johnparker007

Been working on the layout generation stuff still, got it generating some now from these autoselected/autoscraped layouts. This new progress has highlighted more bugs to deal with and other issues... up to generating ~10 MPU4 layouts so far before a critical failure: I've realised I need to do yet more with the MPU4 scraping, as I need to scrape the Characteriser lamp tables, so that where it is wrong in the MFME layout, I can correct the lamp numbers to work with the correct Characteriser lamp table in MAME (otherwise the lamps are scrambled). So I'll start scraping some other platforms tomorrow until I can get time to implement that for MPU4, since apart from the Characteriser, the scraping side is generally complete for what's needed for these MAME internal layouts. Another slight show-stopper, is that due to how MAME's internal layout renderer works, my fancy new shaded, rounded corner lamps may have to go (sob, I spent ages getting them looking nice!)... I might look into working out the layouts that are likely to cause issues, to then make them fall back to the old minimal solid rectangles... not sure yet, as then the layouts would be randomly inconsistent on the lamp/button shading, which might be worse. The test layouts I developed it on, while they had plenty of lamps, the lamps were a consistent size... but, for each lamp of a different size, MAME has to generate an internal texture, so a simple layout such as this has broken it, purely due to it needing to make more textures for varying sized components: So running that in MAME results in this While the array size of this could be increased (in MAME source), I don't think Cauvas will be on board with that, due to the increased memory hit on constrained ports of MAME. So this layout (hacked a little to render for demo purposes): Would instead have much more basic lamps/button shading, like this (the original 2016 mfme2mame layout): Bit of a shame, but at the end of the day, the purpose of it is just to get functional layouts in MAME for all the games, I think most people will be playing them in Arcade Simulator rather than these text layouts anyway! But they are important to have, so then it's easy to work in emu dev in MAME, and be able to properly play the machine... ah well, gotta keep on keeping on, this was always going to be a massive job lol

It's a known issue, it's on the Known Issues sheet, linked in my sig

Now have the 'border' MFME component scraping set up, that I'd somehow missed... along with some other things, to help me put layouts to one side that won't currently scrape without disrupting the overall flow, since there's a lot of scraping to get through. Going to restart the scrapes for MPU4 since that's where I first started seeing warnings that I was missing border components... Example of new Border component in Dennis The Menace MPU4 extract:

Great work as always mate Hobby time is a struggle with real life and jobs, we make progress though in the end! Thanks for the build and ROMs - with that exe including blackbox, I should be able to romident the 7x mfme blackbox layouts with their MAME names. Started on the MPU4 scraping, but hit some bugs that I need to fix, then restarting early next week during the days... next big job alongside this is some semi-automated reel symbol identification (I think a back of the envelope calc suggested over 200,000 reel symbols across the 3,000 layouts, so I need to develop some tools to automate it a bit!).

That's great, thanks @Altharic

A little update, have been working on more for setting up the batch extracting of the auto chosen layouts for MAME internals which seems just about ready now, and also now setting up the config scraping, have set up MPU4 so far, rest should be a lot quicker now I've done one page - it is this additional data needed per layout: (which differs by tech - will be useful for batch tweaking MAME drivers per game to have the correct 'traits'). I'm about ready to start the next stage of the extracting during the days at least while I'm working on the other PC The scraper is fragile and needs baby-sitting, it has a fundamental crashing issue that I've not been able to solve - I didn't anticipate I'd be attempt to batch scrape 3000 layouts, so I'll have to see how painful it goes! This will be getting underway tomorrow am... Already done the extracts for SRU - though I couldn't progress as I don't have the revised MAME romsets, same for Blackbox (though I suspect I have another rom ident issue to sort out like we saw with the MPU5 roms). Perhaps @SomeRandomGuy could hook me up with the new MAME roms for those two techs please? I do have the MPU4 roms however, and that seems the biggest one to try work out the kinks as best as can be with the scraping tech as it stands, since from my graph above it looks to have 774 layouts total to be extracted, a popular tech Alongside limited graphical extraction (I'm skipping lamp & background images to save time as they're not needed for these MAME internal layouts, only the reels), this is the current json file that is generated for a layout for those interested - I suspect this will stay on zero downloads, it's heavy reading lol Chase_The_Ace_Cards_(Empire)_[C01_8jp].zip

MPU5 looking a bit better now @wolf676 I think some of the MPU5 Roms may have been patched to run in MFME... I was just checking the first rom, and getting very few additional matches. Then I compared the two (MAME vs MFME layout rom), and found some altered bytes, that looks very much like a cheeky patch I then had it test against all four parts and got a lot more matches Since MPU5 and Scorpion 5 are the newest supported platforms, it makes sense there's a higher proportion missing from those.

I did have it on checking further in my Art folder, it's from an old 3d MAME frontend (a little bit like an early Arcade Sim!).

