johnparker007

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

Cool - didn't realise he'd got that far with 3D! That was from 5 years back, so I'm guessing that project is shelved now. I'll probably knock up a few more newer cabs when I get chance to spend time and develop a few more 3ds max skills, or try tempt one of the 3d artists I know to have a crack at a few of the good ones (like the JPM Vogue). Plus a lot of those older ones are just simple metal tubing pieces and rounded corners, so seem like they'll be pretty simple to model: ...then can always be tweaked to near exact scale later once we can get owners to take a say ~5-10 measurements with a tape measure.

Don't forget the Missile Command!

Oh yeah, I reckon so - as well as fixing all the lamp issues, I think I should be able to extend the new technique to help determine the correct position and scale of future elements (reels, vfds, dmds, leds etc). A good day, as I was struggling a little with getting that maths working, which everything relies on to look perfectly aligned after the warp

Had the day off work today, and basically spent it all on lamps so far! I need a break But it's gone really well So I had a bunch of minor (but hard to solve how I was originally going about it) issues with the lamps: - not in correct positions - scale may have been a little off - lamps that overlapped each other were having problems (two overlapping ON lamps would mean one lamp would get overdrawn with a partial off image) - even after the main fix earlier for the green fringing I was getting with Wok & Roll, there was some other green fringing from a different cause (to do with edge of warped quads at conversion time I had a think, and realised I could rework the whole thing in a different way - which has fixed ALL of the above issues in one go It's quite a relief I can you, as this lamp stuff was not trivial to solve the way I was trying to do it before - the maths was making my brain melt. Here's Wok & Roll lamps with the issues fixed from today's rewrite: (Blended lamps - I haven't implemented fully yet, just treating them as normal lamps for now... will prob be looking into more converter automation/optimisation and reels next as higher priority tasks)

Hey there I've only put together small bits of layouts for testing stuff - I'll leave it to the pros on here to make the lovely layouts! Some of these high resolution DXs these days with the blended lamps and the latest MFME really do look very nice indeed. I'm a games programmer, and I also made a program years ago called mfme2mame along with some MAME development, which allowed me and the talented A:E to put together the first ever working DOND (Wizard was off the scene back then and so it seemed worth developing emulation for new techs via MAME). I've found a video where it's working in demo mode someone made, but we (another programmer called Keith got involved) also got basic ccTalk working - so we could play the DOND DX layout in proper door closed mode for real money, not crappy 'Demo' mode. Wizard reappeared on the scene at that point promising a new release of MFME, so I drifted away from the FME scene for a bit - as his new emulator release would cover what we were doing and lots more besides - I was just keeping the chair warm for him! So anyway, that's why I'm very familiar with the internals of layouts and MFME and fruit machine emulation in general, I've already written an MFME layout converter once already! (though the 3d stuff is adding some new problems to solve).

Hey the flaws are in my converter program, not your layout The layout looks very good. I've been tinkering with it for a couple of hours and got a partial fix working, to fully fix it I'm gonna have to figure some more stuff out... here's the same area with less green fringing:

It's not just blended lamps, the transparency color fringe is everywhere - I believe I know how to fix; this is a common problem with with 3d alpha textures. I have to modify transparent pixels so their color is that of their nearest non-transparent neighbour. Then the GPU has something good to sample against, for 'inbetween pixels'. Apologies for making your nice layout look bad with all the lamping bugs in my converter! Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I can get them all ironed out.

Thanks for the offer, much appreciated I'm hoping I should be ok - if I can get it down to about 10 mins a layout, then that should be fine for big overnight runs, it's just a bit bloomin' slow at the moment with this first crude technique I'm using!

A little update - I'm back onto working on the Converter side of the project now Have started on 'machine configurations' as a basis for trying to get batch conversion set up once each machine has been configured (things like the location of the 'perspective quads' live in the configuration). It's still very manual - the idea is that ultimately it can batch process, down to creating the data layouts. So then, I can make a fix in say one of the many lamp bugs I've got, then leave my office PC reprocessing all the layouts overnight. Currently conversion is slow, due to data extraction from MFME taking a good 20-30 minutes per machine (this is due to a limitation on how I'm capturing data from MFME, I may revisit using alternative OCR or something custom to capture out the numerical data, which would be much faster. I tried before but the OCR wasn't accurate enough and sometimes got numbers wrong). Anyway, thought I'd post the latest test machine Wok And Roll. Here you can see more lamp bugs that need fixing; green fringing around the chopsticks in the top right, blended lamps not yet implemented so purple rectangles are back, issues with overlapping lamps not doing the alpha properly... along with a list of existing lamp bugs. Still, nice to have a change from Happy Hour!

