johnparker007

Hi Davados Someone else told me about this issue and I'm seeing it too now, so the website appears to be broken at present. Shows this: I can hopefully fix, I'm guessing @slasher rolled out an update as he is kindly hosting the Arcade Sim website for us. All the actual data for Arcade Sim is hosted here by the folks at Dif. Some great folks in the community, so I've not had to pay for hosting! Anyhoo, so for now, here is a link to the Installer exe from my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dy9cgg2c71y5k91/Arcade Simulator Setup.exe?dl=0 Download that and run it, and everything should install fine from there. Remember in this 'legacy' version of Arcade Sim you'll need to also install MFME and update it from v20.0 to v20.1 (this won't be a requirement later, although dev of the open source successor Oasis is on hold due to health). Hopefully that should all work for you, and you'll be back Arcade Simulating again!

Even though I was involved, I have to admit that the Amiga may have faired better had it not been for the ubiquity of software piracy. All the talented game devs got out of the Amiga ecosystem, and focused on SNES/Megdrive/Saturn/PS1 and the poor old Amiga was bereft of software... amazing computer for its time though

I used Protracker and Noisetracker - but ultimately found OctaMED Pro to offer the best editing features (I think partly because it was built on the OS native Intuition lib).

I did a work experience from, school at a place called something like Humberside Computer Services. He sold Amigas and printers etc, but the real cash cow was we had several amigas along the wall, and people would browse the games, and choose some, and then we'd write them a copy. I believe it was £3 for a single disc game; multidisc games were £2 per disc. There became a problem with kids coming in, browsing the master copies (Dave was getting these via post and BBS) and then 'shoplifting' games... so then Dave set up a system, so his masters were all on 5 1/4" floppies instead - in X-Copy, it didn't mind if the source drive was an external 5 1/4" drive (so you'd then copy from DF1 -> DF0). The shoplifting dropped to zero overnight! (As no-one could use those massive discs in their Amigas). He got busted by FAST three times, each time, the fine was far less than the money being made from selling the copies, so he'd just pay the fine and carry on

There was also a 'software only' version of this. It was a little hit and miss as to whether a game would overwrite the interrupt stuff and/or the RAM area of the resident program, but when it did work, it was pretty much the full hardware, but in software - was good for finding cheat values in memory, and general hacking. For ripping soundtracker modules from memory, I recall that it was actually better to do another way (soft reset machine while mod to rip is loaded, then fire up a memory ripper). I amassed a lot of samples from games/demos to use for my own music making endeavours with this technique

At least someone actually paid the devs for games! There was another awful lot of this going on in the late 80s-early 90s That said you did need to be linked to someone who could source the cracked games, ultimately coming from a BBS (or the snail mail). I didn't play many games, but I was lucky to be 'connected' to a couple of people who were in the scene

For a little secret At the very start when you collect these items from the rooftop, you can collect them in a specific order to enable cheat mode: I didn't know this at the time, as I didn't have the internet (and it was early days of the net, may not have even be there/findable). The order is the first letter of each item, to spell out the word C.H.E.A.T... so Cake, Hammer, Earth, Apple, Tap. A good platform game on the Amiga though, worth enjoying without any cheats!

Ground-breaking game for the time - out of interest, does the megadrive/genesis version work on your mistr fpga? I remember this is the only game on genesis that features extra hardware in the cartridge (to provide the 3d)... weirdly it works on my real megadrive (a Japanese unit for best NTSC CRT picture without shipping from the states) with my X7 Krizzx flashcart, I think I probably paid like £40 extra just for the FPGA support for this one game, so the collection would be complete and playable!

lol from a quick scan through, and I'm certainly no expert, a lot of this stuff sound like made up nonsense Like: ...like yeah this part is true (3x hold of double symbols means the win spins in on a lot of machines), but Step 1 & Step 2 of this is saying that when offered holds with 2 of the same symbol on the line, hold 2 reels, but not of the same symbol, and this will 'confuse' the fruit machine, so then it will be forced to offer you 3 consecutive holds on the win symbol. Sounds to me like they were doing that, which is essentially just credit cycling to build up the payout %age, and then in their head, retro-fitting the outcome to their made up theory... All they were doing was feeding the machine more cash, ensuring no accidental win could spin in, and then attributing the consequent 'readiness' to their made up elaborate system. A fun read though from what I checked out so far! Btw here is step 2 from the above - this sounds like utter fantasy to me:

Good call mate, I did the same thing with Arcade Sim, when you're still writing the software while people already want to use it, it's a good idea - as you don't want people running crusty old versions with bugs and missing features that have already been addressed! Good luck with your ongoing FruitBar project.

Paging @appstrader

It looks good on paper, but I think most fruit emulation cab builders find that they want physical buttons to operate the machine, at least for the main buttons (Start, Hold 1/2/3 etc) - so trying to press down at the bottom of the touch screen, while it will work, will make for a fairly unsatisfying experience, especially in this pure vertical orientation.

