HongKong Phooey

We know in the past that silence has been the norm and it doesn’t work. We just wanted to try and explain why we did things we did

evening everyone just want to give a quick explanation over our reaction to the events today and stick everything in one spot so it’s nice and clear. We knew when we released MVFME that it would create a buzz that had not been seen for years and given that we had a few false starts we rushed the release out. There should have been safeguards in place to make sure only the 10 (we even missed listing one of their launch games in our hurry lol) could install and run. This is not us dictating what you could all play. We knew it could play a lot more (infact we didn’t know to what extent we had got running until serious mass testing took place) but we also knew that we could have spent the next 3 months of the testers testing games, finding loads that worked but finding issues on others which we would then try and fix and then the cycle starts again and again. We also didn’t know how the launcher would behave outside of the closed environment so we went for basically the first 10 games we had running what we deemed perfectly with a variety of different features and game styles. what shocked us was the lack of issues. The crash logs some have posted and were seen on @Chopaholicvideo was because of the exit game button being used which force quits the game rather than using the on screen menu button which is the only option on the cabinet to quit a game. Exit game button was a tester option that never got turned off. Apart from that it seems most other issues were from a touchscreen being used that was a different type to the original cabinet which caused the game to miss the button touches. The t7 monitor touchscreen is basically a mouse click. The newer touch screens use a different system and they fail. We built a stable platform that could be built on and more features added to and that was the aim of the beta release. which brings me on nicely to the next issue. The onscreen buttons. As was pointed out, other games can run but have issues with the onscreen buttons not working. This was the reason for the force exit game button on the hw panel. It was so testers can force quit a game if they loaded it and on screen buttons didn’t work. ALL those games were listed as part working and got parked to try and find a pattern. If we had shipped with some games not working fully it would have made the touch screen issue a lot harder to find the cause of because there would have been hundreds of reports of buttons not working when it’s a know issue. Infact about 8 builds before the release build we actually had a pop up come up on some of the games each time you launched it to inform you of the known issues incase we had to launch with those problems. We hated it, the testers hated it and we went back to the code and and tried to find the issues. We found some of the blockers on the touch buttons not working. But we still have a large amount that are still not responding. If we can solve that issue then it opens up a LOT of games. we code, we test, we code again, we test, we sort out an issue with one block of games, we go back to known working games and find it breaks one of them so then we have to find why a system on the real machine that runs any game doesn’t do the same on the emulator. We are sick of Ida pro logs and scans. We are sick of debugging messaging calls between tcp stacks and exes but every analysis creates a bit more of the picture and we didn’t realise until just after launch how much of the picture we had. For a laugh we started to try t8 bpaks and some worked and worked well. At that point we knew the back end was good because if it can just install a bpak we had never examined before and run it then it must be accurate. We tried equinox bpaks and they failed with vgap errors. all we want is for everyone to have the most complete and accurate experiences with the emulator. We don’t want to have to spend days implementing systems to totally lock people out and implementing DRM and shit like that because it will only impact those who want to use it properly (as all DRM does). Anything can be circumvented if you are determined enough to, hell MVFME itself is proof of that, so layers will be added to try and stop this happening again. and just to give another example of why a trickle release is good. If we had pulled off a total miracle and had everything running day one you all would have stuck with the games you know. You would have missed some obscure but quite good games that were just there. This way we feel you will have time to play the games, check them all out and go “never seen that before, but I quite like it”. Or go “what a heap of shit, why did they waste time with that” but at least you will have had a go. and finally with some control over the release titles we can try and avoid drawing attention to us from manufacturers. If we suddenly started putting community black knight or burn em up (don’t even bother trying them. They don’t even work on our current build lol) on the list of titles we would have a cease and desist on our lap quicker than you can play £100 off on a B3 lol. We are covering our backsides and trying to make sure we stay out of trouble anyway so much for a short explanation. I’ve gone on a bit but just wanted to put our side over. All we ask in the future is if you do find anything like that out please keep it to yourself and even better let us know. We all make mistakes HKP and Marvin

Evening everyone hope you are all enjoying the t7 games. been a few reports of games crashing on launch. We think we know the issue. Do you have your folder on the desktop or on a folder that one drive links to? If so move it to a folder that is not backed up automatically. MVFME moves files at runtime to get the games running and one drive locks them when it sees them to upload them. Once locked MVFME cannot open them and this causes a crash. To always be safe put the folder on the root of a drive like c:/MVFME and all should be good

So one new reported bug was game could be selected on a touch screen but could not be played via touch screen. Now the only issue there is the only touch screen I have is an 800x480 touch screen so it had to be tested on that. Good news is bug is fixed and for those wanting the ultra mini cabinet you can use the big tree tech hdmi5 screens. T7 in the palm of your hand, literally

Na crypto miner built in mate

I have a worse idea than that. Cat d version only

You will all be testing soon

Cashino is in the launch list of t7 games.

