johnparker007

I was noticing it takes a very long time to the machines to initialise, and I'm impatient ...plus it's not great for the online arcade experience. Anyway, so I've been doing some R&D (well the research side, I haven't actually made the proper system yet) - to speed up those initialise times with some good old fashioned hacking Excluding the time to load the layout (which I should also be able to speed up once my data layouts are generated from scratch with no image resources), these are the speed up results on my PC (which runs at a fairly fast speed of 4.7ghz): So on the older techs (Scorpion 4 and earlier), the machines will get to their playable state near-instantly, on the latest techs (Scorpion 5 etc) the times are around half to third (on a ~4.7ghz CPU) Here's a quick video of Monopoly Road to Riches (Scorpion 4), first showing normal startup (approx 42s), then turbo startup (approx 3s):

Bit of a long gameplay video here, been working on various things... - attract modes look scrambled on all machines (except Happy Hour as the recording was write protected), this is due to new converter feature, so it can now record these automatically as part of the conversion process (saving me time/hassle). Will fix the new scrambled lamps bug soon. - 'MFME lifecycle' system working well so far, on each of these I'm pressing enter to launch, escape to return (then the machine returns to displaying attract mode recording) - new machines being played: Fiddle 'A' Fortune, and Eastern Promise. - all machines playable (except Happy Hour, once I turned volume up, I realised it wasn't starting due to a RAM error) - plus other misc stuff. There's a big pause somewhere in the video, that's because someone from work rang and needed a code for the underground car park, so I had to deal with that! Next, planning to work on getting those automated attract mode recordings unscrambled, along with more on MFME lifecycle (full screen windows client, keeping MFME always hidden behind but still operable). I'll prob do another video when those things are implemented, as it'll all look a bit more ship-shape

Beginnings of HUD rendering, plus a little progress on MFME lifecycle work. Here I'm pressing enter when viewing Wok 'n' Roll / Fiddle 'a' Fortune and it's loading the correct data layout under an MFME instance. Then when I press Escape, it kills the 'engaged' machine instance, and goes back to viewing mode to continue exploring the arcade

Bit of a rough WIP update video, emulator lifecycle management is going to take more time to develop than I initially thought... but, I have started with getting a decent UI system in, which you see some of the elements of here, so thought it was worth a quick vid It's a weird vid, the mouse pointer is invisible and the camera moves when suing the UI, this won't be the case with more emulator lifecycle stuff done - but I do really like the look of the new UI ...I initially started making one of my own, and it looked 'adequate', so I spent £20 and bought this one that I can adapt. I like the style of it, clean and modern.

Thank you, that is very much appreciated mate

Flexi reels sound like something new, don't remember those from mfme2mame... and disk reels - I haven't implemented those yet... so both those reel types won't currently work with this basic implementation. In a nutshell, it's like you say; they're not that common, so they can wait until later The plan is to implement all reel types (Horizontals, disk reels, band reels, and this new flexi reel) in a later pass of the reels. But for now, I just wanted to get enough basic reel functionality going to get a bunch of 'standard' machines playable (hence the placeholder 'treat horizontal reels as verticals' workaround), so I can move onto the next step towards the online arcade Next steps are currently planned to be: getting a UI system in for the menus, then basic MFME lifecycle stuff (quite a big job), so I can walk around and engage/disengage with different machines (in full screen with MFME always hidden). Once that's working 'well enough', I can start looking at the server stuff (to keep database of machine RAMs for upload/download, and player total In/Out per machine session, along with some other bits and bobs). Thanks for the heads-up on flexi reels, I look forward to figuring them out when the time comes

Turns out I had more stuff to do with the reels than I thought, but now they are finally at the 'done enough' stage There were issues with horizontal reels, and some mis-scaling of some vertical single symbol reels. Horizontal reels I now have working, though I'm displaying them as vertical reels (so they move up/down for now, but the number is still correct so they are perfectly playable). Here's some gameplay on Wok 'n' Roll, which I've never played before, as is probably clear from the video! But it shows the horizontal number reel working correctly (as a vertical reel). There's also 4 other machines with their reels correctly converted from the same latest code (the off machine's reels aren't aligned to winlines etc since they aren't hooked up to anything).