It's a real shame about the timing I'd not thought about FME in years since doing the mfme2mame project, then when you told me about Chris's sudden tragic passing, I read through all the tribute comments on Wizard's Rest, and along with sadness, it got me thinking about FME again. I know what you mean, he was much more into the low level emulation rather than the visual/multiplayer side of things, but yeah I think he would've liked to have seen this. Noted - it'll be 'a while' yet, but hopefully in the realm of a month or two we'll be getting somewhere near an alpha client at least I must admit I'd not really thought about those, but I think it would be possible with extensions to how the existing system works. So I'd launch the MFME instances for the master/slave(s), then capture the pre-generated data layouts from each one, and render the 3d machine from that. It'll need some more thought on how best to implement, but I can't see it being a problem, it'll just need work. Will definitely do it, as they do look pretty cool with those massive reels on top! One slight issue I can see is that all the machines (master+slaves) will currently have to run on the same client, so two different people couldn't be playing a slave unit each side by side. Yeah, will need some thought... These robocop guys are just placeholders until I get the customisable avatar system properly implemented in client/integrated with server etc, fairly big job, so will be saved for later as it's cosmetic - at least we have names above our heads now! I have had different machines running (Monopoly & Happy Hour with separate MFME instances), though not made a video - as the plan is (with the exception on the master/slave units above), that each client will only run a single MFME instance at a time (for the machine being played by that client, if any). All the other machines will either be playing back their attract mode loop (like the Happy Hours are in the recent videos)... or, playing back live gameplay if another client is playing. I have actually switched back to work on the Converter side of things now, as the 3d multiplayer arcade side is working well enough for this stage... so you will be seeing different machines next to each other in the not-too-distant future

Done some more bits - multiplayer nicknames above heads - got 3DS Max up and running, edited the cabinet model enabling me to fix a transparency issue that was making the 'lamps off' background glass image not render properly - added some camera smoothing (though I'm still using a cheap wireless keyboard with built-in trackpad so it's still a bit jerky compared to a proper mouse) It's pretty confusing trying to switch between the four instances plus I'm hungover lol but in the later part of the video you can see the avatars moving around with their nicknames. Still showing the new nicknames across 4 instances: Video showing the fixed glass transparency and moving avatars:

So this is complete placeholder environment for testing purposes, just to get things functional, and doesn't represent what will be swapped in at the later stages The scene currently just has some realtime lighting bodged in to ensure it isn't pitch black in there, and I can see what's going on. The lighting is generally going to be done a lot nearer the end of the project when the rendering of the machines is finalised, and an actual arcade environment is chosen - probably something more like one of these (cheap purchasable modular assets): Or this, but with the lighting turned down lower: These often come modular, so you can 'snap' them together to construct, then light, various custom building interior environments as required, e.g: here's some of the parts for the red nightclub scene above: I'll perhaps ultimately have an option to select between three different prebaked levels of light, so people can choose to play in a bright/average/dimly lit version of the environment on their local machine (wouldn't affect what other players see).

Getting there with setting up new source code server and backup, so had a little time to sort out a first person camera setup and build a test arcade environment. There's a slow stroll round (showing walking speed) then a brisk pace walk round (showing running speed)

Ha ha - the machines are 'off' due to me not having set up some additional build scripts for Unity yet. So running from the editor I have access to the custom codec that is used to 'play back' the attract mode lamp pattern, but when I make Windows builds, they do not have these assets packed, so the machines can't play back the lamps. Nothing major, it'll all get sorted out in due course

A little more progress on this very early multiplayer testing. Shows 4 local instances (so this could be 4 different PCs anywhere). The remote robot guys don't animate yet, just your local robot guy, the remotes just slide around. I want to see if I can make it look good enough without transmitting all that animation data over the network, to save the precious server data - I think there's a way deriving stuff from position/rotation changes per frame (so remote avatars will ultimately animate without using expensive network data), will just need some time to figure out.

Lol I'll have to make sure I add mandatory underpants to all avatars!