. I replaced the control panel for a nice bit of wood. I used 10 main buttons, an exit button on the left side and a coin one on the right as well as 2 small buttons I use for volume under the fake coin slot which I wired to a USB on the PC. I am very pleased with the way it turned out

Done a little more hacky testing, this renders basic 2d reels, synced with the emulation. Kept MAME window visible so I can press keys in MAME for the moment to drive the emulation (play the machine). Ultimately MAME will be a hidden child process and Oasis will be passing inputs through:

As some of you are aware @johnparker007 has set up a 'Community Drive' as a place to gather quality artwork for the scene. I have been going through all of my old folders and uploading any base art, glass scans, edited art & redraws. Some of the art is good quality that the emulator couldn't handle back when the DX was released and now can, and perhaps future advancements can take advantage of them. In the Community Drive if you click on the advanced search and put my name in the 'item name' box it will show all the art I've uploaded. Where I have additional artwork for that machine of I've made new reels or buttons etc I have uploaded them in the machines relevant folder on the drive. I still have some other archives to look through containing old WIP folders that's I'll probably never get around to finishing, I am sure I have usable art somewhere that needs a DX. I will upload to this thread as and when I find it. This link will take you to what I've just finished uploading... Community Drive

As someone who used this software many years ago and just finding this site recently. Im sadend to hear about the death of its creator. All can do is after a heartfelt thanks posthumously to Chris for the hours of fun they have given me. And aplaud this community for keeping his memory and work alive.

Here are the DX's updated for the newest MFME. Fairground Attraction Club DX's.zip

I registered here back in January and ... well, forgot about it TBH (health issues.. you know how it is...) - Anyway I remembered I registered and I'm a New User - which is fine, and I even seem to have some rep.. but I have no posts and I can't repost an intro... So.. I presume I just have to be active? In which case.. hi Been following Emu since the early days, before DOND was even a thing.... Happy to see things are still going on and machines are still being updated etc.

3 years today - still miss you mate.

Had another play with this new simple process for enhancing low-res pixelated layouts... the idea is that one day, as part of the layout editor, it will be a easy to use built-in tool, with some tweakable settings... This time was Super Hyper Viper at a whopping 16x upscale for an 8K layout, here's some before/after, using the simple fixed process (upscale, rebalance color, unsharp mask): Before: After: Before: After: Before: After: Before: After: It's not all there yet by any means though: Before (notice the text is actually much more legible): After: (text is an unreadable mess) I believe in future multimodal LLMs would be able to guess the correct text based on knowledge of the game though the MAME internal classic layouts, and fonts used on these machines, and then redo the text as fonts with layer effects... probably a long way off yet, purely due to these not being particularly in-demand generative AI skills, but it does seem feasible... will be a handy stopgap for those machines where no high res images are available, and no highres redraw has been done

Not technically FME-related, but I believe these were in arcades/bars in some countries alongside fruit machines... "work on PC video cards is still progressing, with the added benefit of fixing MegaTouch XL 6000 graphics this month" https://www.mamedev.org/?p=529 We also have an initial 3d model from @Spidy21982 for the future (as the new Arcade Sim will directly run latest MAME releases )

Robin_Hood_NumberReelWorking.zip

Here's Tommyc's layout with the issues sorted. Tick Tock Cash WDX.zip

Hi, this is just a quick post to say thanks for accepting me on to your site, i have been watching videos on youtube and am so excited to get started playing old favourites like psycho cash beast and cops n' robbers!

hey to everyone here nice to meet you all, cant wait to play some of those old classics that i used to play in the pub when i was younger

Been feeling a bit better, so got some more progress on porting/converting the MFME Layout Extractor from the old ArcadeSim project to the new MfmeTools application (this is a 'standalone' Windows-only component of the Layout Editor, which is a cross-platform component of the Oasis suite). Work ported so far, allows for a little more progress in this test extraction, is now puts Mfme in Edit mode, and copies off lamps to the background: Next, is to get the Window Handle of the Properties window, and then from there, it's working on the new window capture system itself, as I need to get: - window position/size from the handles - getting window content as a bitmap - redo the old scraping of the component name (used a fuzzy OCR in old system, this needs converting to my Delphi font scraper, as everything else uses)

