johnparker007
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Posts posted by johnparker007
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13 minutes ago, spa said:
Are there 10p/£5 rom about for this game anyone?
I did have a play about and found a set. It loads but says 'contact maygay'. This is actually a very good game on £5.
I see quite a few in Geddy's rom archive for this machine, so there could be...:
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1 hour ago, slotsmagic said:
@spa and I took photos of different machines, did you want me to upload mine to say Google Drive and send you a link, or is there a dedicated place for me to upload to?
I've pm'd ya, I have got this Community Drive thing semi-started, but I need people's email address in order to enable their write access on on their personal folder - thanks again for taking the pics dude, they look good
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Nice one @slotsmagic and @spa - some layouts will be improved with the new photos you guys took on your trip!
Example - Apollo 9 Maygay:
Latest DX:
Processed photo for MFME off image:
More great resources for the Community Drive when I get back on with that side quest next week
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A little video showing the WIP of the new cross-platform UI Dockable Windows system
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15 minutes ago, Altharic said:
I just tried with a steam deck and touching the buttons does nowt so the same behavior as the android version
Which games have layouts setup for touch?
The rom j6indy is 'completely' set up for touch (some are only set up partially and do not have an orange mouse pointer).
The rom m4andycp is 'partially' set up for touch (doesn't have the orange mouse pointer, but buttons can still be clicked with OS mouse pointer). -
4 minutes ago, Graham the goldfish said:
It definitely is essential. W11 laptop, off came the mcafee virus and visual studio, virtual box, mfme and arcade simulator have been installed.
I'm not sure my dev experience is in the right area, but perhaps I can help things a long a little at some point. I have so many projects queued up and there's just never enough time to undertake them all!
There's never enough time for hobby coding projects lol
The new project is Unity, open source:
[ Oasis ] Source code: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis
...currently was making a xplatform ui system for the editor, though need to sort out the Community Drive side project I've started before I get back into it.-
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1 hour ago, Reg said:
Played a lot of the arcade version of this, great little game
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1 hour ago, Graham the goldfish said:
got the essentials on it at the moment, amongst them MFME and arcade simulator.
I'm glad to hear that Arcade Sim qualifies as an essential!
It's going to be a while before 'arcade sim 2' is developed (as part of the new Oasis suite), but that will allow others to build and improve the fruit machines (rather than just me in this initial version), so the long run that will have many more...-
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12 hours ago, jasscen said:
1990s early 2000s is what i am interested in martin. tried the mpu meca, don't think its running anymore as im still waiting for a confirmation email, its been a month now.
Mpu Mecca is definitely still running, may be worth giving another try, checking Spam folder etc.
https://www.fruitemu.co.uk/ib/ -
1 minute ago, Altharic said:
Retroarch is a backwards step in addition to creating unneeded and out of date cores they also use obsolete emulators solely because they just run an example of this is handy whilst it runs most Atari Lynx games its emulation dates from the late 90s aside from being ported to SDL its not been worked on since great if you just want to play games but not accurately
You mean like Agemame was to begin with before it was swallowed into mame
Yeah I don't know what the solution is with MAME currently, it's all kinds of tech that's being impacted (in terms of people don't want to work on them with MAME currently as it is, and these are highly skilled emulation people, who you definitely do want working on this stuff), fruit machines is just a small part of it... going to keep to the sidelines for now!
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6 minutes ago, slotsmagic said:
wouldn't the attitude shown by Cuavas just drive people towards their own standalone emulation projects, or possibly Retroarch cores as an example?
Kind of yeah. A whole emulation project is iffy as it's a massive undertaking - but if someone wanted to say get all of sc4/5/6 fruit machines working, they might make a 'fork' of MAME, to say ScorpionMAME. Then do all the work in there, free from code reviews. But ideally you'd want someone to then merge that work back to MAME. It doesn't need to all start splintering out like that into these dedicated mini-projects, as there'll be loads of duplication of work, bugfixes not making it across the forked projects... it's really not ideal longterm.
Retroarch doesn't really do any emulation development, it's just a 'wrapper' that encapsulates existing emulation projects into its 'core' format. A lot of devs in the emulation community hate it, though I can see it's utility, it does overstep sometimes with building cores where permission is not granted etc.-
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3 minutes ago, Altharic said:
And where are those guidelines........that's the problem it's a case of do as I say not as I do
Yes and no... there are most cases where Cuavas is correct, and the code is not 'up to the MAME coding standards' (the basics are here: https://wiki.mamedev.org/index.php/MAME_Coding_Conventions).
