johnparker007

Having a quick look around, I'm surprised various BlackBox machines don't have classic/DX MFME layouts... There's more games, just some very quick youtube screengrabs of the first few... ROMs are in MAME, would prob also work in MFME since it does run some Blackbox games... Edit for info - games mentioned in the driver, some in MFME, some I couldn't find: Nudge Climber 21 Up Bell Trail The Nudge Machine Upstairs 'N' Downstairs Reel Gambler Double It Spin Up Fire Cracker Crackerjack Fiesta Oranges And Lemons Golden Spin

Currently focused on the path to developing the new art/lighting renderer, so this Full Throttle is a useful layout, as I have the 'real' artwork, plus the DX - allows me to evaluate some of this transform/upscale stuff against ground truth. But things like Blackbox/SRU/Impact/Mpu1/Mpu2/Mpu3/Mpu4/M1a/Sc1/Sc2/Sc4 off the top of my head are close to working enough to be playable via MAME (just some bugs, unemulated elements like ccTalk etc) - definitely some early era stuff in there

Been working more on the Layout Editor, and somewhat got the 'panel' view stuff started - so now a ViewQuad can be set up saved as part of the project, and the de-perspective view created: Need to design more of how this will work, so we can get multiple Views next among other things (currently that single Bottom view is somewhat hardcoded in by name, and there can only be one ViewQuad).

Yeah, I also noticed it seems to have a bit more vibrancy to the colors Always happy to get free unexpected quality wins along the path!

Been working on stuff in the layout editor: - improved zoom in/out - zooms in/out while keeping the position under the mouse cursor anchored. Still a bit janky, as the layout is currently locked to the top-left, where as in Gimp, the image is not. I'll probably replicate this as then the zoom will work better still - started implementing 'ViewQuads'. These are the quadrilaterals that we use on the perspective elements from MFME layouts; mainly rectangluar glass panels, but also buttons for instance are planned for this time around. Just have one view quad for now while it's in development. - view quads have draggable corner handles, and can be relatively quickly aligned to the corners of a perspective panel, then in the vid you see at the end we use a temp menu function to export a 'transformed' view quad image (back to rectangle from perspective). Aspect ratio is off, as I need to start thinking about the cabinet side, as those predefined panels on the cabinet are what the glass panels map to, and the aspect ratio of the output image is derived from there. View quads are loaded/saved with the project (at least this initial test one).

So back on the editor side, I fancied having a fresh go at my 'de-perspective' transform strategy (plus I have to as everything in Oasis is open source and I was using something commercial in original AS ). The 'de-perspective' stuff is how we get from an MFME DX where there is perspective in the image, back to a non-perspective image (so standard glasses are transformed back to rectangles). So we've got one written, and it's actually a little better quality than the original AS one was - so a nice surprise! This will ultimately result in the 3d machine glasses in the new Arcade Sim being a little sharper then the old ones, even before we get into the planned inbuilt AI upscaling, which will help add further clearness in some cases. Arcade Sim (original): Oasis Layout Editor (new): Definitely a bit less blurry, Catmull-Rom bicubic interpolation with cubic pixel clamping for the win! A non-zoomed in area - it's subtle, but it's definitely a little clearer with the new transform algorithm: Arcade Sim (original): Oasis Layout Editor (new):

Plus it probably lasts for what they thought the working life of the machine would be - but then arcade owners just kept them going for decades. I remember there was a couple of old MPU5s in Smithies about 5 years back, no retro angle, just running them into the ground!

Here's some of those perished adhesive foam strips from an old Cashcade - you can see white strips on the floor, plus old residue of strips on the mask/tray interface. I believe when the machine was new, there would be no inter-tray light bleed. But then as the foam perishes (the heat from the lamps probably plays a part in its demise), strips disintegrate and fall away - allowing the light to bleed across to adjacent trays. I'll prob have a slider or something so it can be adjusted between a new machine with perfect foam and no bleed, to a very old machine, with no foam left, and plenty of bleed

I've imported Full Throttle DX - then it seems the reel band values I had for Sc4 were off, so I've fixed those up to marry up with Full Throttle's reels. Something weird going on, as when I got the bottom glass number reel aligned, the top glass number reel is not aligned correctly - could be Oasis bug, could be MAME bug. It's roughly playable for now at least (in Door Open mode until we implement ccTalk in MAME). I think after those initial lamp render tests (where I'm using a single shader to render the artwork+lamps+glows as simple layers - the next stage is getting into having it as individually controllable lamps. This will involve a bunch of steps of the Layout Editor side, to pull out the perspective-removed glass panels to their own views. Then something to initially predict and arrangement for the white plastic lamp trays, with the option to edit that layer as lines/curves with handles. Though hopefully the predicted trays won't be too far off. That then allows for simulation of cross-tray light bleed (usually where the foam tape has perished). I'm thinking then I could convert those tray boundaries to signed distance field data, that a compute shader can work with, so the bleed can all be done on the GPU (rather than having a prebaked illumination for each lamp). It's all a bit bonkers, the idea being there will be a single GPU material instance per glass panel, which will just have a list of current lamp intensities from the emulation - and it will render all of the lighting effects internally in a single draw call on the GPU. This is more complicated to develop, but then it'll be efficient (like original Arcade Sim), which later will be useful for better performance when lots of machines onscreen at once, which is always key. Anyway, enough of that, here's a few credits on sc4 under the Layout Editor

I realised I'd been artificially down-rezzing some of my textures and using non-optimal texture compression, which was giving worse image quality than it should be the previous vids - this is with the correct settings, a little bit cleaner in places (bear in mind I also bodged these masks pretty quick just to make a test glass, a patient artist would be able to do a better job!) Lamps off: Lamps on:

I think there's room for both things on this site If those posts bother you, and you wanted to get fancy, you could always write a chrome plugin that hides posts that contain keywords like gambling/addiction etc.

