johnparker007

I'd recommend asking him in the comments on one of his most recent youtube vids.

I've seen that before, some machines go into a 'demo mode'. Perhaps a feature for trade shows or something? If it didn't happen on an earlier MAME version, then sounds like a regression - might not be too bad to figure out the breaking change as a starting point to investigate. Been looking at the Oki MSM6376 sound chip sound/speed issues on M1A/B... though when I fix some things other things break lol

Well - so I've been looking at these scrambled lamps in Eastenders Queen Vic, kinda making some progress, but then I thought - let's just try some other rom revisions - hey presto, they have correctly working lamps! Eastenders Queen Vic - scrambled lamps ROM sa7-496.zip I then tried the ROM in MFME, and the lamps are also scrambled in MFME! God damn lol So I'm not sure what is going on with the lamps, maybe a dongle is required to unscramble them? Since Chris didn't emulate/fix these lamps in MFME either, I'll move onto something else... as we can simply not use these affected ROMs (like we do in MFME now). I could 'fix' them given time, as it's simple a 1:1 mapping, so I could even make a basic lookup table... however that table may then only work for Eastenders Queen Vic, and then other M1A/B games might have a different scrambling, needing figuring out again. Once less thing to have to sort out anyway

This is a modern project, but a guy Bernard Mitchell has been making some impressive MPU3 era machine simulations that run on a humble 48K ZX Spectrum (mainly based around Line Up type machines): The audio is particularly dialled in, and he's also implemented the G.A.I.N system, plus it plays to a realistic VTP.

That is very cool @dad! Also found an recentish Follin interview @thealteredemu

Wow not heard that one, it's got some riffs from his Chronos music! Yeah, he really made the beeper sing

I will later on, for now I'll just keep chipping away at fixes in this repo so they're safely on github... I have to get back to work on the Layout Editor before too long, so maybe then I'll pass them over to David or James to get them into the head repo I saw from testing Eastenders Queen Vic (different sound chip to the Bar Gain one above), that has an issue where the trail letters count up to slowly, and also the lamps (I think above lamp number 127) are mapped wrong... so hopefully a couple more Maygay M1A/B fixes in the pipeline

My mouse hand was very happy hearing the looping samples working properly after I've been chipping away at this with a hangover most of today lol

I have made some decent progress on Maygay M1A/B improvements (@Altharic ) Fix emulation speed, fix synth sound pitch/speed (on NEC chips), fix looping samples playing an ungodly rapidly repeating racket (seen here on Nudges and on Hi/Lo gamble: Before my fixes: After my fixes:

No unfortunately, it would make things easier! Things like the reel controllers, I believe they've just been reversed engineered thus far... they were custom chips, so it's not like they're super plentiful for decapping shenanigans...

If you are ever curious about having a dabble (since you mention proficiency in c/c++), the full live source for MAME is here: https://github.com/mamedev/mame If you wanna see how a driver works that isn't too crazy (Scorpion 4 is currently 50,000+ lines, so I may refactor that one!), I've very recently been looking at Maygay M1A/B platform (which needs some work, it has various issues), it's a bit more sane in terms of source size, and the game configs are mercifully already split out to a separate file from the machine logic: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/maygay/maygay1b.cpp No pressure though, it is a steep learning curve if you're not familiar with chip pin outs and clocks etc! ...but always good to see a fellow coder around these parts

Maybe we could lure you into some emulation programming on MAME...?

I've had a very small taste of the addiction when I was young and relatively skint - I was going down to the local arcade ('Smithies' in Cleethorpes), and contrary to my usual super-frugal approach of going to the seafront with little to no money, then slowly boosting myself up to a few quid so I could play video games, I was doing the danger dance of just taking 'big bucks' for me at the time of like a tenner down there. Then if the machine seemed overdue to payout, but wasn't playing ball according to my expectations, it was like my brain would enter into a grim determination mode, where it was a case of pull a big win/jackpot or die trying (i.e: go skint). Just mechanically slinging my much-needed food money in there (I was on the dole). I remember at the time being probably pretty lucky ironically from also doing a few drugs (not while I was playing!), and recognised that 'end of the night' fiending behaviour. Looking back it still holds true, even after having had access to more and 'better' drugs; there comes a point where you are just fiending, and not getting the 'original pleasure' which motivated you to take the specific drug in the first place. As an example (as I realise I might be more of a fiend than most, so this isn't 100% relatable)... if you haven't taken alcohol for a week, then you get into some drinking (and your brain is wired/tuned up for alcohol)... you'll get a sense of almost euphoria, possibilities seem endless if you just keep doing what you're doing (drinking). Cue 8 hours later, and you're 'chasing the high', earlier a couple of pints and you felt on top of the world, but now an additional two pints is just keeping the wolves from the door (disclaimer I've had various drink/drug issues lol ). That brief dalliance with fruit machine gambling I had in my youth felt very similar - I had transitioned from that phase where was exciting, to the phase of grim determination, where I just had to keep it going because my subconscious brain was willing me too, and I was just along for the ride. I think the parallels between gambling and drug addiction (speaking from experience on the latter) are really similar - your brain gets desensitised to that specific spectrum of stimulus, yet seeks it out, leading to increasing 'dosages' (i.e: stakes in gambling). Unfortunately I'm a bit drunk now, so clearly I haven't learnt! But yes, gambling is a bad path, just like booze and drugs - very similar scenarios ensue. Also - to be clear, I'm not comparing my experience to folks who've spent their entire livelihoods on gambling, just chipping in with my thoughts

