johnparker007

Thanks very much for the permission, I'll get you added to my sheet for future conversions! I am planning to do some more old Vogue/mpu4 machines (like Roller Coaster), I have various other necessary work to get done first (to save me from doing some time consuming things twice). Bear with me current strategy means a lull in new machines now, but in months to come I'll be ahead and have lots more available.

Thanks for letting me know it worked okay for ya

Hiya mate - it's still a very early tech demo, lots of things don't work you cannot add actual new games yourself, long term there will be many games converted and available.

Really good find mate - will come in handy I'm sure, when I get to that stage

Great find! I'm doing a lot of other work first at the mo (red reels need me to implement LED support etc)... but I will check this out on Sunday, should hopefully be able to get it usable with a little work. Where on earth did you find it?

Thanks man, just a quick test with some extreme settings, definitely potential though You can't beat a bit of eye candy I've played back through that vid, just any random shot looks like an arty photo! Definitely be some form of basic support for this shizzle when the next patch drops (which will be a while yet)...

And one last tech demo, before I'm away until prob Sunday - some post-processing I've ramped these settings up reeeally high here! These settings will be optional and user-configurable - looks kinda cool though, though I went overboard with the levels so it was noticeable

Thanks man I'm not planning on making any cab models by hand, at least in the short term (I'm just going to hack up the Eclipse for placeholder models, pending the Lidar->Artist models plan) so honestly no rush. Good luck getting your gameroom/mancave sorted!

Thanks for the pictures and measurements @davep180

More reels wip; - new feature so that machines in attract show what the reels were last showing when the machine was last played (even from days ago etc). So if you left Cherry - 7 - BAR, on the line, that's what shows when walking around Currently they are all just misaligned until you've played the machine in that session. - automated generation of basic reel lamps on all machines with no graphics glitches (still need work for red reels, 12/24 symbol reels) Not a fan of the '48 ON/OFF ALARMS' I've gotta say! Been rapidly turning machines on and off to test the new feature that sets up the reel positions from the last game... and those ON/OFF ALARM delays just get longer and longer. Might see if I can hack them out, since there's no setting to disable them... they're super annoying

Well when it's time to be able to put more new games in, they'll be going in temporary rescaled Eclipses - they'll not look too bad, just a bit unfamiliar

Thanks man, those prices are a fixed rental term of a year though... (12x monthly payments minimum). I may also think about buying one used, then reselling it used after the scans. There's no rush (as prices will slowly fall) since I'll be using simple placeholder models for the next rounds of new machines, by rescaling Eclipses etc. Just won't be spending ages painstakingly making crude models... since I know I have far superior models in the pipeline. Least overall work for best overall results (hopefully!)

I may be on the hunt for photos soon, but I'm putting a little thought into this Lidar scanning. I'm wary of doing work 'twice' on a big project... so while my initial thought was to hand-craft more basic models, that'd be roughly to scale - what I'm thinking now is hopping straight to the Lidar -> Artist workflow. As the results will be insanely accurate and high quality - with the right artist who's into that technical style of 3d tracing. Just had a look - you can actually hire the iPhone 12 Pro (the earliest, so cheapest model with Lidar). £114 for a couple of days which doesn't seem that crazy really. If I could perhaps find someone with a quite a few different popular machine cabinets, I could go on a scanning mission... I guess it depends if there's a retro arcade owner or home collector with a decent sized varied collection, who's up for me coming round and scanning up all their stuff haha! In the interim, if I get to the stage where I can safely continue scaling up - I was just going to make very quick 'placeholders' by scaling the Eclipse, and the MPU4 - will be fine to house older games like rolltop/genesis two glass games as a stopgap.

I have a potential long term plan for accurate, high quality, efficient (to render on modest PCs), scalable 3d models of the fruit machine cabinets... It will be a case of: - waiting for something like the used iPhone 12 Pro to come down in price (it has a lidar scanner) - finding private owners/retro fruit machine arcade owners willing to let me come out and 'scan' their machines - sourcing a good freelance 3d artist from an affordable locale (India etc), to build a working relationship with - funds for the above Lidar model scanning is really coming along - the idea is I use it to capture full 3d reference models for the artist to use along with photos for textures and support maps. Here's some examples (from a lidar iPhone): These models can be viewed in interactive 3d here: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/day-16-camel-from-edmonds-playground-c1d13305fc9d488084031114ec5e1a6a https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/day-35-frozen-mini-d799169f7ffe4faf87d658f6e68e0e25 https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/day-45-orange-chair-de50a84e21ec4b4893d191401c391f3b This is long term, to replace the 'placeholder' cabinets I've made so far. For upcoming cabinets (genesis etc), I will be doing faster mods of the existing Eclipse etc that will look pretty generic for our interim use, but be relatively quick to make (no point in spending much valuable time when they'll be replaced with high end models). They'll be fine for playing the newer (i.e. older!) machines on in the meantime. This workflow: Find friendly owners -> go out with the iPhone 12 and scan their machines -> pass over to affordable freelance 3d artist along with high quality photos, so they can create highly accurate 3d models ... seems like it'll be a realistic way to get highly accurate, future-proof (still high quality in 10-20 years, but scalable down for hardware now) 3d models. Probably be a year or two, when those phones are cheaper, and I've got a lot of the mountain of programming out of the the way first! But nice to have a proper plan for this asset issue, I've been thinking about this approach for a while

More work on the reel lamp system Managed to fix a nasty bug that was glitching the normal lamp renderer, missing lamps from previous (those should be lit): Rebuilt a modern machine with the latest, in prep for the 'red reels' work I'm hoping to get onto soon - cool to see the black reels getting lit