SomeRandomGuy

No problemo

Well it's done now, PM'd it to ya. Theoretically it should work, but I didn't have any actual blacklisted layouts handy so fingers crossed These used to be quite widespread, there's loads of crappy 70s-early 80s handheld games using one or a variant of it in MAME . The particular chip used here has the MP0027A program on it, there was a MP0027 as well which I'd imagine is compatible but not 100% sure. I don't think there's anyone just selling the chips by themselves though, so one of those doorbell kits or anything else that happens to have it is needed, no idea about the price. Getting one from a real machine is probably a hard sell, because the decapping process destroys the chip and you can't program new chips either, TI didn't make any blank versions of these. Yeah emulating the TMS1000 is no problem, MAME has many things that use it already, the obstacle here is finding a chip with that specific music program in it and sending it to someone with the necessary skills & equipment to get it dumped.

If it's still a problem then the blacklisting can probably be patched out too You never know what you come across sometimes when emulating things... in this case I was trying to figure out why the sound on Oranges And Lemons was different from everything else, and turns out it has a special music board only used in that machine. That board actually has a TMS1000 microcontroller on it, the particular model of it was also previously used on one other product that I know of which claims to be... the world's first electronic musical doorbell! All that chip can do is play 24 preset songs, so the sound effects on that machine are created by just playing the songs really really fast. The game runs now and plays fine but unfortunately if anyone wants to play Oranges And Lemons with sound, then that microcontroller needs to be dumped. I'm hoping that Bellfruit didn't come up with any more "interesting" hardware after this

First part of the first stage, sounds like your PC has a lot of work ahead . Also, more Black Box developments - Fire Cracker and Double It are now working, I'd say it's mostly just adding games from here on. If things continue going this smoothly then it might just make it in this month

Got a bit busy lately but the Black Box work continues. Upstairs N Downstairs and it's upgrade Reel Gambler are now working, that's 2 more off the list I think some Laserdisc games have been in MAME for a while now but Time Traveler is notable for being the first one that was dumped with the Domesday Duplicator, basically it's a device that captures all the data on the disc. Quite important because some games have special data on them that a regular video capture won't get you. Right now there isn't any Laserdisc work going on, but the tools needed are now available if someone takes an interest. That's most Laserdisc games for ya Some of them I enjoy in a so-bad-it's-good kinda way, the 90s American Laser Games lightgun shooters are absolutely glorious cheesefests. Yeah, Star Rider has some serious hardware in it for a LD game, will be interesting to see that one emulated

That's great to hear, keep up the good work Black Box progress has been slow but steady, some bits of it were not as simple as I originally thought and needed more time to work out. I've made a fair amount of progress by now, most of the base hardware is done and more games should start going in once I get the sound board going.

Well as far as feasibility goes there aren't any blockers for sp.ACE really, it's pretty well documented and all relevant ROMs should be dumped. The reel MCU is not a problem, there's a version of the ACE one dumped and the PCP one as well (which is the problematic one for MFME in the first place). Unfortunately actually emulating it would not be a quick job, not much existing code to work from that some of the techs have in MAME. Currently I'm still committed to doing all the older techs first and slowly moving up to the newer ones, simpler that way. So not right now, sorry, maybe one of the other guys might look at it once MPU4 is dealt with though, you never know Been a while without progress reports so here's one: Black Box work has advanced so far that I now have a driver going, as of right now 21 Up is very close to 100% working . The plan for now is to get all the older EM reel games going, then I can do the stepper games sometime later. Bellfruit used the tech for quite a while so there's some expansion stuff I've gotta implement later on. Fair amount of mystery ROMs I've found as well, wonder if any Dutch games are going to pop up again

Aaaand it's merged now. Looks like the SRU driver is currently finished for real this time

Could be

Finally got it through! Looks like the backlogged SRU Lite a Line is up next now. Good work with the layouts as always I've been slowly figuring out bits of Black Box hardware as well - haven't started on the driver yet, but work is underway.

MPU1 didn't make it unfortunately, Vas (the guy reviewing most of the pull requests) was busy this month and simply didn't have time to check all of them. Just how things go on volunteer projects sometimes, should be in next month though. If anybody wants it right now then I can just put a build that has it somewhere myself

Interesting stuff, I thought Lucky Casino/Club Casino was the only club SRU machine, guess I was wrong Haven't seen any dumps for this one. Well looks like the whole thing is coming together now, that is great! Very nice facelift overall Also I think most of the MPU4 lamp extenders have been sorted now in the current code. Road Hog at least has the correct one.

