johnparker007

I believe the poor play is down to these basic checksum bypass patches/basic chr prot/lamp bypasses, like my system does at present... I know a couple that actually behave differently in MFME along with a real Cloud 999... in the future I'll do a better solution for the checksum bypass and chr stuff protection stuff, that I suspect will fix the gameplay issues (the additional reads don't really happen on the 6809 side from what I can see, even though you see them when probing). The gotcha is that is may need additional free space, there's not much free bytes in those ROMs! Once I've finished up this basic bypass MPU3 patcher, I'll be back on Arcade Sim anyway, so be a while before I can get into that stuff... But plan is to sort out 'stealth bypass'... and then can test for known issues with the 'basic bypass' method, which should then be fixed - fairly optimistic that will sort things out - it's just getting the damn time to work on it! Good luck with your future hobby projects anyway, I'm sure you'll find something cool to hack

@andrew96 totally man I've recently had a situation where my current approach for MPU4 patching doesn't work for Cloud 999 on real hardware. Works perfectly fine on emulator! Patching's currently a bit of a bodge, at least my ones are... currently I bypass the checksum, though I suspect the machine may 'know'... it's always a struggle for free time to work on these things though... Better way, which is a classic old way, is to find some spare bytes, figure out/decomp the algo it's using to build the checksum, then simple use a brute force or whatever to get the required bytes to get your patched ROM (with say just a simple lamp bypass routine, and chr routine BNE/BEQ swap) so it has the original checksum, and job's a good'un. Can try finding/patching the actual expected checksum, but that can have other issues. Coincidentally I've been side-tracked recently as had a request for an MPU3 patch - looked into it and they're a lot easier than MPU4 to bypass, at least the few I've tried on... the first one is winging it's way to a real machine as I type (A Lucky Strike Club MPU3) - hopefully it will work fine, it does work correctly in emulator. For your approach of building a replacement MPU4 chr chip - could something like this be used? Raspberry Pi Pico - £6.60 RP2040 microcontroller chip designed by Raspberry Pi in the United Kingdom Dual-core Arm Cortex M0+ processor, flexible clock running up to 133 MHz 264KB of SRAM, and 2MB of on-board Flash memory Castellated module allows soldering direct to carrier boards 26 × multi-function GPIO pins https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-Pico/dp/B09KVB8LVR/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3SG98I7DSFFJI&keywords=pi+pico&qid=1645125431&sprefix=pi+pico%2Caps%2C118&sr=8-3 If programmed correctly, could it read/write the correct voltage signals through those GPIO pins? It could be updated since it's just software, so the software could support a library of machines.. though it would require some kind of socket I guess, so it starts to get expensive - since you'd realistically need socket+RPi per machine. Plus it'd need power from somewhere... so not a perfect mod, but it could perhaps work

Sounds like it's a jad & jar file you have? If so then it's in J2ME (microedition of Java to run on phone's KVMs (kilobyte virtual machines)). If you want to run it on Windows desktop, you could use something like: https://sourceforge.net/projects/freej2me/ I haven't tried this, though j2me is relatively simple to emulate. In theory you could even run it on an Android phone via an android j2me emulator! But it would not run under MFME.

I thought this was pretty cool, a MiSTer starting different cores games from physical games in a recreation of WH Smiths computer section TLDW: he's using a handheld scanner, and has put small QR code labels on all of his various games (which are all shrink-wrapped in plastic to add to the realism of the shop experience). So the the scanner sends the code to some kind of middleware, than then tells the FPGA "Hey, now run Sonic The Hedgehog on the Megadrive" or whatever is scanned. Many ways to implement this have been around for ages, yet I don't think I've ever seen it done, I think it's a first... a true 'reality' frontend for retro gaming!

@Psycon How this works is you set in MFME to reflect what you are actually hearing, it then mixes this over both channels. If it's only coming out of the right speaker: Select Right in settings, to have it come out of both If it's only coming out of the left speaker: Select Left in settings, to have it come out of both

Looking good!

Hiya mate The keyboard shortcuts for the layout buttons are stored inside the .fml file... the .gam file is updated when you exit MFME normally (which updates various data depending on machine, along with .ram and potentially other 'save' files). No keyboard shortcuts are saved in the .gam file.