More reel improvements - number reel working correctly, plus redone some fudgy ratios with more accurate maths, so closer to the approx reel diameters to match the reel windows now wrt symbols on reel and symbols visible (calced via s=rθ for those interested! ). There's still a bit more to do on this pass of the reels (better scraping of visible reel window, to deal with rounded / arched / irregular reel windows)... then I'll park that feature for the mo, as it's 'good enough for now'. Then, I think I'll be moving onto MFME lifecycle management; so that'll be about walking up to the 3 machines in attract mode, pressing Enter to 'interact' with whichever is the main machine currently in view - at which point, it'll load up MFME, and do some hacks to keep MFME hidden behind, but accepting keypresses. Also, perhaps move the player into a fixed playing position. Once say Escape is pressed, then it'll 'disengage' from the machine, so basically kill the MFME process, and return the player to normal walking around controls. So it'll be possible to play two different machines in the same video. Unfortunately no snapshot load/save in MFME as it currently stands, so we will need to wait for the machines to do their full 1 minute+ boot up process, does seem to be quite long on these newer machines (I think the older machines are quicker).

Not thought too far on that, though I should hopefully be able to come up with something to stop it being too easy to cheat If someone is really determined they could still cheat in certain ways though even if I add counter measures, hackers gonna hack (I'll not detail how one would accomplish that here though, we'll rely on a little 'security by obscurity' ) You can't at present, but I will be adding that in at some point further down the line, I did similar in mfme2mame (clickable buttons) so it's definitely doable

Still a lot to do with reels, but definitely getting there with the latest test These reels are being driven from the new reel pixels on the generated data layout (so each reel has a pixel, whose brightness determines the position). There's plenty of bugs and unfinished bits, like the number reel on the feature board is showing the wrong numbers... and still not finished up the autoscaling yet so reel scales are slightly wrong... but it should all be sortable

Quick tech update Took a break from the batch conversion stuff, to do some work on the reel conversion. There are some fudged ratios for now (and so the scales are a bit off) until I can work out the maths (or just generate a lookup table to avoid that hassle )... but the reel placement and scale is still much improved now... and I think I should be able to sort out the remaining issues with another night or two on it. After that's done, I suspect I'll move onto adding, then reading, reels from the data layout (generated data layout only contains lamps at present). Then that should allow me to play one of these 3d machines and have the reels spin

Sorry mate, they've had to go on! Just remembered I could pretty quickly knock up another 3 machine demo (as I had the converter config files set up for Eastern Promise and Fiddle A Fortune from testing something the other day). All the data layouts here were auto-generated (but I did then have to manually record their attract mode loops, so that's the next thing to automate).

I didn't make the manual data layouts in the end, and just pressed on with coding the converter to generate these automatically. Turned out to be more painful than I thought, but that's often the case! There's plenty more to do (reels, vfds, alphanumerics etc) as this just places a compact scrapable lamp matrix for now, but it's a good start Anyway, here's the first machine that has it's data layout generated by the converter. I still had to record the attract mode anim manually, so that's the next big task (generating attract mode recordings as part of the automated conversion process).

Just another tech update After spending the whole day reorganising stuff and writing new bits, I've finally got the office PC synced up and acting as a 'build machine'. So I'm on my bedroom PC typing this, meanwhile the office PC is chugging away rebuilding those 6 machines from last night's video. This is really handy, so I can make converter changes then rebuild the machine collection overnight (or something like a machine every 30 mins at present). It also means I can have machines building in the evenings while I'm working on new stuff for the Converter in the bedroom (I can't do anything on a PC when it's building the machines). I'll probably make the last 3 manual data layouts (lamps only) I'll be doing tomorrow for the 3 new machines... as then I need to figure out how to best generate the data layouts automatically per machine, to save my time as the collection grows (Data layouts are alternative layouts that contain just the bare minimum to relay to the 3d renderer what's going on with the lamps, reels, vfds etc)... a big old job again, but everything that can be automated, must be automated to keep my time free to work on development. Tons of work at every turn, but nice to have that separate build machine set up now I also learnt today that Perforce absolutely hates '£' characters in filenames and breaks... so that was a couple of hours writing scripts to auto-fix all that including inside .gam files etc (plus removing spaces from filenames), they're absolutely everywhere in these fruit machine layout downloads!

