johnparker007
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Posts posted by johnparker007
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1 hour ago, Reg said:
Firstly, thanks to @johnparker007 for this excellent setup that he has done - honestly had a real blast making this video - the time was a literal time sink.
For anyone that has not seen this, perhaps if you choose to watch this video - this maybe the day that you choose to give Arcade Simulator a play - everybody at DIF should do this.
I know we are moving to Oasis in terms of what is going to happen - but this is the right time at least for me to do an series of these videos. I'll post updates if we have updates on Arcade Simulator moving to Oasis and keepp this chain of videos going.
@johnparker007 your work has hit it out the park here.
For anyone else trying this video, there is a little experiement in the intro - if you have never played Arcade Simulator before but remember arcades from old, please do this.Awesome vid man, thanks for the review!
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56 minutes ago, Reg said:
Hah - yes, this was translation that was done by Daniel Isoba ( https://danielisoba.itch.io/ ) and released that way.
Very kind of him and he must have updated and somebody else done a video.
Cool - I do keep an eye on the Speccy scene, as I think I showed before, I have a full screen shoot'em up engine in development, and some other projects, it's a challenging machine to work on, but you can get some decent performance out of it
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Hey @Reg, erm what's going on in this new video that popped up on my youtube recommendations?!
Video link: -
Ok a small update on the Layout Editor component of Oasis, here is a demo of it importing an MFME Extraction (of Vectra's Popeye layout). It now places the lamps, and flickers them just to show they are there as separate editor components within the project:
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On 17/08/2023 at 17:47, Mrbeanstreak said:
Will we see a demo release of this new arcade sim ?
It's a very long way off, I'm not up to doing much coding at the mo, projects this complex take a lot of time and effort... you do have the existing Arcade Sim to keep you going at least!
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1 hour ago, Reg said:
Thank you - can you recommend any specific groups here where I might have luck ?
I've checked my old fb account - this may not be comprehensive, new groups may have started etc - but here's the recently active ones on my list:
Sinclair For Sale (or Buy)
World of Spectrum
Sinclair For Sale (separate group to the first one in this list!)
ZX Spectrum Latest Games
sinclair sales
Sign up to some/all of those, and ask about your New Wheels John in the groups, if someone can help you locate and procure an obscure Speccy game, it's these guys
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I don't know if you've been using the facebook groups, there's a few - quite a few years back I went through the same process of buying all the old Speccy games I either used to have a (usually pirate) copy of, or even just remember playing at a friend's house. Thankfully that didn't comprise of too many games/boxsets!
The rare ones get expensive
So you can often find things cheaper outside of ebay through the fb groups, especially if you get a few from a single person who is willing to 'build piles', so you can accumulate a pile and then they send them all together as a single package. Also, you can request, as someone may have a copy of New Wheels John for instance, but not be very attached to it and so willing to sell, even though they don't list it.
Good luck in your quest, I rebuilt mine, and have zero regrets at having them all original on a shelf!
I saw some insanely obscure stuff on the groups, sometimes going for crazy money like £400 for a single game (these are usualy suuuper rare titles). Almost always cheaper (and friendlier) than fleabay.-
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1 hour ago, SomeRandomGuy said:
That's quite interesting... on that first example the text looks somewhat funny and the numbers on the squares are screwed, but considering the source material this thing is working with, the parts that work look pretty good. Interesting stuff!
Got an MPU2 update as well - two VFS games went in, Triple Chance and Fruitopoly, the latter actually got dumped only slightly more than a month ago, so thank you EddieC on the Mecca! You don't see new dumps of machines that old very often, so that's always nice to see. These two and some Barcrest test ROM that I added are the last of the ROMs that I found, so now it's on to cleaning up and testing. Most of the way there for the next pull request now
Yeah man, these AI tools are getting pretty good, at least for some parts of the layout from the low res sources
Great news on the MPU2 update, you're doing great work, thanks dude!
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Had another play with this new simple process for enhancing low-res pixelated layouts... the idea is that one day, as part of the layout editor, it will be a easy to use built-in tool, with some tweakable settings...
This time was Super Hyper Viper at a whopping 16x upscale for an 8K layout, here's some before/after, using the simple fixed process (upscale, rebalance color, unsharp mask):
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
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Before:
After:
It's not all there yet by any means though:
Before (notice the text is actually much more legible):
After: (text is an unreadable mess)
I believe in future multimodal LLMs would be able to guess the correct text based on knowledge of the game though the MAME internal classic layouts, and fonts used on these machines, and then redo the text as fonts with layer effects... probably a long way off yet, purely due to these not being particularly in-demand generative AI skills, but it does seem feasible... will be a handy stopgap for those machines where no high res images are available, and no highres redraw has been done
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1 hour ago, Mavroz said:
Looking really promising John, hopefully it can be used as you expect. Brilliant.
Mfme has the option to load a sound rom for a few tech's , don't know if you have ever noticed it?