But - lots of people who enjoy reverse-engineering stuff, building emulation - don't enjoy being tied to rigid coding standards. So they just don't bother working on MAME... and I've seen this happen in real time the other week with Paul, he just hates all the coding standard stuff.
I'm not sure what the solution is - one way might be to keep Cuavas, but then have an army of people who enjoy converting code from its current form to one that meets coding standards... I dunno, without Cuavas things get messier again, and the codebase is huge and precise, perhaps more than any other codebase that has ever existed. I can't think of an equivalent project. -
9 hours ago, Altharic said:
Seen the civil war from Haze on X?
I kind of see his point
I've not seen that, though I may scout it out, but I did just read through the github thread from @Johnnyafc and I'm not surprised by what I found.
It is not as simple as it appears; on the one hand, it does appear that Cuavas is a bad guy stopping emulation coders doing their thing. But on the other hand, MAME has grown into the most complex emulation project in human history by an order of magnitude. It emulates such an insane amount of hardware, and ties it all together.
In the past, emulation devs were allowed to do their thing, and while that worked ok when it was just video games, however once the scale massively jumped, with fruit machines, home PCs, main frames, synthesizer keyboards, calculators, word proessors, door bells etc etc etc, the list goes on to emcompass anything that can be emulated... it became a real nightmare codebase.
And Cuavas, love him or hate him, is a very intelligent coder with the aptitude to be able to deal with that complexity and try to organise it in some fashion.
But! I also totally see the other side of it - just the other day Paul (who's been looking at some sc4/5/6 stuff), was saying he doesn't do much, because he hates the insanely strict code reviews. He doesn't mind doing the reverse engineering (which is the hard bit), but hates trying to then fold his work into MAME's monolithic codebase, so doesn't actually bother.
David alludes to this on the end of his github post:
"You're driving people away, making the project look bad, unapproachable. MAME is getting a reputation as very gatekeepery, and elitist, looking down on anybody who has a slightly lesser understanding or different set of skills."
I have to agree.
Not sure if it would be different with someone else at the helm... or if it is just that MAME has grown so large as to be a very slow moving frustrating project.
In David's case he was just partway through writing a disassembler, and committing a WIP from what I can see. From Cuavas's perspective he is saying, get it to a state where it passes the strict MAME coding guidelines before committing (mainly; using official MAME assembler syntax, some other bits, plus the infy loop is just an oversight).
I can see both sides of this to be honest. I'm not sure if there might be a branch in the future 'casual MAME', that would have more relaxed coding rules, the people who are into the rigid code standard stuff could import work from that branch into the core MAME branch... though that it introduces its own issues.
Can definitely agree that is does discourage a lot of emulation coders from even bothering, since they know they then have to deal with the iron fist of the Cuavas code reviews! But, Cuavas does loads of work, and the code reviews generally are all valid criticisms, compared to the coding standards and methodologies of what should be merged into the root codebase.
I've posted that here, but I'm staying well out of it over there!
Edit: I just read though some of David's twitter, and I saw:
It also appears that HE is allowed to go through an iterative process of how the disassembler represents things, through a series of live checkins, as he understands it, but when I want to do that, not allowed
Unless he's finally realising that yes, that iterative process matters
So there may be some level of double-standards here that I wasn't aware of, i.e: Cuavas may not be following his own rules when he is working on something in MAME, or making up arbitrary ones to suit what he is doing at the time... not a simple situation this... I can really see both sides, as it's putting a lot of people off even working on the project-
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11 minutes ago, Altharic said:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/commit/a42a71d5c5bd2cce99bd671a86982ed19b24c4f8
mame/bfm: Implement Bell Fruit 96x8 dot matrix display for Scorpion 5. (
#11805) * New driver for BFG 96x8 dot matrix vfd * Add 96x8 dot matrix vfd to Bell Fruit Scorp5
First CL is just housekeeping, second one is good though - finally get MAME sc4/sc5 on the dot alphas, they've previously been running in 14/16 segment alpha back compatibility mode
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25 minutes ago, thealteredemu said:
I had a 2600 back in the day, I loved it, there were some great games on it for the time.
Frogger
Pitfall
Hero
River Raid
Vanguard.But the ZX Spectrum was mindblowing and one of the best 8 bits I've ever owned. I got a C64 in early 1986, it was a great machine, especially the sound capabilities of the SID chip but I still preferred the ZX Spectrum even though it was inferior in some ways. 3D vector type games were so much faster on the ZX Spectrum, some absolute stonkers on this beloved 8 bit!!
