johnparker007

I'm not sure offhand, if it's electronic hardware it will be possible - though I think these guys are just focussing on getting existing techs booting for the mo (not taking into account config stuff). Just checked, the old mfme2mame converted classic layout of the above machine in action in MAME:

He's a busy man in the emulation scene - I know he's been working on a lot of cheap handhelds recently, he just loves emulating random hardware platforms!

May be taking a couple of days away from this, as two very talented MAME devs (Haze and Agemame) are now looking at FME - so I will be helping out with MFME2MAME/other tech stuff on that project where I can. Here's one of their WIP videos getting a 'new' (to MAME) tech working:

Lol yeah it wasn't me running out of electric tokens, though I have used those many years ago, and it was a right pain if they ran out at night when the shop was closed! They're doing some works and managed to knock out about 200 houses for a few hours - put a sudden stop to my FME work Cool - I'll update my Todo list and get a dedicated Paypal account set up, like you say, no point in wasting money on fees

I'd not want any funds for myself personally, but some funds to help with the mainly FME-specific costs could be useful I could set up a separate Paypal account or something, as I already use that... I bought the Eclipse cabinet 3d model, and some other bits. If I can't get a good voluntary 3d artist on board to help with making the 3d cabinet model templates, I may pay one to make the required cabinet starter templates that I can then tweak in 3ds Max to make all the cabinet variants we need (as it'll cost me a lot of time to learn Max to the level to build good template models myself). Plus potentially other costs to do with running Amazon / Photon servers to make all the online magic work... I'll stick it on the Todo list and sort something out - is GoFundMe the preferred platform for this sort of thing? Cheers for the offer of financial help with the costs folks, it's appreciated

Quick update Dot matrix alpha displays very nearly done now (just a minor scaling touch up left to do). Had a bloomin' power cut part way through fast re-converting the batch - which made Monopoly Road To Riches come out looking a bit weird so I left it in for fun. Here's 5 working anyway, sourced from MFME DotAlphas and MFME MatrixAlphas... starting the Seven Segment displays next

I have considered a feature like that - at the moment it's essentially always in 'walking around' control mode. The plan is to add an 'playing machine' control mode. So when you are walking around, you look at a machine, press enter/zero, and it will engage the machine. It'll automatically move you into a preset ideal viewing spot in front of the machine. Now walking controls won't function (you are locked in place). In this 'playing machine' mode, the mouse pointer will appear, allowing for clicking on buttons on the machine (with left mouse click). Hovering over a button will change mouse pointer to a finger (similar to MFME). Holding right mouse button down will change mouse pointer to an 'eye' icon with arrows - while right mouse is held down, moving the mouse will control the freelook camera, same as the 'walking around' mode. Another option might be to have camera move if user moves mouse pointer to edge of screen... not sure yet, will see what feels most intuitive. Plan was to do some form of zoom in/out with the mouse scroll wheel. Of course it'll be more worth zooming if/when I can work out how to do streaming AI upscaled textures (8-16k per glass panel), there were some demos of this tech investigation I did on another thread on this forum Long way off before I can work on that AI upscale streaming stuff though, still tons of basic functionality to do...

Made some good progress on getting the dot alpha displays properly implemented Demo vid of a couple working, two didn't work for some reason - just a silly bug I'm sure, too tired to fix tonight! So, still a few more hours work, fixing the bug and adding support for 'Matrix Alpha' from MFME alongside the now working 'Dot Alpha' components. I guess next up will be starting the task of implementing the Seven Segment displays, as there's usually a bunch of those...

