johnparker007

I've heard gamble blocks were a common thing among MPU3/4 club machines (folks asked me to hack them out) - I guess there was a slim chance the algorithm could be abused or something (gambling every win until one went up before %age had been correctly met). Hopefully with those new rom hacking tutorials, some folks might get into it and start hacking those blocks out

I did post a rough strategy for reimplementing the hack, not as clean as removing the original code they added - but it would work I think: If you read that post and the one directly below, that tells how to go about detecting whether the flashing bonus is active, running your own extra code if so to change the stake down to 25p, and also how to disable the ROM checksum test to allow you to make changes without it alarming at startup - hope that helps

Finally got back to looking at this project for a bit! So, I've got rid of the old WIP right-click context menu system I was building, as I've cracked using the OS to make the context menu (Windows only for now, but Linux and MacOS allow similar) - here's a demo of the new OS right-click nested context menu: Going to be going back and redoing some of the custom GUI stuff next (the dark mode dockable window system) as it needs refactoring, while I'm at it I'll be cleaning up the look a bit, as the tabs etc are all a little oversized...

I heard this game has one of those JPM tells; if it starts rolling in number ones and number twos, that means it's numbering, and it's ready to splash out the jackpot (three brown 7s). (warning: using the above method can lead to a full hopper dump).

lol that's so uk - guy breaks the pub fruit machine open and grabs the cashbox (?) - and then the guy filming shouts out 'Go on my son!'

Waaaah!

Welcome Andrew Your comment about the Union Jackpot exploit along with @Chopaholic's video did indeed cause quite the stir over here lol

Nice idea!

I suspect the paper are showing 'cherry-picked' results, as is quite common with these things. However it does show potential promise, depending on how well it does like you say, with the more complex font stuff that you see on fruit machine art. Never be as good as a redraw (at least in its current approach of pure image gen at the pixel level), but could be useful for sprucing up some old layouts

There is a new 'text aware' AI upscaling model, it's not fully publicly released (yet), I'll keep an eye on this repo https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/TAIR/ A couple of examples of it in action, this may be useful for our low resolution resources... (the TeReDiff / Ours images show the output of the model, impressive stuff)

In p3 I see the text JPMNFC. JPM Fruit Chaser perhaps? They're tiny so prob sys 80 or something super early like that. No messages, as too early for Alpha displays. They are all different, so probably good dumps. Prob worth some tinkering in MFME, swapping the order etc - probably a game in there.

You can usually find a bit of text if it's non-interleaved ROMs just by loading up the ROM in a hex editor or summats If it's interleaved set, the bytes alternate between two ROMs - so you can still search for text you see on the alpha - say "BARCREST" appears on the alpha, you can search for either: BRRS or ACET As the bytes in each ROM look like: ROM 1: B R R S ROM 2: A C E T Hope that helps for some quick ROM identification, without needing to emulate first

@Spidy21982 has done some great models

Yes man, that's the idea - will work better for some layouts than others based on the quality of the source art etc. But there will be various tools built into the workflow, to AI upscale, local and global normalise the light (so it'll work in adjustable dark/bright rooms), and then go into the 3d cabinets (which will be assembled in a separate Cabinet Editor). Once someone has made say a base Vogue cabinet, that can then be reused for different Vogue layouts (same as in original Arcade Sim). There is also planned reflections on the cabinets, so metal ones can reflect the flashing artwork/moving reels. All a long way off though, so it'll just be occasional demos of editor features etc for a good while yet!

Started work on the 'projects hub'. This may end up being a seperate exe that is the full Oasis hub, showing layout/cabinet/arcade projects, but I'm just doing it for layouts only for now inside the LayoutEditor (quicker to prototype that way). UI is super basic, it allows to create/load Layout Editor projects. Here's a demo video making a couple of test projects, and shows then importing MFME layouts into those projects, making a simple but noticeable change to each one, and then the changes are saved to the project. Also shows a quick look at the project file structure - as rather than being a single file, it's all very open, so you can see images etc inside the project folder (and it will be possible to 'hot edit' images, so then alt-tabbing back to the Layout Editor from say photoshop, those changes would instantly be reflected on the layout, if you chose to work that way).

Been checking into a few things for the layout editor - it looks like I can simply bundle a few files to have the upscaling working without the user needing to install the Upscayl program - which is cleaner Here's a command line demo showing upscaling an image 4x with the esrgan ultrasharp model, just using a small handful of files as part of the Oasis LE install:

I started back on some LayoutEditor work last night, as from the visuals in my previous post, it's clear now that URP is the way to go for the Oasis rendering As it allows for lights and 'real' soft shadows to be cast on a front lit fruit machine glass whilst including HDR lighting, a basic but very clean looking flat reflection strategy, VR with more feasible FPS (than RTX). Covered in an earlier post plus demo videos proving this, but ray traced rendering simply does not work well with fruit machines, due to the rapid aggressive changes in brightness the light bulbs can and often do have. Just ends up looking like a mess as lamps quickly flash on/off, and the reflections are even worse. So the LayoutEditor component has been updated to latest Unity LTS, and then I've set it up to include URP. Nothing went wrong so far, I'll be able to test that further later (as currently there's no lights in the layout editor). LayoutEditor shows up on github: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/commits/main/ Lots of stuff to do on the LE next: - right click menus - load/save projects (currently just imports MFME extracted layouts) - fix some weird MAME emu issues - Ai upscaling step (will rely on the open source Upscayl being installed for now) - high quality perspective warp step per glass - overall light level normalisation step per glass - localised light level normalisation step per glass - etc...