I did already have a feature in the backlog related to this: "Camera X/Y/Z/angle controls somewhere like Visual Pinball has? Kinda nice for fine tuning the camera position to just where I like it." I have added a an idea for another feature, that'll be a much easier to use 'set it and forget it' option, in the settings menu: (bool) Ensure all panels fully in frame or for more user control: (bool) Ensure topmost panel fully in frame (bool) Ensure topmost panel fully in frame (bool) Ensure leftmost panel fully in frame (bool) Ensure rightmost panel fully in frame This will be used for machines such as the Streak in casino cab, so the user can be stoody further away when playing so as to seeing the entire topbox and/or belly glass. One a 3 player party time, could be used to ensure some/all of the left/right side machines are visible. I think this idea will be more useful, so you'd simply turn on the setting Ensure all panels fully in frame, and then machines would always have play camera so that you'd see the top of that topbox and the whole belly glass. It would mean you would be stood further back for casino cab machines like The Streak, 3 player Partytime etc, and the buttons etc would be a little smaller so it all fits on screen. Yes those cabs are pretty similar, I'll perhaps adapt the existing model to make some of those others that are very similar And ta for the model, we should be ok as Spidy has made some already (though I've downloaded a copy for safekeeping, might come in handy for proportion checking), they'll be developed in Arcade Sim models at a later stage

Currently working on MAME stuff, there's a lot of steps involved in this, will ultimately be used to drive the emulation in Arcade Sim with various advantages. When it's finally done from my end, I'll be looking at getting mame to work with AS then back to JPM Electra machines.

Absolutely, as it should be - I plan to do that using @wolf676's tools above as part of the process of getting all the unmatched ROMs added to the relevant MAME drivers as new games/variants

Ah cool Can't beat your own tools though - I am going to use those tools you posted above, so I can batch out command line process from Unity - thanks again for posting, I had no idea what was going on with those MPU5s!

Thanks, good to make sense of why there are some that match!

Thanks, that's great info! Also it does explain what's going with MPU5, in the second chart here... though it does have some matches, I'll see about batch-fixing these hacked MFME ROMs to be the original data, and regenerate the charts, hopefully MPU5 will then be looking a lot better A small number of the MPU5 games have matched, even before doing the byte shuffle, these are: Barcrest Austin Powers (Barcrest) Barcrest Bonkers (Barcrest - Red Gaming) Barcrest Elvis Gold Rush (Barcrest) Barcrest Elvis Red Hot Roll (Barcrest) Barcrest Elvis Super Streak (Barcrest) Barcrest Horn Of Plenty (Barcrest) Barcrest Hot Rocks (Barcrest) Barcrest Run For Your Money Club (Barcrest) [c] Barcrest Seven Deadly Spins (Barcrest) Barcrest Spinsation (Barcrest) Barcrest Squids In (Barcrest) BWB Magic Carpet (BWB) BWB Reel Thunder (BWB) Empire Bonanza Club (Empire) [c] Empire Hot Shots (Empire) Red Gaming Aftershock (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Demon Streak (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Fruits U Sir (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Funfair (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Hypalinx (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Jewel Strike (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Lock 'n' Load (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Lock 'n' Load Club (Red Gaming) [c] Red Gaming Nitro (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Paint The Town Red (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Rainbow Runner (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Rampage (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Red Dwarf (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Red X (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Take Two (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Top Dollar (Red Gaming) Red Gaming Zig Zag (Red Gaming) Vivid Car Wash (Vivid) Vivid Connect 4 (Vivid) Vivid Magnificent 7's (Vivid) Vivid Manic Streak Features (Vivid) Vivid Raise The Roof (Vivid)

You're doing amazing work man! I'll def check in with David about the new ROMs - they're spread across the platforms, but I noticed a large showing of MPU5 games...

I think for now just doing this based on the legacy section will be a good stage in the process, the only thing it won't protect against is: Hacked texts might be obvious ("JOHN PRESENTS ADDERS & LADDERS" etc) though would still need to be checked by a human... roms hacked to run in MFME, not so obvious. I need to do all this work anyway, I'll check in with David when I need to talk to him about all this stuff in general, see what he reckon is best

Does the fruit machine dat have muchother info per ROM, such as Manufacturer, Platform (MPU3/Scorpion 4/etc?) For ones that are not emulated by MFME (ie in the legacy section as part of a working layout) this could be super useful, as the emulation bugs can be ultimately worked out in MAME to get them running (with exception of maybe some MPU6/Scorp 6 protection stuff). For the ones with layouts, there's more that I can pull over (damn only realising now, I've got to doo all the scraper work for these per tech Config pages yet!): Which are then useful for the MAME driver, e.g: for MPU4, these settings lead to which sub-driver they end up in, or inform setting up of 'traits'.