I remember one of the first games I loaded on my C64 was a game called Sanxion, the loading tune melted my brain, then the Ocean loaders. In fact that was one of the main standout features for me on the C64 those awesome loaders
J
I've played 4 out of those 5 games on the 2600, alkl except Vanguard (I've got one with a flashcart, and dabbled), also enjoy the 2600 version of Centipede - the graphics may be simplified but it is super playable on a CRT with zero input lag
Speccy - obvs awesome And yeah it was faster than C64 for vector games which was always nice, since the c64 had better sound and sprites and no colour clash and full screen hardware scrolling, which is a lot of advantages. It did cost more though, amazing what the Speccy could do for the pricetag at the time
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10 hours ago, thealteredemu said:
To be fair the ZX Spectrum has far better specs than the Atari2600.
J
Indeed, I messed around with a little coding experiment on it, the 2600 has a whopping 128 bytes (not kilobytes; bytes!) or RAM. You have to do it all with the playfield/object drawing hardware and beamracing - good results can be attained, but only if you play to its strengths, and design accordingly
The Speccy on the other hand was a fairly versatile little beast for the price.
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Ah yes, seems like the only workaround fix for MFME might be if your 3rd party audio drive software allows you to swap the L/R channels. Apparently that was more a thing in the past, not so much since Win 10 level drivers. Then you could temporarily swap the channels while playing an affected machine (but you'd need to remember to swap them back afterwards!).
Just an unfortunate oversight I suspect, when Chris was unifying the 'Sound' and 'Speakers' settings into a single overall setting (missing an additional new 'Stereo (Swap)' option in the dropdown).-
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On 01/01/2024 at 22:00, wearecity said:
Just to be aware, even if setting to stereo, that sound on Scorpion layouts, can come out reversed I.E. Left, comes out of right and V.V.
It's an emulator bug, that of course sadly won't be fixed now.
Regarding this are you saying there is a machine where it does output in stereo, but the L/R channels are flipped? And so you can tell in a sound test mode, if it says "Left" out of right speaker, then says "Right" out of left speaker?
In that case, that sadly would be a bug, as he would have needed a fourth setting: Stereo (Swap). -
Just to defend Chris's coding honour here
It's not an overall a bug in his emulator, it's just a little counter-intuitive to understand the meaning of the setting! From my earlier comment regarding this here:
So if you followed that explanation, which probably could be written more clearly haha
You see that his work is correct, it's just that you are trying to tell MFME how the machine audio was originally coded and subsequently wired, not how you expect to hear it. Hope that makes sense
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4 minutes ago, slotsmagic said:
Oh that's almost certainly what I'll end up doing. The complete PC was £46 but assuming it's as advertised it's a standard H110 mATX board, so it'll almost certainly be mounted on the back of the cab at some point, on some plywood. I would have done that with the original PC, but since it transpired it used non-standard PSU wiring, and needed an external GPU, I couldn't be arsed in the end. Didn't have confidence in the motherboard itself supplying 12V for all the peripherals (rather than 12V from the PSU via Molex / SATA, the stupid HP board had a single SATA power socket on the board itself).
At least this board I can shove any ATX power supply I want on it. That was something I was thinking about, using a PSU to double as an exhaust fan at the top of the cabinet, on a little shelf made out of plywood.
If you grab a newer PSU you'll have plenty of spare 5V/12V outputs after CPU/GPU/Mobo is supplied for exhaust fans etc - good luck with the build
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18 hours ago, slotsmagic said:
... OK, a change of plan.
So I was in the garage earlier agonising about what to do with the existing PC, the HP I was planning on using. I had several ideas - effectively break the case up and just keep the motherboard mounted on the tray. Potentially use a different power supply.
Unfortunately I then made some unfortunate discoveries... The motherboard was non standard... fair enough... but isn't even proper ATX. It has 6 pin board connector (rather than ATX 24 pin)... and the board itself then outputs 12V for the drives via a bespoke mainboard power delivery section.
It's a bit like an early version of the new ATX12VO standard.
Meant using another PSU would be awkward. Meant that relying on the 12V supply from the board being sufficient to power a hopper didn't fill me with optimism.