Those 3d cabs are looking good! Long way down the line but one day Arcade Sim will have all its layout in a clear open source format, along with the cabs themselves (prob in .json). Once that time comes, it'll be all open source so you can have at it Also, there'll be the lamp data, so you could even show attracts running - keep up the good work man

That port has come out pretty well! It's by Ed Fries (who also did Halo 2600) - here's his dev thread for it: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/218406-rally-wip/ It's really nice that he managed to use the 'playfield' aspect of the 2600 hardware in a 4 way scrolling fashion to do the map, very nice.

Wow just checked out Boxxi, does look like good simple pure fun actually!

Not technically FME-related, but I believe these were in arcades/bars in some countries alongside fruit machines... "work on PC video cards is still progressing, with the added benefit of fixing MegaTouch XL 6000 graphics this month" https://www.mamedev.org/?p=529 We also have an initial 3d model from @Spidy21982 for the future (as the new Arcade Sim will directly run latest MAME releases )

Technically possible using the source released version (from many years ago during the whole MAME source code situation), though it's old and buggy. At some point, the more promising approach will be using MAME... currently no official up to date port, though retroarach has an android lib, but it lags quite a lot of versions behind - plus the MAME team (and emulation scene in general) really aren't happy with the Retroarch project, so I'll not be using Retroarch as a dev pathway going forward. TLDR: 2D FME on mobile will be coming one day, and probably 3D to via Oasis - but don't hold your breath for any of this, will likely be years away!

Quick test of an MPU4. Seems the fix we put in (as Adders and Ladders synth sound tunes were running too slow), has also sped up the sound chip, so everything sounds too fast/high pitched! Will be fixed in a different way at some point (2x xtals, or different values per machine or something...).

If we're necro-ing old posts, I've had a quick edit of that layout to fix/improve: - improved alphanumeric display - made buttons clickable, with keyboard shortcuts (should now work with touchscreen) - made main coinslot clickable, with 0 to insert £1 - made reel lamps and reel mask the default, which looks smoother and more realistic Alphabet - Barcrest.zip Have fun

Just thought I'd record a very quick play with some of those new emulation features we get 'for free' (since this is using MAME for emulation backend), such as the save states...

Ah unfortunately it sounds like it is likely not compatible with your machine then unfortunately, sorry about that. I just checked and the arcade sim website is live, and it boots for me past the update process, so all I can suggest is restarting your PC, then launching it again, a restart has been known to fix things! Also, I guess try launching Arcade Sim as Administrator (find in Start menu, and right click, like shown below): I'm a bit under the weather, so maybe someone else may be able to think of something if those steps don't work! If still not joy, perhaps you could post a screenshot of the errors you saw ("get errors on updates") ? Might help to narrow down the issue...

I think the CPU should just about be fast enough to even do the videos, RAM is fine, SSDs are fine... however your graphics card looks to be one designed for CAD workstations rather than standard 3d gaming, and I think that may really pull your framerates down. I'd say your best bet is to install it and see! Like I mentioned, download is here: Arcade Simulator: Pre-alpha installer: http://arcadesimulator.net You'll also want the latest MFME installed for the fruit machines, though I'd try installing Arcade Simulator first, then try walking around in the arcade, see if your graphics card can run it ok. The graphics card looks to be one specialised for working with wireframe models and things like that rather than playing games. So I suspect it may not work/work very well due to that, but you might get lucky!

It's 'Arcade Simulator', there's a download link in my forum sig below (You'll need a half-decent PC to run it btw, it's more demanding than just MFME, since it's 3d, realtime lighting etc...)

This is normal, that menu was placeholder - this Arcade Simulator was a (very large) initial proof-of-concept of a large playable 3d arcade (as was not sure if was even feasible), the new one is going to be built as a component of the new Oasis project (it will have more tightly integrated emulation via live MAME exe which will solve a bunch of problems with the current system). This will be quite a while though (at least a year, probably longer), but I felt that I left Arcade Sim in a good spot to keep people going, there's plenty of machines in there! For the video games, the keys are QAOP and Space for up/down/left/right/fire, and then I believe it was MNB for additional buttons. Some standard joypads will automatically work (Xbox pad etc), however for custom ones, you'll need to use some software like Joy2Key (which maps definable USB joystick inputs to keypresses). Not ideal, but this was where I was up to, so hadn't gotten to doing definable input system yet. It did while it was under development, however, the new Arcade Simulator (as part of the Oasis Suite of arcade emulation software), will be a whole new install. There are no more updates planned for this version of Arcade Simulator. I play it on a TV for the fruit machines from time to time, it's nice relaxing experience! All donations are gratefully received, there's a link in my sig below They will go towards future expenses for the Oasis project, as stuff comes up - ta very much! Also, the Oasis project is open source (as are all my new FME projects going forward) - source code links also in my sig.