johnparker007

Nice to see the bottom door art!

I got asked about this a while back on the Mecca, from a few different owners of these machines, e.g: "it has a gamble block at £10 with a double/nothing style gamble .its pretty frustrating at times and I'm certain that allowing the gamble upto the £100 jp would make it a far better machine." I am only on MPU3/4 with this right now though (as I can fix the checksum to make work on real machines etc), just curious if these games can be made more fun with a little rom patcheroo or two...

Interesting Unfortunately I'm just working on MPU3/4 at the mo, since I've got techniques to fix their checksums after hacking them (otherwise the hacks are kinda useless as they won't boot). Just generally tinkering!

Just been having a play with an idea to make the MPU3 'clubbers' a bit more exciting. Here I've done a couple of ROM hacks to make the reel spins much faster, and also the 'skill stops' (I'm sure they are actually fixed predetermined stops lol) much faster. At around 0:50 in the video, I have a gamble, and you can see it going up on the alpha display, when I hit Double... until I get to £4.80. At that point the gamble sequence continues, but I no longer have the flashing start button to continue gambling, so I have to collect some of the win. Is this the infamous 'Gamble block' people have mentioned to me before? Apparently there were these blocks to stop you gambling up to say £100... but also in early ROMs that are not dumped, these blocks didn't exist, and were only introduced later. So yeah, is this definitely the 'gamble block'? I may try to figure out how to remove it if so...

Yep that works too, though if a new updated DX layout comes out, it wouldn't then work for the user immediately, you would have ongoing maintenance of that FML hash -> rom name lookup table. Both workable approaches anyway, should be a great feature

The CRC stuff was pretty old, for more recent projects I've done I've generated a SHA1 hash (for interoperability with MAME, and 'effectively' zero risk of a collision which would mean a misidentification could occur), but of the actual ROM file contents itself, rather than just the filename character string... so then it doesn't matter what the rom file is named as (that is referenced in the .gam file); you are only comparing the actual raw file byte data for a match (not the filename). If you choose to go SHA1 route, you'll also be able to do more stuff, like figure out from a MAME rom zip (named any random thing) which internal MAME rom name it is, and then have the video game themes/cabs etc indexed off that, so they'll be able to be automatically downloaded/installed. Good luck with it all! Edit: I think you said before you're coding FruitBar in c++, so you could use something like this: https://github.com/clibs/sha1 ...so once you have the example working of say: SHA1_CTX sha; uint8_t output[41]; char *buf = "abc"; ...instead read the entire ROM file byte data into a byte array pointed at by char *buf All fun and games lol

Sounds good man! I've done the ROM CRC trick before for an FME project, so then it'll usually work on a few different revisions of the layout, since the ROMs are still the same (I'm sure you'll already know this, but just in case - the ROM filenames used by the layout are stored in the .gam files in text, so you can just grab those ROM text rows to get the filenames).

Looks good man Out of interest were you thinking about a way so that once a 3d machine has been 'skinned', that skin could upload to server... and then other users could download that skin? So if they have a Toastbusters layout set up in your launcher, they could right click it, and choose 'get skin', and choose it, rather than having to build it themselves. Ultimately you could even have it recognise the ROMs (from within the .gam file), by having the ROM file CRCs uploaded... so then any layout using the same Toastbusters ROM could auto-download the correct 3d skin without any user intervention. Dif is hosting Arcade Sim for no cost, via a file server setup, I'd imagine they would extend you a similar setup if you went down that road. Apologies if this is already the plan haha! Looking cool anyway

"the flashing displays will be an interesting one to overcome" @appstrader Indeed I guess there's two main approaches with the flashing lights/segment displays etc on fruit machines: (a) record video of each machine running its attract mode flashing lamps etc in MFME, and then map the polygonal areas of the video to the rectangular textures for the quads representing the rectangular glass panels on your models or (b) go the ArcadeSim route, and fully reconstruct the layouts so the lamps/segment displays etc are all rendered in code and updateable (via data captured running from a 'data layout' in MFME via image scraping, to provide an attract mode recording of the pure data) I suspect for your use case, option (a) would be better, as option (b) requires that you build a full 3d model of each individual fruit machine including lamps, displays etc just to add it. With option (a), it's certainly much more straightforward to add new machines. Though, I'm a bit hungover to be fair haha, and there could be a whole other approach I've completely missed Look forward to seeing how you go about implementing the feature. If you decide to go the route of option (b), I'm happy to share some code that would help you with that approach, but it does get fairly complicated and tedious - I only did it since I had to anyway to make the machines playable from live rom emulation... if they only had to do fixed attract modes, I'd have been more considering option (a) for minimal time investment to add new machines! Good luck with this new wave of FruitBar2 dev

Doing ok ta, and hope you are good too man Keep up the good work, the 3d cab system looks like a really promising feature!

@appstrader nice work on the 3d cabinet renderer! If you'd like the fruit machine models (and Electrocoin Goliath video game cab) in ArcadeSim I could provide the .fbx's for you - we'll have to check if @Spidy21982 is cool with that first..? ...as most of the new versions of cabinets are his great work. Looking forward to seeing FruitBar continue to evolve

Nice game this, they knew their target demographic I have been dabbling with an idea of doing a 'blocky' shoot'em up for the Speccy on and off for a few years. I'd made a 8x4 Atari 2600 background style system that avoided colorclash, but moved to this new technique provided by a coder Denis, allows avoiding color clash and plenty of sprites, game will prob be done in like 10 years lol, got to code in z80 assembler for maximum speed, so it's a bit of a ballache to write...

A couple of 2p oldies from that era that stand out; Always Eight, Rat Race. You might like JPM Rollercoaster, same era as Indiana Jones.

Your layouts are great, always good lighting levels

I think your rep points can take a few whippys lol

Nice Game made by Retrosouls / Denis Grachev, he's a whizz with the multicolour techniques on the Speccy!

There is a emulator launcher frontend called FruitBar by @appstrader that has some MFME/fruit machine-specific features

I don't believe so unfortunately (driving alpha segment/alpha matrix display). There are ways (screen scraping from a 'data layout' like how Arcade Sim does it... or direct memory scraping - which is kinda less bodgy but I didn't get it working properly as I moved over to screen scraping, for a universal approach), no straightforward way at this point. If someone were inclined they could perhaps write a program that would hook into MFME to do things like this, it would require coding skills though.

More Romeo Knight goodness