Anyway, I spent a few hours slotting in the garage while browsing eBay, checking classifieds... and found this. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure it's an absolute steal. Few plus points - assuming the photos are accurate :
1) Off the shelf motherboard. MSI H110ECO which has normal power circuitry, and all the video outputs I need.
2) i3 7100 CPU - not going to set the world alight, but a perfectly competent little 2 core / 4 thread CPU. Should be ample power for MFME.
3) 80+ Bronze PSU. Admittedly it's not 80+ Platinum or anything but it's a positive to see.
Essentially what this means is the following - I'll try and fit the case in the machine intact. But if it's still too big, I can remove the motherboard (hopefully on the metal tray, if it has one) and mount that inside the cabinet. The motherboard, assuming it's as shown in the photos, takes normal ATX PSUs, so I can easily run something more powerful if the included one doesn't look up to the job.
Speaking of which, I might use the SFF PSU included as a spare for a T7 assuming it has sufficient connectors, which I'd expect it to
Sharing the PC I found incase anyone else finds it interesting. Just seems a bit too cheap?!!
P.S. sorry for the latest video from The Bandit, I have YT Premium and often run a little YT window while browsing, for the audio mainly!
I know you went for a new PC in the end, but I've done a few MAME cabs over the years, and mounting the motherboard bare on the side wall of the cab interior is a fine option - plenty of space then for heat to vent off too without noisy fans. On old arcade games that's exactly what they did, just had the JAMMA board mounted onto the plywood side of the cab. No real reason for a second casing - plus if you hang it/mount it on sliders, it's easy to detach for maintenance
Just fighting the corner for PC motherboards naked in arcade cabs! I am revisiting my (landscape, video) MKII mame-converted cab at some point, and unless I get too tempted by the MistR with Jamma, I'll be mounting a newer I5 mobo in the cab with a firmware-flashed AMD for arcade frequencies (may sell the Mortal Kombat II board as I'm doing it if it still works, they seem to have crept up a bit in value)
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Getting there with the smaller first UI change task, switching to native OS menus
Out with the old ones:
In with the new ones:
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10 hours ago, kingysince1982 said:
Is it possible open the source code to the emulators and amend?
As above, MFME source is lost as the author has passed away (Chris Wren RIP). There is indeed slow but steady fruit machine emulation work happening with MAME, it is fully open source, the code is here:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame
I have started a project that will interact with MAME to allow designing/playing 2d/3d machines (fruit, but also any other machines), also open source, but very early stages and I'm not up to putting much time into it at present, though hoping that will improve in the future, code is here:
https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis
Are you a coder?
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Small tech update on this project... been getting small amounts of work done here and there with it, started to build a UI Form for the options for MFME Extraction, and decided it's still not a good enough foundation for the UI. All these cross-platform non-native UI solutions have issues, here the problems that are becoming clear are:
- awful to design forms in, it's built off the old WinForms system. It isn't taking advantage of Unity's UI stuff at all.
- it is crap for resolution-aware scaling, and people use there computers with 16:9, or 'Ultrawide'.. or even in Portrait etc. Plus a Form in 1080p would simply display at 1/4 the size on 4K, and dynamically sizing docked/undocked panes would also not scale the contents.
These things are going to be very hard to back-implement down the road (since Unity UI has already solved some of this), so I'm setting the project up for having a perpetually crap UI, which isn't good when it has:
- a Layout Editor (for designing 2d and 3d machine 'layouts'- a Machine Editor (for importing 3d models to build the 3d machine cabinets)
- a Level Editor (for creating environments contains machines, such as arcades)
That's 3x the pain, as they're all Editors requiring Editor-style UI... so for now at least, I'm planning to:
- change the top bar menus to be OS menus (so this will be working in a nice usable way on Win / Mac / Linux)- change the window content to be based of a basic framework I found in an open source Unity Runtime level editor project. It's very basic and missing a lot of stuff, but, the bones are good from what I can see - and will allow for a much better end result, with far less pain when creating more UI stuff, as it's based around standard Unity runtime UI techniques
So pausing on looking at MFME Extraction feature, and replacing the WinForms style UI with those two new UI approaches.
I have worked around implementing as an MVVM pattern fortunately, as I thought I may end up doing something like this down the road - so the work so far (Emulation control, machine extract importing, layout rendering, emulation input) isn't intertwined with the code that renders the UI - it's all pretty much decoupled. So it'll take time, but as there's no spaghetti code, it should be relatively straightforward
OASIS (working title)
in Arcade Simulator
Posted
Ah yes, the early days