johnparker007

Hey all Ok so I can 'test' changes to a machine's volume in the test mode on Scorpion 4, I've been doing: Open back door Await full reboot Press Test button and then I can test volume changes like so: However... I assume there must also be a 'settings menu', so I can change the volume, and then have that volume saved in the machines NVRAM as the one it will use on subsequent boots for standard sound effects/music. The reason is that to ensure my volume emulation code for Scorpion 4 is working properly/complete, I believe that if we set the volume to very low/zero... then reboot the machine a few times, to trigger the On/Off alarm (or some other alarm like coin alarm/hopper alarm etc), that alarm should actually play quite loud, regardless of if the machine's saved volume setting is very low. So I'm wanting to see if that just works with my existing emulation code, or if I need to find an address that is mapped to a temporary 'Volume Override' command. Thanks for any help

Not quite finished, but there was some code in Chris's source that was not implemented in MAME - I've implemented it, and now I have a working representation of the digital volume pot that is part of the Scorp 4 hardware, that is adjusting with the sound test Showing test value 69 of course So tomorrow, I'll continue, and work on implementing that so it scales the output waveform in some accurate way to cleanly represent what's happening in the MAME source (perhaps see how other drivers do it), and that'll be another minor audio bug fixed

Got some serious 'old school' MFME on the go over here, running in Windows XP! It's the trusty Cash On The Lash test layout... as there are some bugs in MAME that don't happen on this old version of MFME... so I think the strategy for some of those types of bugs will be trying to spot the internal difference between MFME and MAME emulation states/ram/irqs/read/writes etc as the bug happens, may help with developing fixes for MAME... that's the idea anyway

Ok - so to give a bit of variety to my FME dev stuff, I've bit the bullet and got the stuff sorted out so I can build MAME locally. First fix is to the Scorpion 2 broken volume, I made the edit I mentioned in the BFM Showtime Spectacular thread, and with a bit of debug, we can see the Volume is now emulated correctly I'll figure out a way now so I can have these commits in Github, without needing to wait for the MAME dev team to merge them, which has often been rather problematic. At some point in the future when convenient for them, they could grab all of the fixes and merge them in to the official MAME. Once that's done will update with a link to the repo here (and prob in my sig). Edit: the base repo on github for now that will contain the bugfixes/features is: https://github.com/johnparker007/mame

This test is unfortunately not using free software... it's just a proof of concept I was playing with, to verify that these patterns can be removed using an AI model. If you have some decent resolution scanned flyers that you want processed that have this specific issue of rosette/moire patterning, you could send me a batch and I'll process them here and send them back... best I can do for the mo! I was getting these from @spa's drive, he has a decent collection there. At some point it would be possible to train/find a model/weights and use them with a ComfyUI setup + NVidia GPU (so then it would be free software), but I've got too much on with Oasis to get sucked down that rabbit hole, which will cost me loads of time One day perhaps I'll sort something

A few more tests:

I've been having a play with another AI image processing angle that might be useful for creating good background images from scanned flyers; attempting to remove the printing artifacts like the rosette pattern/moire: Original on Left / Processed on Right:

Quick summary of Dif by our robot friend Desert Island Fruits is a community-driven website focused on the emulation and appreciation of vintage fruit machines. It caters to enthusiasts of fruit machine emulation, particularly those using the Multiple Fruit Machine Emulator (MFME). The site offers forums, layout reviews, video tutorials, and a gallery of user-created layouts for various machines. Members actively contribute by sharing ROMs, layouts, and technical advice on recreating or modifying old fruit machines digitally. New members can access a "Newbies Help Area" for guidance on setting up MFME, downloading files, and contributing through donations or by uploading resources. While some downloads are available freely, there are limits on downloads for basic members, which can be increased with contributions or active community involvement. The community aspect is a significant part of the platform, where users share nostalgic stories about their favorite fruit machines, discuss cabinet building projects, and even honor the memory of Chris Wren ("Wizard"), who was instrumental in developing MFME. Overall, Desert Island Fruits serves as a hub for enthusiasts to relive and preserve the legacy of classic fruit machines through emulation. Totally gives itself away with its weird AI phrasing, though one day I'm sure that'll be solved so it won't do a final summary sentence starting with the word 'Overall' which makes it sound utterly mental by British writing standards. Nice to see a shout out to Chris, though I'm sure he wouldn't be best pleased with occupying the same sentence as the American spelling of 'favorite' and 'honor'

I've tried it on some 'retro' asm (the latest Claude 3.5 / o1 mini preview which are SOTA coding models) and it is ok but it does hallucinate. A lot... a very long way off a skilled (human) disassembler right now, but maybe one day I could see some usefulness