There is a lot of work to do building the Layout Editor. This will allow for importing extracted MFME layouts to be converted to native Oasis layouts (to work in 3d machines like in Arcade Sim). The 'extraction' will be performed by the MFME Extractor, which is already somewhat done, but will be rewritten with a focus on improved robustness as it's a flakey process. There will also be a feature to generate MAME layouts - this will mainly be used for creating/improving internal text-only layouts, that are built into the MAME.exe itself. This will indirectly help out with getting the emulation improved in MAME. Using the same UI framework I'm building for the Layout Editor, will be a second application that will be the Cabinet Editor. This will allow for importing 3d models in a generic format such as .fbx, to be converted to native Oasis cabinets (again to work as part of 3d machines like in ArcadeSim, housing the Oasis layouts). The Machine Player will allow playing these 3d machines in a single machine mode initially, and also have VR support, along with various visual effect options (like Bloom etc). Once this is all fairly solid, I will start development of the Oasis version of Arcade Simulator (I guess you could think of that as 'Arcade Sim 2'), to allow for the Arcade Sim experience with multiple Oasis machines... and that will ultimately get things that weren't in Arcade Sim 1, such as multiplayer, VR etc. Also there'll be lots of surrounding work, things not thought of yet etc. The key purpose of all this is that using the tools in the Oasis suite of FME software, the community will be able to convert existing MFME layouts, build new layouts, create new 3d cabinets, and build fully integrated machines that then work in the new Arcade Simulator... all without needing to touch any programming. The full source code is open source, hosted live here: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis This probably represents years of work, but I think it's what we need to take the scene to the next level, now we've seen the proof-of-concept the original Arcade Simulator represents

After a solid weeks work, making the box, applying vinyl wrap, drilling holes, fitting buttons, wiring buttons to controller boards my MFME keyboard is finished. I couldn't have done it without MPU_FIVE (Gary). His amazingly detailed shopping list made it easy to buy what I needed. His awesome guide on his own keyboard helped me get mine built. Thanks to ArcadeWorldUK for supplying the parts quickly and replacing my faulty led super fast (thanks Andy). Now comes the even more scary part. Getting the keyboard to work with fruit machines. That's the task for the weekend. Attached are photos of prototype and final version.

Just thought I'd record a very quick play with some of those new emulation features we get 'for free' (since this is using MAME for emulation backend), such as the save states...

Continuing this thread: ...in here, as it's a better place than the Blockbuster's VHS Emporium now I've started doing a little coding on it Got some very early progress on this idea for a sound ROM editing tool, I'm decoding the entire sound Rom (testing with Andy Capp MPU4 to start with) and can play it back. There is 'background noise' which is expected at present, due to how the adpcm encoding works (offset from previous byte). I believe once I can decode the header and have all the samples individually decoded from their starting address, the background noise will disappear. Cool to hear some vaguely recognisable noisy sound though Going to work on figuring out the header stuff for the MPU4 type format (also shared by some other techs) next, hopefully sort out that background noise...

The new channel has hit the 'jackpot' number of subscribers.....

MPU2 is now in! That one went waaay smoother, wasn't quite as much stuff this time around, but I've also learned a bit since the last time. Next thing to look at I haven't quite decided on yet, but it'll probably be Summit Coin 8035 hardware, or taking a look at Cleartone Bonus Talker, the first fruit machine with sampled sound. Not many machines to add for either choice so should go quicker overall, but I've also got university and work coming back soon, so less time for working on fruits there, but we'll see how things go.