Thanks man I shouldn't have those issues with my rendering system, as I built it to be very dynamic for later changes (at some point I'll be able to add optional lamp light bleed etc via shaders). Was just having a quick play the other night to make sure it worked properly I just take the raw layout resources and do all the brightness adjustment like you see in the video in realtime via the GPU using shaders. Thanks guys yeah that's what I figured, MFME hits a wall so you can't properly scale the displays to the display windows. My rendering system doesn't have those limitations, so I'll just make 2 or 3 'correct' Dot Alpha displays, then use whichever is the correct type per machine (determined from youtube video / one of infections images). Ta - yeah I had a look later yesterday and spotted that, I've now properly implemented support for converting and running reversed reels. I then did a fast re-convert on Pots of Luck (and Trail Blazer which also had a reversed number reel) - both now working correctly

lol but on further checking of youtube videos, there are displays that do have a horizontal gap between the characters: I'll do a 'standard' one for now, then perhaps make a couple more. I've tried scaling them in MFME and it has limitations, so I can see why layout artists may scale them differently, in order to best fill the alpha display window - or perhaps the manufacturer just uses what they have lying around in the parts bin... there may be no 'correct' version for a machine! Interesting stuff anyway

No worries on the Vega thing for now - just from unexpectedly seeing it in action on that Oliver's Twist machine in the video above - I find it hard to imagine that the program ROM for Oliver Twist has some code that tells it to cycle through those colors with pulsing. I think it's more likely that if it's fed with lamp on voltage/signal - it just goes through that pre-programmed color pulsing. It's for lots later anyway, was just surprised by seeing it since we were just talking about it! Anyway, so I found another example, so on this very shaky youtube video of Pots of Luck, it seems to have a Dot Alpha that is different from the one in the layout: In the layout, there are large horizontal gaps between the characters, yet in the video grab, we can see from the 'NN' in 'WINNER' that there aren't any large horizontal gaps. I think I'm probably best using just the overall size (total width/total height) of the Dot Alpha from the layout, then just making a 'standard one' and fitting it into that space. Yeah - those ones are different, I'll be doing those later on - they should be fine Thanks for the info man

@slasher In doing some research into dot alphas (looking at Dad's Oliver's Twist layout compared to youtube video), I've seen one of those Vega color-cycling note acceptors in action: Am I right in thinking that basically this gets fed with a 'lamp on' signal, just like the standard ones, and instead of showing solid lamp (thru red plastic bezel) - it color cycles? So the color-cycling isn't ROM controlled from the game ROM, the game ROM just tells the acceptor to 'light up'? If so, then this can be easily supported in the 3d arcade - if there's the signal for it to be lit, instead of a steady color, I'll just run the pulsing color-cycle I have another another query please, as you know your fruit machine hardware ...so on this layout for instance, there is zero space between the 'dots' of the 'MFME Dot Alpha' dot matrix display: ... and on this machine (Pieces of Eight), there are gaps between the individual dots: Now, I think this is perhaps just due to MFME not scaling displays, so layout artists are doing this as a workaround to best fit the display to their background image? So is that the case - are all these displays actually identical? Or do some have large gaps between the individual dots, and others have absolutely no gap between the individual dots? Thanks for any insight

Had a quick check, and balancing the pseudo-lighting of the machine glasses should be fine This is a thing I noticed before, each machine has different lighting levels of the unlit glass (and indeed the lamps). One of the new machines (Pots of Luck) was particularly bright, so I've put it next to the darkest machine to show the issue (and how I will ultimately auto-fix this inconsistency). So in code, I will get all the unlit glasses (and potentially the lamps) to a baseline unlit and lit brightness. Then when they are matched, there will also be an overall control... so each user can have their arcade darkly lit (how they look best in my opinion!), or if they prefer they could have it very brightly lit - it'll be like a 'dimmer switch'

Since I've spent most of the weekend working on FME dev - I've got my 'fast re-conversion' system done. So now when I need to roll out a change/improvement to the existing machines, it doesn't need to recreate the entire machine from scratch in order to add a Dot Matrix display or whatever the change is. It finds the existing work from the previous conversion, and reuses it (unless I override the settings to force a rebuild of a certain area, such as reels for example). Needed to get it done, so I can start adding dot matrix displays, fixing reel bugs (the number reel is wrong in the below video for some reason, haven't investigated yet). And then I can re-generate all the machines in around 1/10th the time it took before the system As a test, I've converted another new machine (and then re-converted it a couple of times), everything seems to be working (apart from the wrong number reel, but that's a separate issue I'm sure). New machine is 'Pots of Luck'.