Yep, in this case I already know most of the lamps from doing the layout, wouldn't be that much work to figure out the rest since I can see all the accesses in the disassembly anyway, and I could then put together a list once anyone's interested

Sounds good I gave it a try in MFME, the ROMs run but I couldn't get the lamp extender to work, so for many of the lamps you can add them, but they won't actually light up. Seems to be working alright otherwise. That's the machine alright, great find! Seems they moved the reel symbols around because there aren't any bars with the same symbol around it, but otherwise it's spot on. Thank you

Maybe eventually add camera X/Y/Z/angle controls somewhere like Visual Pinball has? Kinda nice for fine tuning the camera position to just where I like it. Been looking at some other stuff while the MPU1 code goes through. After receiving a tip from @wolf676 I discovered a mislabeled SRU ROM set that turned out to be a Dutch game, which is something I didn't expect to see . I'd stumbled across it beforehand, but when I ran it at the time it was doing funny things and not working right, so I just figured it was a bad dump. Fixed a bug and added some extra hardware, and now it works fine. The name of this particular game remains a mystery right now though, I found a Dutch site with pictures of some SRU games, but it's not any of those. So I don't know what this game is called, but what I can do is figure out how it plays, so I decided to do just that. Found the locations of the reel symbols in the game code, then played it a bunch, stared at the code, then played it again and so forth. Now I know how the game works, so I threw together this very quick and dirty "layout": There's many things missing, like the paytable which I couldn't be arsed to add (making MAME artwork files by hand involves manually typing in XY coordinates of everything on the screen, it gets old real fast ). The symbol names definitely aren't correct as they're guessed based on what the other games have, still better than calling them Symbol1/Symbol2 though. Also found some very interesting stuff while looking through the code. 3 of the symbols give you bonus points when you get four of them lined up and these bonus points can make you quite a bit of money. However on every spin there's a 50% chance for the machine to just straight up block these symbols from appearing at the same time. Quite sneaky that, I'd imagine anyone even slightly involved with playing modern fruits knew how "random" they were, can't imagine anyone expected this in the late 70s/early 80s though. (BTW @johnparker007 I made a few changes to SRU in regards to layouts - the display digit outputs are in reverse order now and extender lamps now get inverted as they should be. I see you're doing MPU4 stuff right now, but thought I'd give a heads up once this code eventually appears in MAME)

Well I had a look, you're correct in that the driver has no sound, the code for it consists of a comment saying "?". From a quick investigation it seems that the sound hardware is not very complicated, just one register that controls the frequency of the tone. Problem here is that I don't know what that frequency is or how the sound is exactly generated. That manual is sadly not much help on the technical side of things. Seems like Ace deliberately didn't publish any schematics, and they also had a habit of sanding labels off chips, so a board photo won't help much and tracing your own schematics would be much more difficult. Maybe sometime I could possibly end up with something that sounds close to correct with some experimentation, but not right now, I'll probably end up looking at Black Box or something next.

Standard stuff there really, I wasn't expecting it to get in on the 1st try in the first place. MAME has some code standards to maintain, 25 year old project after all with a lot of tech debt, don't want to be creating more of it

Nice to hear about progress as always! Replicating someone else's text wrapping sounds like a fun thing to do

Something is there indeed Not quite in yet as it needs to get through code review first, but very likely that MPU1 will appear in this month's MAME

Must have missed that SRU one, it's in now, thanks for the find! Looks like it's a machine called Super Shuffle, can't recognize the manufacturer though. No idea what "SCH" is. I also finally got a hold of the fruit ROMs torrent and had a look through the unknown stuff. No dice regarding MPU1, found a fair amount of Black Box ROMs though. Nice job! Definitely more of a fresher look compared to the old pile of flat colored rectangles Save states are a very neat feature, particularly handy when it comes to doing reel skills for example

Great work, keep em coming! Here it is, quite a convenient resource. Some of the games there are a total mystery, like whatever Super Star is, and apparently they had some sort of early video tech going. BTW there's 3 different sizes of ROMs that were used: two 0.5K's, one/two 1K's and a single 2K, so any of these can be valid. If you've got the unknown ROMs from the dat somewhere, then I can have a look to see if anything might be MPU1. MPU4 has a lot of improvements but it's still under construction. SRU is almost done for the time being, minus a commit for Lucky Casino sound which didn't make it for this month. All it needs now are some internal layouts, which are on the way

Golden Nudge It Match It Match Up (£2 version of Match It) And some Leisure Games ones: Big Apple Lucky Nudger (seems to play exactly like Big Apple) Big Apple £2 version, has more sounds and stuff Yep I have that one, looks like there was also an MPS game called Match It. I looked at some of the unknown ROMs that I had, didn't find anything there. MPU1 seems a bit short on dumps compared to the others, quite a few games on that Barcrest list that I couldn't find. Hopefully they'll show up one day though.

spACE is definitely doable, everything needed to emulate it is there. The dumps were taken care of, they're already catalogued in MAME. Thanks These reels look cool, saw the discussion at GitHub already. Though adding extra 'overlays' for the symbols would be nice to have if that isn't too complex, like any numbers/etc in the corners, boxed symbols, stuff like that. The Big Bucks layout for example has boxes and numbers via text, but doesn't have the red hidden feature lines. Yeah I can see that working, more cumbersome compared to the usual process but that's just how it is right now I guess. I've got some lamps figured out myself already from disassembling some of the games, not that it's very hard as there's only around 13 of them on MPU1 More SRU layouts sounds great!