Funny you should ask Josh this morning we deployed what we hope is a final beta. 3 out of the 4 beta testers have all reported positive feedback, the 4th hasn’t had a chance to test. Up until 11pm last night we didn’t actually have a stable build running outside of the dev system but found the issue and everything works as it should. sorry for the lack of updates but we took the decision to go radio silent until we had something we could tell you and everything is positive news. we are just in the final stages of testing a few features, one of which will blow you away we think and it’s not community (YET!) the initial build is t7 only and has 9 games of various ages and categories. we don’t want to say any more or give a definite release date just in case something major comes up but considering that so far the biggest “bugs” that have been reported is a slight clipping off the right side of the game window and you can install the same bpak twice then they are very minor things. IF everything goes to plan we will be setting the emulator free to everyone in the next 3 days it’s coming and one of the testers even had the games rendering perfectly on a 5k screen and it looks amazing and runs smoother than it ever did on the real machine not long now we promise

I’m not going to stop working because of one person who is worried the value of his cabinet is going to go down lol. Actually, on the road map further down the line is a replacement front end for an actual cabinet so you can get past the 40 game limit and install hundreds of games and actually play in real play on a real cabinet. But first priority is getting this one game 100% with no exe patching. We are one step away from that

Ok found one issue. We thought we had solved the hasp issue which blocks start button from working. Well we had solved it in a way. The hasp from my machine was still plugged into the pc (yes contrary to what someone thought im not that poor i dont have a machine lol). The emulated game was actually communicating with the real hasp which actually is quite a breakthrough for various reasons Anyway back to trying to remove that requirement

Ok just to update everyone. it seems while everything was local it was not too bad but as soon as we passed the install files to testers we went from 27 games working down to 2. All the Astras broke and most of the t7 games had regressive errors where we patched for a new game it should not have broken old stuff but the installers were breaking it. Testers were getting anti virus warnings all over the place because of an exe patching files and overwriting DLL files which means that approach is not useable. one of the patches that was killing everything was the patch to enable the start button as it was disabled. This was a dirty bodge and we thought we had got away with it. Seems we got lucky with the first game we picked so with the information from the testers we have rolled right back and changed plan. We are retesting the Neptunes treasure again and trying to make it work with no exe patches which has many benefits longer term but short term breaks everything. I will hold my hands up and say this was my fault. We had a run of stuff starting to run and rather than check everything off fully I pushed to move on to get quantity, which affected quality. the new plan is get Neptunes working with no patches and everything including pots to run but we have nothing to show you and don’t know when we will sorry, we will keep working

Aww I wanted to see what was being said. Especially after getting this belter

Quick update on progress Testing on a laptop with 16gb ram i7-6600u 2.60Ghz processor and intel hd graphics 520 128mb most t7 games running fine. Astra on the other hand is booting to game screen but very slow and can’t see buttons to click them will be working on sorting that today

Spot on. When we started the testing tonight we were aiming for 40 games. After testing and finding some didn’t work as expected or crashed after some gameplay (we did minimal testing when writing to get a quick snapshot) that has trimmed down to 26 but that’s 26 we are happy to put out as they stand. we know it’s still going to be a bin fest with people saying “why isn’t this game included? Where can I get the files?” but please understand we have put in many many late nights and countless hours of work just to get to this stage. MFME launched with about 5 games and look where it is now with probably 20 years of development. This is 3-4 months work on and off and 2 weeks of intensive coding and testing. I have just backed up the whole project folder while another build is being done to give it a test on a separate computer. This is the first time MVFME has left the dev computers and it could totally bomb or just work. We found an issue today with the Astra games loading configs off a different drive which just happened to have Astra config files on it. If we had not spotted that then Astra was off the menu. This wasn’t in our code it was in the game code. Little things like this will cause games to drop off the list so we can’t say game x works because if we have to take it off people will be moaning it’s not there

Maybe because even we don’t know what’s going to make the cut yet

Well tonight we closed the games for launch. If we didn’t do this we would just keep adding games and it would never come out lol. The launch list is about 40 games, cannot give an exact number as we might find one has broken or doesn’t work right on deeper testing. Now I am sat here installing each one, one at a time, testing all functions, making a note if you have to quit by keyboard or on screen or if the onscreen start doesn’t work and you have to use space to spin. We can fix these but again it’s time to release this to you all. Enough teasing. my tests will take probably two evenings then it’s passing to the testers who will try on various hardware and report back. Depending on their findings it’s then pack it all into an installer and get it out. When it that be? It will be soon unless a killer bug is found that can’t be fixed but it’s looking promising. Adding Astra to the launcher has killed t7 installation but that will be something stupid It’s coming soon. Not long now we promise

The game api is vital but the sim api shows the minimum needed to get a game to run

I think the t7 only badge has gone now that Astra is working. But you are right, technically late t7 and early t8 are similar but late t7 games are not running yet

Can’t beat a bit of classic click bait

Honestly we haven’t tested yet on a non high end pc but given that the originals were running on low end devices they should be low spec. Will try tonight and report back some keep ram and some clear. Again we are working on it

Well this is to announce that all development on T7Emu is ceased That got your attention didn’t it the reason its ceased is because it’s now known as MVFME (multi video fruit machine emulator). this morning we got these running so the name is changed to reflect that work needed on the back end to add new system in and make sure it all works as a single entity but hopefully we will be able to say it plays party time and crazy fruits

We are not looking for donations. This isn’t about the cash to us. Yes it has been talked about but as yet it’s undecided. can I make a suggestion. Use the money you are going to donate to the project to get the mega account upgrade for a month and download the bpaks if you are that desperate to have them all. Then you can send them to anyone else that wants them

It simulates the api Don’t we all. £200 a month for last 3 months on dev tool costs to get the project this far and you are moaning about £5 but you don’t hear us moan about it. Just google the cost of IDA pro and other tools that you would need to do this project at the speed we are working

Then throw mega a few quid and remove the download restrictions. It’s about £5 for a month and then cancel the subscription.