Yeah, the shadow was having too much impact. I've done another test, not quite right, but a lot better for the point lights and their shadows not affecting how much light the bulb puts out. It's getting closer

Ok so I've got to grips with a bit more URP stuff, so with this Indy artwork with lamp test, you can see that the point light shadows are correctly cast on it by the moving block (so the point lights will be the 'ceiling lights' as in Arcade Sim, and the block would be things like walls, other machines, and the players own 3d avatar - all potentially casting multiple shadows on the glass art). But, it's not right, as when the faint shadow covers the lit lamps, then they go noticeable dimmer - which isn't how it works in real life... definitely getting closer though, so nice to have shadows

Experimenting with a 'lamp' brightening technique. With this shader, it's not also using the point lights to light the artwork, just the directional light - a bit more to figure out with these new URP shaders yet...

Testing an old technique, that renders a planar mirror. For non-ray traced machine reflections on the active machine, flat-ish areas can then use the image in the mirror. Not a cheap technique (as it's a render per different mirror), but no raytracing noise issues with this approach. I think then for metal surfaces it can blend to a realtime reflection probe to give a blurred reflection of the approximate room behind, and of course for surfaces facing the machine, it'll show the mirror image:

I've been doing more research and experiments with ray tracing, and I've come to the conclusion that while it has definite benefits for some types of game, for rendering the lit glass art of fruit machines, it is basically not great. The issues are to do with how realtime ray tracing works for games - it's not the same as how a single frame of say Toy Story (the movie) was rendered. To achieve real time speeds there's all manner of chicanery going on. The ray counts are relatively sparse, and then 'accumulated' over frames, and aggressively 'denoised'. Then if you want to use something like DLSS, again the game is rendered at a lower resolution and upscaled with AI - adds a little input lag, and more artifacts on fine detail. In the original Arcade Sim, I was doing fairly raw rendering - but I could make a light look a specific way on a single frame for instance - with real time ray tracing, that is just not possible (I've checked Unreal's Lumen solution - has the exact same issues, it's the tech not the software). In Unity there are 3 'pipelines': Built In (BiRP) Universal (URP) High Definition (HDRP) So my original plan was to use the HDRP, I am now leaning towards the URP. URP works on mobile, HDRP does not. URP doesn't do ray tracing, so zero issues with 'ray tracing noise'. As I want the arcades to be fully customisable, pre baked light/shadow maps are not an option. Some arcade sims have the approach of prebaked lighting, but all you can do is swap different games into fixed cabinets at fixed positions - which I feel is far too limiting, compared to being able to place any cabinet anywhere you want. So no prebaked lighting/shadows possible. This is a basic room mockup, with some cube 'cabinets'. There are 8x point lights in the ceiling (most offscreen to the right) - it shows the cubes casting shadows on the floor, walls, and each other - all dynamic (for weaker graphics cards these shadows can be disabled in settings). While they're not ray tracing level shadows, they are still a massive step up from original Arcade Sim with no shadows option! Next things I'll be researching are reflections and lamped art under URP. Incidentally I checked the new Visual Pinball rendering engine (which does look very nice) - this is made in Unity under HDRP, and I see suffers the same issues with noise/reflections/etc - so I think going URP is the way, since I'm really bothered about getting the lamps/reflections to a higher standard. ~ Reflection wrong Maybe RTX light noise

After more testing today, I think I've got a fix for my dodgy PC Don't want to jinx it, but running just 2x RAM sticks instead of the full 4x RAM sticks seems like it might have fixed the stability issue. I think it's weak VRMs on the motherboard. I can certainly get by with with 16GB instead of 32GB for now, if it stops the dreaded BSODs! So been able to run Unity (so far) again with the ray tracing tests - one of the previous ones, it's not that good as I see lag and also ray tracing noise in the reflection. So here I've tried with 'light cookies', unfortunately again that technique has similar issues (and it is more expensive to run). I'll try some more ways, though these reflections may end up being tricky!

I don't think they'd be too happy about that! On the plus side, I realised I should check on eBay, and found there are old CPUs and mobos of this spec at reasonably cheap prices - so once I can narrow it down further, the replacement bits shouldn't cost too much after all... I was looking on Amazon for replacement parts, but Amazon's only good for new stuff, they're charging a bomb for these old 7600K CPUs compared to the used ones on eBay.