It's all totally understandable man I'm lucky enough to work in an industry where drug taking is not so frowned upon (which is handy as I kinda cane them)... but back in the day I've worked in (safety critical) places like GTRM (railway maintenance) - where any mention of drugs was highly taboo, and engineers doing maintenance would be regularly random spot-tested. It's all hypocritical of course with the legality of alcohol... but these are the times we live in. Your real professional life has to take priority, it's the right call. On a side note re the hypocritical side of UK drugs policy; I had a friend who enjoyed a casual weekend toke, cannabis was his drug of choice - he really didn't get on well with alcohol, it just didn't do much for him. Once he started doing HGV work, he was subject to the random drug tests. So then when we would catch up for a little weekend session, he'd moved over to doing coke as a weed replacement! Purely because it's not detectable by Monday, whereas cannabis hangs around in your system for ages... and he knew of a couple of other HGV guys doing the same strategy. Also a massive pain for me, as then once I'd sunk a few ales I'd of course go fiending into the chop as well... though I wasn't quite up to the level of a 'chopaholic' for the most part

I only became aware of your channel after you made some Arcade Sim vids, but I then watched some of the other videos too, all very watchable chill videos. I know what you mean though, with recounting personal memories and whatnot on there it's all right out in the open, which can be problematic. Thanks for the entertaining and informative videos anyway, it was a fun ride man

Yeah - I guess the anonymity puts a damper on an idea I had, to make a public spreadsheet that was an 'alias matrix'. So it'd have most recent name on left, then previous ones in the columns moving to the right. One row per actual person... But to be honest I haven't been massively plagued by this, there's so many layouts that I can often just make a note move on... and like you say, when an ancient layout is only 768 pixels tall, there's usually a higher res one that is better to convert over. I guess this thread has a generally relevant title as it is So if I get stuck again, I'll post layouts on here and draw on the knowledge of the community - much appreciated!

Thanks guys for clearing that up - I've made a note about duplo and Ady So do you know if Ady is the same person as Adydb, who did actually create some layouts?

Ah cool, thanks very much for finding it! I need to up my searching skills game... So, I see submitted by 'duplu' - is that an alias? (I've started noting these down where I can, so I can figure out who's who) .... or is it just someone else converting/uploading Pook's layout?

Thanks man - the original request was for the version by ACE, I should've put that in my post! This one by Crystal looks very similar, I've checked to see if it'll still scratch their nostalgic itch Cheers man

I've had a request for a machine, the best of the two layouts from the legacy section is this: The only info is that is was converted at some point using FMEConv. So... is this an orphaned layout? I need to know if there's anyone I can realistically ask for permission for this conversion (to Arcade Simulator), presumably from an older fruit machine emulator. Cheers

My first hands on experience of writing code on a real computer was on a friend's 48k+ Sinclair Spectrum (having learnt general basic from books in the library before that, and just 'pretending' to write and tweak stuff with pen and paper!). And then my first computer was a 128k +2 (grey model, that still had the original Sinclair-designed internals). I'm sat in my home office right now, and doing a quick count up - I have 14 Sinclair Spectrums in here in various states of disrepair, I will fix them all one day (and a +2a and a +3, but they don't count as were redesigned internally by Amstrad). As a kid I remember enjoying Treasure Island Dizzy (and trying to find all the gold coins!) immensely - little did I know many years later I'd be working with Neil, who drew those very graphics... using a Sinclair Spectrum to create them and Sinclair Microdrive to save them!

"He was still working on his inventions last week "because that was what he loved doing", said Ms Sinclair." A sad day indeed At least he was working on his passion projects right up to the end - RIP Clive.

Thanks very much @Clo06 that's perfect! Layout now working, good to know for the future - I guess there'll be a few needing that setting

I've had a request to make a Chr free ROM for the MPU4 machine Cash Counter... so I got the converted .fml from @Geddy's excellent legacy pack - thanks very much for that! The machine doesn't complete startup - if I add an Alpha to get additional info, it displays "NO DATAPORT COMM" when it stalls: Does anyone know of a fix for this please?

Wow it does sound super complicated to try reverse engineer that chip! Again, I'm not an electronics guy really, but would it be possible to actually use some other more modern component that would go in the same socket (or perhaps with an 'adapter') and could run more complex code/logic... some kind of FPGA... if you had something you could deploy compiled C code on (I think you could do that with those 'Pic' chips - then you could just write the code to emulate the operations in there, and not be constrained by the Pal/gal chip architecture. This is probably totally not possible for a bunch of electronic reasons haha, just trying to think outside of the box