Yeah I have talked about this with David many moons ago, there was a large collection they used. I'd not thought about this, but this will be a real preservation push! As while I'm currently just running this for the 'selected' layout per Dif Legacy Section game folder (the one autochosen as best candidate to make a MAME internal classic for debugging/playtesting)... I can run it again, but for all the layouts... So I should be able to generate some kind of spreadsheet/csv, that will list every missing ROM from the dif legacy section, along with various stuff like its tech platform, DIP settings, name, manufacturer etc - along with the zipped ROMset and sound ROMs. I'll have to talk to the MAME guys about how best to get all these in - there's always more work haha! Once they're officially in, I can do a second pass, to generate their internal classic layouts.

Found a couple of other minor issues, but think it's all working correctly now, I recorded kicking this big batch process off for those interested Worried when the first 3 'AC Games' roms printed up NO MATCH! But then things settled down, so these AC Games are just not added to MAME (yet, that will be another part of this work, to get all missing ROMs in dif legacy added to correct mame drivers with related metadata). I saw the odd NO MATCH flash up with the Ace ones that followed, so MAME is clearly a bit behind on the ROMs front... I suspect it will only be some manufacturers/techs... I'll code up some basic auditing probably Sunday, so I can generate a report of missing ROMs per tech, and work out how best to get them added to MAME

I think I'm there with the coding for the automatic Mame rom identification process now The mame rom name circled in purple was auto-populated into my big layout database via this new system: I'm going to set it running to process all the 'autochosen' layouts for making the MAME classics now, and keep an eye on it (in case of crashes) as I go about my Saturday chores. Looked to be around 5-6 seconds per layout so the ~3,000 layouts should get processed today, unless it runs into an issue I've not seen in the mini-test of the SRU layouts I'm expecting a small fraction of the very new rom dumps to not be in MAME, so they will then be able to be packaged up, and added to the relevant MAME drivers as separate work, ready for current/future emulation.

There is not, it is full screen mode only (this had to be the case, due to the various stuff I have to do to make MFME scraping work with it). I also use OBS when I record videos of Arcade Sim to demo stuff in development - these are my OBS settings, I think the key thing is having it set to capture display (see purple arrow): then it'll record even full screen games... (You might not see a very good framerate while you are recording, as recording adds additional load so needs a hefty PC).

Very long day at work today, still managed to squeeze in a bit of time on the automated MAME rom identification though Here I have my early code batch calling Mame to get its output for trying to identify the layouts on SRU platform only: Looks like around 5 seconds per id, so fine for this big one off batch task. Next step is getting very latest mame.exe, and generating a full gamelist... so then I can take the MAME output, and step through the 'words', until I find a match - if I do, then I've got a valid MAME ROM name I can apply to the data for that layout (so when I'm ultimately converting them all, I'll have the correct name MAME is expecting for the layout).

Turning my attention back to some batch processing now the majority of the required MFME 2nd stage scraping setup (pending testing) is done So the next job is back to working on the 3k layout definitions that were auto-picked to be used, and getting the relevant MAME rom name populated. Not a job to be done manually as there are so many layouts ... but there is a handy function of MAME; 'romident' - so I can run a rom from each layout through MAME and get back the specific MAME romset name (if present in the latest MAME) - here's some manual testing, not got all the batching stuff set up yet: May ultimately want these mapped to 'parent' romset name, but I'll figure that out later... it takes around 5-7 seconds to identify a Rom, so say 8 seconds total * 3,000 roms == 24,000 seconds, which is only around 7 hours to actually do this step once all the batch coding stuff is properly set up

No virtual wallet system implemented at present, it's a feature for the future. Yes, the arcade can be larger, and will be able to contain multiple copies of the same machine That twinned with the issue you had with reels suggests that your PC is only just about able to run Arcade Sim, the new 'attract mode' videos feature requires a hefty CPU, and probably also struggles on slow spinning hard drives. There will be a 'lite' mode of this in future, that will just cycle through 3 images per game (and still have the game sounds), for laptop users etc, but it's not built yet. I'd recommend disabling the settings ringed in purple, exit to the main menu and reload the arcade, and you should find it all runs a bit smoother on your laptop It auto-updates itself on startup - so when new patches become available, they install when you next load up Arcade Sim So everyone is on the latest version. There won't be any updates for another 3-6 months, as there's a ton of other work needs doing to continue improving FME with AS - but when there is, you will receive it automatically.

Also have come up with a quick fix for another longstanding issue; extracting layouts where they are not very wide, and so the menu bar spills onto another row, e.g: It is a quick fix (a one line special ), and only works for the extraction stage - but that's all we care about for now For making future new AS machines whose actual emulation is driven by MFME I would need to deal with these manually - but I think it's ok to kick that can down the road... considering all the work for a long time is going to be around MAME dev / integrating latest raw MAME.EXE into AS as the default emulation backend (hoping to keep support for MFME emulation backend as a legacy Windows-only option, but it's not the focus) - i.e: for MAME-driven machines, once the layout has been extracted, MFME is no longer involved in the process, so this menu bar overspill won't be an issue.