Good to know, ta Vecs Without the MFME source it'll probably be a massive pain for me to implement - so it's going on the very low priority pile for now! I will support the 'standard' ones that don't color cycle when I get to that bit

Ha colour cycling eh - I didn't know they did that Thanks for the info - I was only aware of the old NV10/11 ones that just do a lamp on/off (and then I guess the red plastic is what makes it look red). Had a quick google, I see this youtube video shows different colours on a Vega: and different brightness levels: Bright Dimmer: It'll all be fine from the 3d side. Does MFME emulate these color cycling note acceptors? If so, is there a layout that shows one in action? It's all pretty low priority for the moment, but I am planning to get everything looking as good/accurate as possible when the time is right

Both those features are yet to be implemented, but definitely on the roadmap The Seven Segment displays are probably going to be done after I get the Dot Alpha displays in. The 3d coin slot/not acceptor lamps will be a little later, maybe done around the time I get to doing the 3d button system (all buttons are just flat at the mo).

Ah good to know thanks it'll be cleaner to just have them all set to the same volume, from MFME. The dot alphas will hopefully be along within a week or two, once I've done some more stuff to speed up the re-conversion process.

Added a couple of new machines (Snakes & Ladders and Trail Blazer) to test out the new (much faster) MFME text scraper - everything seems to have come out in the right place so working well (Trail Blazer - the sound is very quiet, I actually thought it didn't have sound when I was recording. I will perhaps be able to code something to fix this issue of different volume levels between different machines...)

Not getting as much time to focus on this project at present, but still tinkering along with small bits So the new MFME text scraper is just about working now (full ASCII character set)... testing it on this reel component, the approx 12 numerical text fields I scrape so far - old system took around 4 seconds, new system takes like 1/60th of a second. Very satisfying speed increase (it all adds up when there's usually at least 200 components per layout) Will be continuing to finish this up and refactor some of the 'data entry' stuff to share some coordinates... then onto image caching, for more speed ups to the conversion process (which is currently torturously slow).

Had a nice relaxing Xmas/New Year thanks, hope you had a good one too!

Just a tech update, started tinkering again after a nice long programming break over the holidays So before I roll out the dot alphas from the recent videos properly, I want to speed up the generation/regeneration of the 3d machines from the layouts (so I can move into getting ~50 unique machines in the arcade from the current 5 test machines). Main plan is to implement screen scraping of the delphi font, then also have an option to not save out/process any images that already exist (from previous conversion run). Those two features should take processing of a pre-processed machine down to 4-5 mins from like 35-45 mins. I did some provisional rough test scraper code for the numbers, handcopying, much like making the old ZX Spectrum character graphics from my childhood That seemed to work fine, so I've now grabbed all the characters and worked out their dividers: Fortunately Delphi uses ancient font rendering techniques, so there's no font smoothing and no dynamic kerning (so it's easier to scrape). So once I can program this, it'll allow for grabbing any text from the MFME UI very quickly (compared to the current approach of sending various keypresses with delays to grab text to the copy buffer, one field at a time).

Just a fun update on that display, as I've had a festive amount of seasonal grog I realised it was all set up to do gameplay with zero changes required, so here's that new WIP alpha display in some gameplay action:

Looking forward to seeing them in action once I've done the rest of the work on implementing the test demo from the vid! Sorry man, I know it's an amateur ale, but I can only deal with weak stuff these days, and John Smith's is 3.6% I do treat myself to (local) Bradfield Brewery ales once in a while... some of those real ales get up to like 6% and I start going loopy!

Yeah the Betcom alpha coding isn't too fancy, just one fade after 'PRESENTS' - I noticed Monopoly did a few more effects (vertical scroll on if I remember correctly), and I think Flamin' 400 used some custom graphics, rather than just standard character set. Since I'm back to window capturing the data layouts now I've got it working much faster, we get all those fancy effects 'for free' as the excellent MFME has done all the work already Thanks man, and the session cans for today are John Smith's Extra Smooth