Well, well, well, it took a damn while, but the first part of Black Box is now officially in MAME. At some point I'll deal with the stepper reel games too, but for now it's done. Haven't posted here in a while too, and as far as my free time for fruit emulation stuff goes, I'm still somewhat busy . University stuff I took care of for the summer, but then came an internship right after that. Fortunately though I'm very nearly done with it and will finally have some more time available very soon. I didn't sit idle for the last few months though, in fact I got work done on bits of MPU2 here and there as time allowed. The few Barcrest usual suspects that are dumped such as Spot Light and Rock On run, plus a couple Dutch machines too. Right now I'm dealing with this weird thing from Leisure Games. One of the Dutch games is kinda interesting - the ROM that was uploaded was called Silver Star, but it's actually Super Star, which seems to be one of Barcrest's very first MPU1/2 releases ever. There's a list of old Barcrest machines with their release dates floating around and it's the first game on that list, I was wondering the whole time what it was, but seems that mystery is now solved. Here's the flyer: At first I thought it was also Barcrest's very first CPU-based fruity ever, but that honor seems to go to a machine called Top Twenty, which looks like this: Also saw what @johnparker007's been cooking, OASIS looks promising. The whole Arcade Sim-as-a-prototype thing makes sense, starting over takes longer for sure, but doing things more properly and learning from the first time definitely helps in the long run, plus it being open source is also very nice. Excited to see the converted layouts in MAME once that day comes , together with all the other arcade stuff too of course. Get well soon!

cant wait to play cops and robbers i would play hours on this one

So I'm at this point now. Quite happy with it so far!

Thank you so much guys for welcoming me into this community, I cant wait to get to know you and share in this experience together

So, as I used to play the earlier versions in the wild till they got chipped, sadly we only have Open the Box 02 with the lines trick in tact. Past few weeks I’ve been figuring out by looking at the Open the Box 02 and comparing it with the fixed 04 programme. I started with Line 1 - Unlimited Nudges and have managed to make this line free. So will be going through all the lines and doing the same, I hope to take this over to the other clones we don’t have free lines working roms…. So Pay Rise, Pound for Pound, Camelot, Grand Prix and maybe Hi-De-Hi. J

Hi, I've got a Twilight Zone manual and have attached the DIP settings below. The percentages can be changed, and also the % token payout can be changed from high to low as well. Sorry about the state of the page, looks like the engineer poured coffee all over it at some point! Reading this thread with interest, would be great to see some of your work come to fruition guys, hope this helps anyway.

Hi all! I just wanted to say a huge great 1 big thanks to all! I have made so many online friends here. So first to the late, great, Chris J Wren Wizard RIP for the emulator, Reg for starting the sight, all donaters and friends, layout creaters, Chopaholic, cheerful pecimist, whatwhat what and on a bucket for youtube emulation vids, infection for ROM and looking for awktions for roms/machines on ebay, anyone else? OH yeah, steve lansett and chris217's youtube channels, well, the whole lot of you! Just one big thanks! The amount of machines that have now been emulated, from the old MPU2's to the whole way upwards to the £500 randomers. again, ONE! BIG! THANK YOU!

Took a gambling awareness sticker off my old reel king machine today. Cut it up and slapped it on my little cab to finish it off nicely