Apologies, I've kinda morphed the thread The flyer scan images at the top were showing a model that can remove print artifacts from high resolution source flyer scans (moire/rosettes). The later Andy Capp ones are showing a new model for upscaling from low resolution sources, such as photos of the glasses, but with a focus on preserving text and 'shapes' which is useful for the kind of art on some fruit machines. So they're not really competing, they're working on different aspects of the source images. All very handy though for future 4K+ layouts from 'challenging' resources, since full vector redraws are extremely labour intensive!

This is unfortunately not an open source free model - I'm just testing some commercial stuff to see improvements for fruit machine images, since open source will catch up in time anyway.

Another day, another new AI model - just having a brief play, this one is quite good at preserving text and shapes, maybe best I've seen so far for upscaling these kind of low res images...

Just tried that - again, the sound sample stuff seems a bit iffy. I'll stick on this M1A/B platform for a bit, and work on the Oki MSM6376 - maybe make a new chip driver or summats, get the datasheet, all that jazz. Might not be able to get progress, but it seems worth a shot, since the machines are 'sort of' working!

Yeah that kinda gels with what I've been seeing with hacking around with 'Eastenders - The Queen Victoria'. I think there may be bugs not only in the core emulation but in the sound chip emulation. For instance on Eastenders QV, when the numbers count up from the reels onto the word 'Eastenders' you have to fill up, the ascending 'ding' samples fire slowly, then it plays a couple of wrong samples, then finally the next credit is available to play. It has a Oki M6376, apparently this is a ok substitute for the Oki MSM6376... but yeah, it might be what is causing at least some problems. When the chip receives a request to read NAR, if I always return 1, then it break some sounds, but then all the things that did go slow, such as the Eastenders letters, the actual feature board, and the bank counting up 10p at a time... then go either really fast (feature board), or about the right speed (Eastenders/Bank 10p anim). So I do think it may be the sound chip causing these speed issues... I've definitely seen something like this before on other fruit platforms in MAME, where it's clearly waiting too long for a sample 'callback'... so I think there's some low hanging fruit around those areas to get started with Gladiator - I believe that needs an alternate Reel MCU... there's a part-done implementation commented out in MAME. If it works in that really old MFME I have, then there's good potential of porting Chris's rev engineered version over into MAME's framework.

Ok I tried Eastenders Queen Vic instead (also Maygay M1 A/B hardware) and that one does boot and play. However, something funky is happening so the machine seems to keep briefly freezing as if it's waiting for the end of every sound sample it plays before it can continue... so I'll have a look into that If you lemme know the names of a couple of those M1A/B hardware games that play but don't have sound and they seem like they should, I'll also have a look at those and see if I can spot a problem in the code - ta

Ta I'll have a look, while I'm looking at sound stuff. Just tried Eastenders (m1eastnd) and it doesn't even boot, gets stuck on 'RAM CLEAR' even after repeated forced resetting...

Ok the Scorpion 4 Volume control emulation is implemented (in 'our' fork, it'll make it to the main branch 'at some point' ).

OK I've added that to my sig - will do a post for it in the future once it has a comprehensive set of test/settings access procedures for the various platforms [ Fruit Machine Settings/Tests Guide ] https://tinyurl.com/yuebw8b5

Thanks, I didn't know you could do a doors closed test with a DIP switch! As I mentioned to Mort, I think I may start a community public doc to compile a 'cheat sheet' for some of this stuff...

Aaah right, I was a little tired when I got my Scorpion 4 'console logs' of the volume working in MAME last night... maybe they do save to NVRAM from the test mode as well! I'm currently working on using MFME 20.1 as the 'ground truth' since I don't have access to any machines. Thanks very much for this info I may start to compile this info about the steps to get into Test/Settings menus into a public community doc if there's general settings that work per platform (and perhaps manufacturer within the platform groupings). For instance I noticed on Scorpion 4: for Bell Fruit's DOND, the volume range in the test menu is what we would expect; 0-100 inclusive. However in Mazooma's Cash On The Lash, while the test menu looks very similar, for some reason they have changed that range to 1-99 inclusive! I'm not sure why that is, but it does show the rebuild manufacturers like to mess with stuff a bit... (oh and yeah, I'm hoping to be able to mirror what MFME v20.1 does with these things in the MAME drivers, it's a nice change from Oasis until we have the MAME classic layout export stuff working Later planning to move onto fixing stuff where the machines simply don't work in MAME if I can work out the issues, I think there's a lot that should be just about in my wheelhouse these days).