Been doing more work on batch automation (of the conversion of the layouts) There's 6 machines setup for conversion now, the new ones have their lamps off at present, as after I've sorted out the reels, the plan is to look at automating the 'data layouts' that are minimal layouts that just provide data to the renderer.

I've seen that project, it's pretty cool! Regards set up, I'll probably get it packaged into an opensource Windows installer - so it should just be download > run > play

Chase HQ on the Spectrum is a supreme bit of programming, they got a heck of a lot out of that very low spec machine

If that Spectrum in the loft is a 'toastrack' (black 128k model without built in tape deck), they're worth a few quid now I wanted to support the project, and get myself a slice of the modern ZX Spectrum action - it's officially licensed, and the case was designed by the (late) same guy who designed the cases for the original Spectrums back in the day. The Spectrum is kinda dear to me, since it's where I first learnt to program, and I've been pretty much programming ever since, with just a few breaks in my 20s!

I grew up on a grey +2 model - good little machines

They had a second round of preorders, and they're running a 'preorder shop' for those that missed the second kickstarter: https://www.specnext.com/shop/ £300 for base model, £325 for accelerated... plus I think £10 P&P. So not cheap by any stretch... but after doing JPLaunch (that I've still gotta release), I managed to justify it to myself as that project just about makes me a Speccy developer Yeah c64 was more powerful on the gfx/sound front (which is kinda most of the fronts) - Speccy was very cheap though in comparison back then

I do like the Next project, I've got one ordered, super expensive though!

Tech update - no eye candy here today So I had the day off work, so obviously spent all day long working on the 'batch automation' stuff instead of doing any of the boring real life stuff I was meant to be doing. Also did a little on reels, though there's a good day or more left on those I think... It's all very hacked together / slightly unstable / slow at reading values from MFME... but, it has just successfully completed my first test of generating 3x machines from a batch job, with no user intervention required The idea is that then once I have it more stable, I can leave my office PC running a batch job overnight, to do say 16 layouts. So then as I make fixes/add new stuff like alphanumeric displays etc, I can just leave the office PC to rebuild the machines while I'm asleep (I think it's currently like 30 minutes per machine, so it's a real time sink). Here's a ~6 minute video of it performing the process, for those curious to see it in action (and some half-finished reels are visible at the end). It's not extracting the full layout, just the first 8 components from each machine, as I'm more testing that it can loop over a bunch of layouts. EDIT: I've downloaded some more machines from this site that should just about perfectly fit in my one cabinet 3d model I have at present, so these are on the way (and there will be some Betcoms and Mazoomas after as they also fit in the model):

Thanks guys ...though this brief test has added something to the lower priority to do list - the glass panels are all varying brightness on the source layouts. I think it's going to want some kind of 'normalising pass', so the lamps in their off and on states look around the same brightness across all the machines and the glass panels are evenly lit.

Done a bit on automating the 3d layout generation, still a bunch more to do, but getting there

Much appreciated They are very good, as A:E says - must've been a lot of work. Once I've got everything basically working with the arcade (which will be certainly in the realm of months), I was wanting to circle back and look at this sort of stuff. I think it'd be possible to take a 'pre-angled' image like yours above (or potentially a high res angled photo), and write something to map that back to a 3d layout, and autolamp, using the existing layout for reference lamp brightness etc. Purely as an alternative to AI upscaling... but to be fair these are all 'side quests' I'd be very grateful to take a copy of those files now, and thanks again for the offer ...but it may be a number of months before I'm onto looking at retro-fitting layouts with higher resolution images. I think it'll mainly be appreciated for VR, where one could lean into the machine to reel-peek etc, and the glass art would just stay sharp