Bit under the weather again, but hopefully on the mend soon So a small tech update: the original 'MFME Extractor' Windows-only optional module of the Oasis suite, is now to become 'MFME Tools'. This MFME Tools module will contain the components of 'Extractor' and a new component; 'Injector'. What this means is that in addition to being able to extract MFME layouts (using the copy of MFME v20.1 on the user's system), this will also be able to export/inject a 2d rendering of an Oasis layout back to MFME. Effects such as the realtime lighting of the 2d cabinet I think will be possible, though there is the issue of MFME slowdown when a lot of blended lamps are drawn at once. I'm hoping it will lead to a workflow where even as existing 2d fake-perspective layouts are extracted then imported from MFME->Oasis, the lighting can be remastered along with the cabinet... and so then a 3d rendering of the cabinet would be displayed in 2d in the injected (i.e. exported) MFME layout. This will allow continued support for MFME users where a layout has been created natively on Oasis, and the layout will also have time-consuming elements like live light reflections etc reflected in the parts of the 2d rendered cabinet, as rendered natively in 3d. Seems bonkers I know, but it's a logical extension as I'm figuring out the project architecture in terms of the Windows-only elements for layout artists to input/output work to/from MFME. The Oasis Layout Editor module will use these components in the background, so it will be as simple as using the relevant UI in Oasis LE. It'll also be usable in a 'standalone' mode, for those that may wish to build other things from this, for instance alternative MFME frontends like @appstrader's FruitBar (so in that example, he'd be able to build real animated lamp on/off attracts into the frontend by having full raw dumps of the layouts as .png and .json data etc). Just a window for start as I am under the weather, but this is where all the ArcadeSim MFME IO systems will be ported to: To be continued, once I'm back up and at 'em - the first stage will be refactoring the MFME extraction system that ArcadeSim uses... Note that a user just wishing to play layouts in Oasis, either standalone or in 'AS2', will not need to download the optional MFME Tools module, this will only be of use to Layout Artists, and perhaps also layout converter scene members who will oversee converting MFME layouts to Oasis, along with enhancing them with the highest resolution source art we have etc.

So been wanting to do this for a while... The aim is to create a very small bar top solely for mfme running with touch-play frontend. I felt it would save me a bit of time by either modifying a Picade which I have done before for Retropie or an Icade from Ion which I feel would suit better as far more rigid. So so far I have :- Bought an Icade off ebay for £20. Stripped and installed an old 15" 4:3 touchscreen HP monitor I got for £10. Also ebay! Installed a Dell micro PC. £40. Changed the graphics on the side. £9. Cut some trim for the bezel £7. Still plenty to do as you can see. I am planning to just get it up and running with only the touchscreen for now however my plan is to build a control panel utilising some old fruit machine buttons. I'm playing around with different speaker ideas at the moment. I feel sound is very important and the best part of playing these great machines. I will add that I have always had real arcade machines but feel you quickly get bored playing the same old games which take up a lot if space and end up never playing them which is why I have always loved emulation. I have to of course try to fit all the wiring and plugs into what little space I have left. Not looking forward to that!

Cheers guys finally got going with this, so many machines!! Amazing work!

Today's update - machine moved into the house where it's warmer ... couple of things working now Many thanks to @Wizard @davep180 @Ross @No1Stoney @Reg and many others. Having finally had a proper read through all the other hurdles others had overcome made life way, way easier!! So, next up is tidying, wanted to make sure it would all work before I made the wiring more permanent. Then I really need to sort out a frontend and how to interact with it. Plus getting the LED lighting going would be awesome. It should be 12V and rather than messing about with the PC and adding extra load to the PSU I think I'll just run it off a separate 12V PSU. Still need to sort out the coin sorter, routing, and a few other bits. But for now... it takes coins, pays out, and has put a bloody great smile on my face. Probably can't tell from the footage

Ok I've copied a few files around on the FTP server, and tested on a 'remote browser' - I think it is now fixed, though it may not appear fixed until local browser caches are cleared: So you may see the same error you saw before, but over time, as local browser caches are cleared, hopefully it will look like this again (and allow for downloading of the Setup exe)

Another little update to Oasis Layout Editor - a bunch of hardcoded bits, but this now shows proof of concept of the new way of interfacing to read component states from MAME: There is no 'screen-scraping' taking place here to flash the lamps in the editor, and so also no need for 'data layouts' (previous MAME/MFME work for Arcade Sim has all relied on the hideousness that is screen scraping data layouts). I'm instead pulling a component data feed direct from MAME. Need to suss out how to get the MAME.exe running as a totally hidden child process - good to see the idea works anyway, this new technique of reading the lamps etc has not been done before