I haven't used it, never had the need yet.
I didn't actually notice that
I have checked out some of the standard sound ROM loading (as part of the usual layout) in MFME though, it's been a useful reference.
Now I've got them loading for OKI (MPU4) into my tool, the next step is to encode them back into a ROM set. Once that's done and working, I'll move onto encoding the 'overrides' (like the Ghostbusters loop in the vid) into the ROM. Hopefully then that newly built sound ROM set can be played in emulation and potentially real machine too...-
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16 minutes ago, infection said:
does worms sound roms work in this app
Worms looks to be scorpion 5, so not yet. I'm currently just developing it with the OKI sound chip (used in MPU4), but I'm planning to add support for NEC and Yamaha later once everything is working well - so once I've made codecs for Yamaha and NEC, it should be able to load/edit/save Sc5 Yamaha sound ROMs (I think!).
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I ain't afraid of no ghosts!
Looking at overrides - here I convert to the fruit machine sound chip bitrate, there is another step yet to encode this to PCM audio, so quality may drop a (quite small) amount when on the real hardware... samples can be much longer, since the MPU4 standard game board has 4x RAM slots, and usually they only use half. To be continued, unless I get slimed
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Started some basic GUI for the sound editor, very much like the Samples window in MFME... vid shows playing individual samples from list:
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Cleaned up/fixed some more code in the decoder, now I have the samples sounding nice and clear, no more 'background noise'
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59 minutes ago, Altharic said:
James Wallace has some experience of this kind of thing
https://github.com/james-wallace-ghub/WilliamsOKIEditor/releases
Interesting, ta for the link!
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Some more progress
...seems like the sound hardware broadly falls into OKI, NEC, Yamaha. Focussing on OKI for now (used by MPU4)... still some 'background hiss' but much improved since the previous video, and I'm not extracting the sample rates yet, so I think they are a bit too fast. They are now extracted as individual samples...
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Continuing this thread:
...in here, as it's a better place than the Blockbuster's VHS Emporium now I've started doing a little coding on it
Got some very early progress on this idea for a sound ROM editing tool, I'm decoding the entire sound Rom (testing with Andy Capp MPU4 to start with) and can play it back. There is 'background noise' which is expected at present, due to how the adpcm encoding works (offset from previous byte). I believe once I can decode the header and have all the samples individually decoded from their starting address, the background noise will disappear.Cool to hear some vaguely recognisable noisy sound though
Going to work on figuring out the header stuff for the MPU4 type format (also shared by some other techs) next, hopefully sort out that background noise...
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16 hours ago, SomeRandomGuy said:
Well, well, well, it took a damn while, but the first part of Black Box is now officially in MAME. At some point I'll deal with the stepper reel games too, but for now it's done. Haven't posted here in a while too, and as far as my free time for fruit emulation stuff goes, I'm still somewhat busy
. University stuff I took care of for the summer, but then came an internship right after that. Fortunately though I'm very nearly done with it and will finally have some more time available very soon.
I didn't sit idle for the last few months though, in fact I got work done on bits of MPU2 here and there as time allowed. The few Barcrest usual suspects that are dumped such as Spot Light and Rock On run, plus a couple Dutch machines too. Right now I'm dealing with this weird thing from Leisure Games. One of the Dutch games is kinda interesting - the ROM that was uploaded was called Silver Star, but it's actually Super Star, which seems to be one of Barcrest's very first MPU1/2 releases ever. There's a list of old Barcrest machines with their release dates floating around and it's the first game on that list, I was wondering the whole time what it was, but seems that mystery is now solved. Here's the flyer:
At first I thought it was also Barcrest's very first CPU-based fruity ever, but that honor seems to go to a machine called Top Twenty, which looks like this:
Also saw what @johnparker007's been cooking, OASIS looks promising. The whole Arcade Sim-as-a-prototype thing makes sense, starting over takes longer for sure, but doing things more properly and learning from the first time definitely helps in the long run, plus it being open source is also very nice. Excited to see the converted layouts in MAME once that day comes
, together with all the other arcade stuff too of course. Get well soon!
Awesome continued work on the MPU2 stuff man!
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@Altharic it finally got merged! Nice one @SomeRandomGuy thanks for your awesome work on the driver
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/10417-
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A little more tinkering - status bar at bottom and test of a basic zoom function:
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There's been a little more tinkering with the layout editor, video shows the beginnings of importing an 'MFME Extract' to an Oasis Layout:
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Found and changed various color code to change the cross-platform UI in development to a dark theme, looks a lot more chill for making layouts
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Further UI tests - foreground 2d layer (the large green circle in front of the 3d cubes), basic tree view of component hierarchy with some dummy data
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Nice to see the bottom door art!
Arcade Simulator - GPC Video !
in Arcade Simulator
Posted
Nice, I had thought it would be pretty cool on a handheld PC like the Steam Deck! Thanks for letting us know it works well on those devices