A lot of work has been going on with Oasis... but none of it lends itself to screenshots! But it's been a while, and I realised this hasn't been seen yet, so this is an example of a 'View'. ...you are not seeing double On the left is the 'Base' view, and on the right (for this early testing) is the MAME view. Later these will also be the 'perspective-corrected' views, that are part of the process of making the 2d MFME layouts into 3d Arcade Sim machines... but just dealing with the fundamentals for the moment... The commits can be seen live here, though they're all fairly technical at the moment: https://github.com/johnparker007/Oasis/commits/main/

Thanks for having a look, much appreciated! I set up this mini-side project, as there were a few folks who had high res (much higher than the MFME Layout) resources just locally on their home drives, and these machines are only getting rarer to see in order to take a photos of, so those high res photos are a super valuable resource for future layouts

Hiya @captainhaddock Thanks for those high res images! ...I'm just wondering, as I've seen your name on a lot of layouts over my years of tinkering with FME projects involving the layout collection... do you have a collection of images in decent quality like the ones above, for other machines? The reason I'm asking, is that if so, I'm wondering if I could be cheeky, and perhaps ask if those could be shared onto the 'Community Drive'. It's a public google drive (so anyone can view/download the files to work on new high res layouts) I have setup, and given various scene members admin access to: [ Community Drive ] The drive: http://tinyurl.com/yckze665 (link above copied from my forum signature) We've generally been putting high quality art assets on there, for future layout resources (I may revise that at some point, so each machine also has a 'low quality' subfolder, since sometimes some useful information can be gleaned from having more photos even if blurry etc). No worries if not, but I thought I'd best check! If you do, me or one of the other drive admins can put them in the relevant folders in the 'Archive' area... or also, I'd be happy to add you to the list of Admins, so then you have full write access (we can sort that out over DM), if you'd prefer that. Thanks for your many layouts over the years

I've done the upscale and placed it in an 'AI Upscaled' subdirectory on the drive. Direct link to the file is here (upscaled from my higher quality original image), this should be pretty much good enough for a 4K layout now (some small text may need a touch up), as the source image was good enough quality https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jz2BgGk80sb0753ADKswi4Oe5qrTsUW4/view?usp=drive_link

I have just added a slightly higher quality version of this image to the Community Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k7N4dVX4kzNhI9zolZkq69D7oLNJA7Iw/view?usp=drive_link Looks like a good candidate for AI upscaling, would recommend a 4x using Upscayl Photo Ultramixed Balanced. May need to retype some of the smallest text, good luck

Later down the line, I'll likely be spending a good few months at least working on (fruit machine) emulation bugs in MAME. I have seen some of those PRs hang around for quite a while before, so I was planning to fork it, and also push my fixes to my fork's mainline. So then if that happens with my fixes (that they don't get merged for months), it won't affect Oasis since the 'MAME_FruitFixes' branch will have the latest MAME.exe periodically updated in Releases, with all my latest fruit fixes. Once they get caught up and all merged into the official MAME repo, of course it won't be needed anymore, but yeah, I have a plan for that so I don't get pee'd off in the interim

I've just heard about this device: They are LCD rather than OLED unfortunately... but if one were to build a 'tiny cab' this thing could be on the bottom, and contain the button images for the game you have loaded. And with a bit of software you could perhaps even hook up the rom-controlled 'flashing' effect, maybe by having an dark off image and a bright on image for each button. Cost is £145 for this 15 button unit, and it's a very popular and well reviewed product: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elgato-Controller-15-macro-keys-trigger-software-like-OBS/dp/B09738CV2G/ From watching this video here, looks like it takes 180x180 image files - so I guess that is also the resolution of each button. Wondering if I want one of these for my desk anyway for the day job, looks like a pretty neat gadget! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrWRzYYC1rE

I did notice that one, if he does more by hand I'll give him a heads up to let him know we have a visual Layout Editor in development that will have a MAME .lay export feature, in case he wants to hold out. Hand-coding MAME layouts is a major time sink, that one he committed is over 1,000 lines!

Well that is certainly a novel approach! So a bit like those console streaming services. If several people want to play at the same time (on different layouts), that could get hairy, as you'd need to be running and streaming out 3x MFME windows. You can pretty much simulate how it might be, by using something like TeamViewer or Chrome remote desktop, and then you could run MFME on your PC desktop - however! You will see much better results if both the host and client are on the same network (i.e: your house). As then it won't go out onto the internet and will all be done over your house ethernet/Wifi, giving a false sense of performance. You could kinda simulate real world conditions by playing it on your phone over 4/5G perhaps.