@Altharic it finally got merged! Nice one @SomeRandomGuy thanks for your awesome work on the driver https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/10417

There's been a little more tinkering with the layout editor, video shows the beginnings of importing an 'MFME Extract' to an Oasis Layout:

Thank you for the insight into CLASSIC v`s DX I did not realise the amount of work that goes into one, I am personally grateful to ALL the designers of any layout, you all do some fantastic work and I really appreciate the work and time that goes into recreating these masterpieces, and I'm really pleased I have been accepted here and that I am allowed to play these on my homemade machine. Here is a BIG 🆃🅷🅰🅽🅺-🆈🅾🆄 to you all

Wizard knew all the pleasure he gave to members. The members got together to show him how much we appreciated him a year or so before he past. Sadly he did leave the world far too early, but MFME would have always been a WIP for his lifetime as he was a perfectionist. MFME will live on and keep his memory alive, until every last machine that it can emulate, is emulated.

Right so I have finally got round to starting a MFME cab, I have had the bits for many years and never seemed to get round to it, but the Interplay cabinet I purchased recently is working out to be perfect (and the bits left over like the Mk7 PC, MPU6, Vega etc all have a role in other projects too!). So far I have removed most of the valuable bits from the Interplay, mounted the PC, mounted and wired the i-pac buttons up (7 of them), speakers connected (got a little amp for that and used the cab speakers and wiring), got the big touchscreen working (driver installed for touch and calibrated in portrait mode). I am using a intel nuc PC which seems to be fine, need a USB hub tho! I have managed to utilise the original loom so far (see pics) as the Interplay cabinet has direct connections to the buttons (not a matrix) and also the lamps (3 colour LED on these), this has made life somewhat easier and a tidy internal cabinet wiring too (well at the moment at least, we shall see at the end). I am not yet sure if I'll work on the 3 coulor LED's or go standard 5v, I would like to see if I can make it work but they are 12v annoyingly which adds complexity. I am just at the stage of working on the pac drive now to get button lamps working then I will have the scary bits of coin mech and hoppers. I'll try and do updates as I make reasonable progress. Might be asking for help along the way! I have read many other topics on this stuff so the forum has already been a massive help.

Add handy console to the standalone GUI for MFME Tools. This log is also available to Layout Editor (when MFME Tools is invoked from there for layout extraction) which will also have its own output console as a dockable tab.

Thanks. I did check the limits I've probs hit the monthly limits. I would like to donate though to get more. As a member for so long here I would love to contribure in the form of donating to the website. I've sent a donation over as it is something I should have done a long time ago.

I found this thread over on Fruit-Emu which has pictures of Wizard's cab that you mentioned above.... it looks as if he did indeed complete it... it looks fantastic! - Wizard certainly was a man of many talents. https://www.fruit-emu.com/forums/topic/56903-thinking-of-building-my-own/ You need to be logged in to Fruit-Emu, to see all the pics but i grabbed one to show you here... I can grab the others and put them here if you think it would be of benefit for the preservation of these pictures (I say that because Fruit-Emu is seemingly a site that is inactive so who knows how long that site will remain up for?) Cheers, Gary.

Added a topper, used @Road Hog Madidea and put a police style beacon on top of that and a proper payout tray. Seriously thinking of putting a newer pc in, to take advantage of the great releases for v20. My machine is on win 7 for quizzes mainly, but I don’t play them much nowadays.

If we're necro-ing old posts, I've had a quick edit of that layout to fix/improve: - improved alphanumeric display - made buttons clickable, with keyboard shortcuts (should now work with touchscreen) - made main coinslot clickable, with 0 to insert £1 - made reel lamps and reel mask the default, which looks smoother and more realistic Alphabet - Barcrest.zip Have fun

Ok a small update on the Layout Editor component of Oasis, here is a demo of it importing an MFME Extraction (of Vectra's Popeye layout). It now places the lamps, and flickers them just to show they are there as separate editor components within the project:

or "Infinity welcomes careful coders"