johnparker007

I've been searching for a Artura for the ZX Spectrum for a couple of years... well on and off, gave up after the first year of not finding it, just had a look and it's on eBay for £33.. but I have no eBay account - pm-ing you @serene02 in search of a quick favour

I have this rare Saturn dev disc You can do things with it Probably worth a few quid... Edit: Looked on ebay, it's as rare as hen's teeth - they've got it listed at £700 - jeez, may have to look at flogging this - I'd be happy with half that!

Hiya mate Don't think there's a discord channel, though I think a few guys do youtube videos showcasing layouts being emulated. Glad you're enjoying the new FME tech experiments - welcome to the forum

Sounds like pinball companies, great policy - Stern have this: Company policy requires that all employees play at least 15 minutes of pinball each day. Stern himself likens the game to “magic” and readily admits that the company is “in love” with the business of pinball.

I enjoyed the slots in the mobile game Jetpack Joyride Gave you bonus stuff you could use later in the game - nice mechanic...

That was my first thought looking at the feature board, looks very Indy-like!

I was on VPForums for a while - I did a little hacking around with the source, but only uploaded one patch build (that allowed you to load VP layouts that needed more GPU memory then was available, feature was later done properly by the dev team, so it's no longer an issue). And part built a VP cab about 10 years back, but drifted away, due to lack of time. Amazing the progress in that scene

Yeah great work @Laylow with all these Dutch layout releases, much appreciated And I thought I recognised that name, I used to be quite VP-focused many years back!

I use to sequence back in the day (Noisetracker, protracker, Octamed), was good times If you sail the high seas there's this: Amiga Mods Anthology - 4cds A massive 4 CDROM-Set, 18,000+ files (Protracker, S3M, XM, Amiga Synth...) Many, many, artist represented (with their OWN permission, info-files, pics and previously unreleased mods!) from the origins of the scene (Amiga days) on up to early 1996 featuring most of the best PC-Multichannel musicians. This CD is readable under all major platforms (MS-DOS, Win, Mac-os, UNIX, Amiga-DOS...) Hope that is of use - would recommend most stuff Romeo Knight did, one of my fave scene musicians from back then Edit: also found this collection of torrents, covering a 29gb base collection plus update torrents: http://tracker.modarchive.org/

Happy birthday Chris, I hope they have fruit machines up there to tinker with You are very much missed around these forums, and I wish we could have worked on the new 3d stuff together - rest in peace dude.

You can see the effect kind of replicated just by watching some Indiana Jones flashes - I noticed recently that most of them (hold buttons flashing etc) have a ramp up/down coded into the ROM. I guess because it was an expensive license they took their time... but anyway, on a modern monitor it gives the same effect. So all machines would look similar to that, with a single frame of ramp/decay each side of the 100% lit frame(s). Right - sorry for taking this off-topic, back to the Autoplaying - gotta hit that 10K @Reg!

If it turns out to be the case that is a shame. I will continue to hold off doing any intensive work on anything like that for now, and keep working on Arcade Sim (which is emulator-agnostic, it can be driven by MAME running fruit machine data layouts). If you need any pointers on getting Cheat Engine to speed up MFME, gimme a shout, I'll perhaps knock up a very quick guide

I did actually think about this for the 'auto-player' when I was doing my turbo startup feature for arcade sim - you can just use the off-the-shelf Cheat Engine to run MFME at turbo speed once you've started the auto player. I'd put it to one side in my mind, as I am still unsure if Chris's code is now lost, or if it will one day find its way to the community. If it's certified never to come back, I was planning as a long term project to build on my DLL injection work, to develop an enhancement suite or 'player' - such that you would use MFME as the emulation core, and it would render the 2d layouts via Unity engine, and have various things like support for bulb 'ramp/decay', turbo start until machine has booted (like you can already see in Arcade Sim)... and whatever else can be dreamed up within the contraints of DLL injection hacking to enhance the final released MFME version. But yes, you can definitely make autoplay run fast (insanely fast if it's pre-Scorpion 5 / MPU 5 tech) - just using standard cheat engine

Hi @MrRog - there's an awful lot of great layouts these days, I don't really get to spend time playing them as I'm usually busy working on some research or coding when I do get 'hobby time'! Off the top of my head - the Happy Hour layout from Pook aka DXcellent is nice and clean, would look good in a cab.

Totally agree, the AI upscaling will never be substitute for a good source art. It's a tricky problem to crack for sure

Hi @MrRog One of the issues is getting 'clean' source images of a high enough resolution. The layout artists do a fantastic job with the resources available, though it can be challenging when all they have to work with is a grainy flyer from the 1980s! I did have a look into this and am planning to provide 'AI upscaled' machines (in cases where good results can be achieved from the source images) in the arcade simulator project. For more information of my preliminary AI upscaling tests and some general chit chat, see here: And for more information on the arcade simulator project (3D machines / AI upscaled virtual streaming textures (planned, not yet implemented) / VR), see here:

Thanks @Amusements I'm just looking into it a little for the moment, but I may take you up one of your flat PSDs at some point to try some tests with, thanks very much for the offer (As the AI upscaling technique may not work well on some lower res layouts on the bottom glass panel, since it's already heavily vertically 'squashed' for the pseudo-3d perspective of the source MFME layout image). I'm thinking that theoretically once I've 'auto-flattened' an existing MFME layout so it can be used for the 3d panels, I could somehow write something to take a high res flat scan (or flat redraw), and auto map that into place (and potentially auto-lamp it) - giving a much higher fidelity source texture on the existing 3d layout. I've still got a couple of big chunks of work left to do on the converter to auto-flatten and AI upscale the source layouts, but then investigating this idea further might be a cool side-quest, to further enhance the visuals In the 3d engine, whilst the glass panels can be viewed from any angle: ...they are stored internally as perfectly flat:

Ah cool, good to know it's a standard technique Yeah it's a tricky one with the lighting, I tried equalising then tweaking brightness/contrast down, seems to level it out a bit ready for an 'unlit' glass image... but getting the different stitched together parts to have even brightness, that does definitely add more complexity. It's an interesting problem, trying to get back to a evenly lit 1:1 ratio complete 2d scan from a bunch of unevenly lit 3d frames

Hey guys I've just been experimenting with a youtube video, I was able to get this perspective/aspect correct image (as if it were scanned) from a single frame. This was using perspective tool, then scale in just the single axis required to correct aspect ratio... Corrected image: Source image (youtube video frame): I was wondering, is this what you guys sometimes do when getting a layout source image assembled - grab a bunch of these then scale and stitch them together to end up with a 2d video 'scans' of the machine glasses? I was watching 1080p videos of fruit machines on youtube, and it got me thinking that the information for high res layouts is technically there, just in a somewhat painful to extract format!

I had a look at the Jetsons pinball artwork, and I believe you should get incredibly good results following the guide I posted earlier in the thread. The reason being is that it's drawn art, exactly what the waifu2x AI was trained on (manga graphic novels).