Another update - I've added in the lamp mask and a yellow tint plus a few misc tweaks

And here's a view of lower down the glass showing the same color glow outlines, but with more different colored outlines on that part of the glass. I suspect I'm going to need to tweak how it does the brightness as the yellow/white look a lot brighter compared to say red. I'll check some youtube vids for reference

I've done a bit more on masked effects - so this is the unmasked colored outlines around text etc - that sometimes then has a second mirror outline. I've also added a small amount of the reflection to the glass in the non-mirrored areas. This will all be user-configurable, as some may prefer not having general glass reflection changing the look of the art

Cherry Master machines can be played in MAME if that's any help:

And another clunky demo of the above, with more brightly lit Indy art to reflect in the mirrored areas, viewed from a lower camera angle. I think in a dim arcade, reflecting lots of bright flashing lights, screens etc it should work pretty well

Been a little more playing with the 'mirror mask' stuff, to simulate how there would be mirrored detailing on a lot of fruit machine art. This isn't the finished thing, it's just a prototype of the effect, but it does seem to work Initially in this vid, I set the artwork texture to a random mainly black texture, so then the masked mirrored art areas are more clearly visible, reflecting the lit up Indy glass art. Then I swap in the actual artwork texture that goes with that mirror mask, and then you can see the mirrored areas reflecting with the artwork also.

Yes that is the plan for this new project

Current builds of MAME do have FME support, though a lot of work needs to be done on the emulation side of things. There are a limited number of partially/fully complete 'classic' layouts built into the MAME exe itself. For instance you could play Indiana Jones by JPM (mame rom name j6indy), that has a relatively complete clickable classic layout, there are plenty more Some only have keyboard input though which is mapped unintuitively at present.

"and if it’s on what brightness it is" - ha that is still to be implemented emulator-side, for now MAME is only modelling simply on/off Will be done of course, not a priority issue at the mo... In general, I'm currently pulling the data out in a text-based data stream. This is currently over standard stdin/out, but I do plan to move that over to a network stream (which I believe will be faster and more suitable for video data). Also, I haven't tackled getting at video output via this new (compared to the original Arcade Sim) technique yet. Not sure if I'll pull it out via my Oasis Lua plugin as a pointer, or actually as raw 32 bit values over the network stream. This class is a bit of a mess as I'm still experimenting with stuff, but it has most of the core c# side of the code that does the reading of data from mame.exe: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/blob/main/UnityProjects/LayoutEditor/Assets/_Project/Scripts/Oasis/Oasis.MAME/MameController.cs And then here is the core Lua side of the code that allows for more custom interaction/access, as a custom Oasis 'plugin': https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/tree/main/UnityProjects/LayoutEditor_ExternalAssets/Windows/MameLuaPlugins/oasis That pretty much covers how it works so far - some nice bedtime reading!

And this is a start on the transparent color layer (mixed with the mirror outline layer). Prob will just use this as it's tedious doing the outlines, I'm not an artist, or patient lol It's only for testing anyway, so should do the job:

Started looking into the glass system, to get a break from the Editor UI So I think the next test machine for a bit will be QPS Full Throttle as it runs in MAME (Door Open), and there are some super clean source artwork images for it - which saves me time having to manually draw these damn lines, which would be necessary on a less clean photo Here I've done most of the 'hard mirror' layer - so this is the 100% reflective mirror layer, usually used for outlines: Next I need to do the transparent color 'inner outlines'. They act like clear colored film, letting the light through...

mame.exe is doing the emulation, but I am doing the rendering (so no .lay files involved). There is a plan later to have MAME .lay file exports, this will mainly be to add and update the internal layouts built into mame.exe itself - this is not integral to anything though, just improves MAME. The Layout Editor will output compact 'built' layouts mapped onto the Cabinet they've been set up with in the editor (these are to be built in the Cabinet Editor from 3d models+textures out of Blender), to ultimately end up with the fully working 3d machines Then those machines can be played individually, or assembled into arcade layouts like the Arcade Sim one.

Made more progress over the weekend on the Layout Editor UI - here the Project window now has the basics of a file explorer to be able to view the assets in the project: Also more improvements to the MAME downloader progress bar (bytes downloaded, % extracted).

Been working on UI and auto-downloading stuff - here;s a demo of installing a couple of versions of MAME. v280 is where the OKI MPU4 emulation had become broken, and then after I install v281, where the bug was fixed, and then you see Andy Capp (an OKI MPU4) running (as it was fixed in v281). Progress bar, like certain other areas of the Oasis UI are using my hybrid approach, where some of the UI is using the OS and some is using the Oasis native rendering/input handling (with the dark theme). Unity themselves do this for their editor, and it helps with future portability (MacOS and Linux), so I think it's a good approach