Well there's people working with MAMEdevs specialized in doing decapping, I could ask around if anyone's interested? Could have been for security purposes, or maybe simply offloading it from the main TMS9900. JPM didn't seem to have any problems but one of the Ace reel controllers (spACE actually, Sys1 doesn't have one) dumped is a PCP clone, so it didn't work out for them at least Definitely feasible but it would be quite the ordeal, figure out 2000s era hardware, get past encryption (they've got "two-stage customer-specific security"), it's quite the contrast from the late 70s relics I've been doing so far . I'm on my 2nd MAME driver right now, first being SRU, and this is really the first serious piece of real world software I've done period, so I've got a lot to learn I'm looking towards the 1st-2nd gen techs at the moment, which is already quite a bit of ground to cover, and someone has to emulate them after all. I'd imagine it'll definitely be in MAME some day, I just have no idea when. Maybe Haze might look at it one day, he's far from done on MPU4 right now though, and of course there's all the Plutos before this one to do. Yep, that's the chip. NOS blanks are useful for doing test runs but ultimately someone has to sacrifice a chip for the greater good. Didn't see anything on a quick look through the datasheet but if we're lucky it might have some sort of ROM readout feature, though even if there is one it can usually be disabled with a fuse, which would most likely be blown.

Well, I'm finally here, thought I'd give an update on my MAME stuff. I've been looking at MPU1 emulation for a few weeks now. There wasn't much documentation to go on compared to SRU, but I managed to figure it out and all the 6 games I found are now running. It'll take some time before they show up in mainline MAME; it's not 100% finished yet and the code needs some cleanup, and I'm currently waiting on all the rest of my SRU code to go through. There's also the issue with layouts, I'd imagine making them for a tech not emulated by MFME isn't exactly pleasant and right now there aren't any ways to run such layouts in MAME anyway, so something needs to be figured out if anyone wants to make them. Well it's no Scorpion 6 but now it soon will Great stuff as always! I saw you mentioned that you couldn't find any SRU classics, that's not much of a problem for testing, these early games are so simple that you can play them with just a lamp grid anyway. Nothing urgent, but there is a Club Casino layout here that would be cool to see running eventually Yep, MAME's artwork system is very flexible, but as it stands right now there's no user-friendly way of making anything for it, your only option is a text editor or as JP is doing, a tool that makes XMLs from some other source. Making smaller scale layouts by hand for simply showing stuff in action is not too bad, but a DX is out of the question (though people have made cool stuff with it, there's a clickable Speak & Spell for example). System 80 is basically a souped up SRU and there's quite a bit of docs available, so it shouldn't be too difficult once I get around to it sometime. MPS is a touch more complicated situation though, rambling ahead: Hardware wise MPS has a bit more stuff going on, but is completely doable. There's one particular part though which presents an issue with how MAME usually does things - the reel controller. Basically MAME's philosophy is to emulate EVERYTHING, every chip on the board running code should ideally be represented in the emulation as well. So in terms of ROMs in a fruit machine layout, you have the game ROM(s) and sound ROM(s) if the tech has them, these would be for the main processor, which runs the game and generally does everything. Dumping these ROMs is easy, just take them out of the socket and drop em in an EPROM programmer. But on MPS there's another, separate processor on the board dedicated to moving the reels around. That chip is a microcontroller (MCU) with internal ROM, meaning there's no ROM chip anywhere to dump, it's all inside the controller chip itself, and nobody has dumped it yet. Most of the time there's no easy way of reading those ROMs, usually deliberately so, and people have been known to go to great lengths to get the data out (nitric acid is one of the tools involved ). Now in the MPS case the reel controller isn't very critical compared to something like a protection chip on an arcade game that fucks up the gameplay if it isn't emulated exactly right. It's just a chip driving 4 stepper reels where the main CPU tells it to. Probably not very hard to simulate, MFME does it fine without a ROM dump after all, but we still prefer to do things the "right" way if possible. Some Ace System 1 reel controller dumps did actually show up a few years back though, which is nice. This is something that usually becomes more involved as the techs get more complex as well, I think MPU5 for example has like 5 different processors on it, MFME directly emulates only one.