johnparker007

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!

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: Before: After: 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

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...

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!).

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

Started some basic GUI for the sound editor, very much like the Samples window in MFME... vid shows playing individual samples from list:

Cleaned up/fixed some more code in the decoder, now I have the samples sounding nice and clear, no more 'background noise'

Interesting, ta for the link!

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...

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...

Awesome continued work on the MPU2 stuff man!

@Altharic it finally got merged! Nice one @SomeRandomGuy thanks for your awesome work on the driver https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/10417

A little more tinkering - status bar at bottom and test of a basic zoom function:

There's been a little more tinkering with the layout editor, video shows the beginnings of importing an 'MFME Extract' to an Oasis Layout:

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

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

Nice to see the bottom door art!

After looking into Avalonia UI for the Layout Editor component of Oasis, I've realised that getting the rendering of 2d/3d layouts and machines will be kinda painful and hacky, so I've fallen back to Unity... going to repurpose a different abandoned open source UI system, needs work but the bones are ok, and should be enough to get some basic tests going... here you can see the menus rendering above the 3d cubes, which render above an Oasis desktop background - this approach will work on all platforms, not limited to Windows: (Logo is just a placeholder I grabbed from online )

Fruit machines are fine in MAME - lots of benefitting from improved emulation in other areas, it's just a shame how it's hard to get those commits actually into the code!

It's certainly not personal, it's just that MAME is getting so big, it seems harder and harder to add or change stuff without causing a potential issue somewhere... and not enough people to code review, as ya know, Haze's SC6 initial skelly driver work should just go straight in really, he knows what he's doing... not sure what best solution will be, it may end up getting forked at some point (like PinMAME, I guess there could be a FruitMAME or SlotMAME...) at least then things could actually go in, and release exes could be built! Far from ideal though...