When I said 'legacy', maybe that wasn't the best choice of word lol I guess once Oasis is at the point where it has a functioning version of the new Arcade Sim, with the machines built using its tools, and the servers are working, then the old Arcade Sim will truly be legacy.

Well this was just some very broad pointers, for if someone did want to do this system (I won't due to the time cost, as I'll be doing a system in Oasis that will work 'somewhat' differently to this (much less janky and much less straightforward to cheat! ). At the basic level, if it's working on an 'honour' system, so say everybody uses their Dif forum username as their username for the Windows-side app... then if a machine stays 'checked out' for a week or so, a message could be sent thru Dif to ask them to do check the file back in. And on the Windows app side, you'd have a button to check in the machine you currently have checked out (so it wouldn't matter if communication was lost at some point during play, they only need to be connected at the point when the click to check the machine back in again). Need to be online: Browse and check out an available machine from the list via the Windows app Don't need to be online: Play the checked out machine, launching it from the Windows app Need to be online: Check in (aka 'submit') the machine again

That is correct. The author Chris Wren sadly died, and so the source code is lost. Yes that's right. There is something on the Oasis repo that would probably be useful for this, as it's also used by MfmeTools to control Mfme for extracting the layout, and not polluting the real Mfme data in the Windows Registry. It's part of the dll injection that Arcade Sim uses - it does cause false positives with virus detection software though! The code's probably a mess, as it was a bit of a whirlwind developing all the technology to make Arcade Sim work, so I wasn't doing my tidiest work Oasis code is better, honest lol You prob do something like have a server running, or ideally set it up on an Amazon instance. That could manage the database of ram saves, who currently has a machine 'checked out' from the collection of machines (i.e: they are playing it). It could provide a web interface purely for viewing the data. It could then also provide some JSON IO stuff (something simple with plaintext GET/POST to start), that's how the Windows-side app would check out/submit RAM saves to the online database. The Windows app would display a list of the machines in the database, and whether they are currently being played by another user, or available to check out. When a machine is checked out by a user thru the app, it downloads the save, and prob fires MFME up under the DLL control, using its own copy of the layout. Then at some point the user can choose to submit this machine back to the server, making it available for others to play. You could also add some basic tracking of the meters, ensuring the layouts specifically set up for this system have them set correctly, I think it's in the .gam file where the accumulated values are recorded. So you could then give users a balance or 'high score' of how much they made/lost. This would all be extremely easy for someone to cheat on if they were so inclined btw! Editing gam file In/out totals, exiting MFME without saving the ram if they do poorly, plus other ways to cheat, hacking credits into RAM with something like cheat engine. It'd also all be highly janky, but that's a way it could be implemented in theory, if you chose to develop it

Ah cool, hopefully you are all sorted now then I'm afraid I'm not doing any further updates on this 'legacy' Arcade Sim, as the new Oasis suite of apps will include a new Arcade Sim... that one will have full VR support, but it's likely a couple of years out!

Hmm that's odd, I recall you said the video game machines were only showing black screens, so I just assumed you had an old PC with perhaps a slow hard drive! That sounds like it should be able to run it... though I must admit I've only tried it on SSDs (rather than the older 'spinning disc' hard drives). So, if from the in-arcade settings menu, you set these 3 settings to their defaults, so it looks like this: ...and then fully exit to the frontend, and reload back into the arcade... the videogame screens are black? For reference, they should look like in this video:

The way I plan to implement this will be that the user will be running the emulator (in this case MAME) in their own machine, not in the cloud. So for the 'arcade' version, the simplified version of how it will work is: when you walk up to a machine to play it (that doesn't have someone else currently playing it), the latest uploaded save state will be downloaded from the server, and the emulator will start up with that save state. User plays, money goes in, money pays out etc... then they exiting playing the machine, and the machine's current state is uploaded to the server as the new latest state, ready for the next user. If you get close to another player who is playing a machine (specifically in terms of the fruit machines), there will be a stream of the lamp/segment/dot matrix data, in a highly compressed lossless format. So then it'll be like how the fruit machines do their attract modes in the current Arcade Sim when you are walking around - it's just a somewhat compressed data stream, that flashes the various lamps etc. Unsure what direction to take wrt. streaming the emulated audio yet, will get into that when I actually come to implement this stuff ... though button clicks, coin payout, meter clicks etc will also play back perfectly as again it can be wrapped in the highly compressed codec as mere trigger bytes. So you'll be able to wander around and watch people actually play the machines next to you... In terms of doing something for MFME, I couldn't get into that myself, since I need to use my free FME dev time to work on Oasis... but someone could knock something up that would work like how Amber did it, so simply uploading the RAM save when the user finishes playing locally, and then the next user downloads that RAM save, and boots up the machine...