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SomeRandomGuy

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  1. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    6 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Thanks very much for doing that, have PM'd you back - it fixes the issue, so I'll be able to extract those DX layouts at the later stage for AS, where they are in fact the best quality DX available (I know there's a newer redraw version of Psycho Cash Beast around, but for most it will be super useful) -thanks man :)

    No problemo :)

    • Like 1

  2. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    4 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    For those blacklisted layouts - it's only affecting DX layouts not Classics, so a not a problem for the moment, though I may want to load those Blacklisted layouts later, if they are the best source for a DX for Arcade Sim... so a patched .exe to do that could be handy :) ... unsure if that's actually the case for any of them though.

    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 :D

    3 hours ago, Altharic said:

    Rather a versatile chip from what I can see TMS1000

    Do we know how much one of these would be to purchase that has the required code?

    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.

    2 hours ago, MPU_FIVE said:

    Not sure if this is of any use to anyone but when reading this thread earlier, seeing the TMS1000 processor mentioned reminded me of a book i have from way back when i was trying to learn to code (then realised my brain just isn't made for coding, sadly!) - found the same book on internet archive so link is here, TMS1000 mentioned on page 20.

    Hope it's of help to someone anyway...

    1 hour ago, johnparker007 said:

    TMS1000 is already implemented in MAME:

    https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/devices/cpu/tms1000/tms1000.cpp
     

    ...but perhaps there's a ROM still needing to be dumped that contains the specific music code to run on it...

    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.

    • Awesome 1

  3. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    On 09/09/2022 at 23:26, johnparker007 said:

    First pass of the legacy set done, and now cleaning up issues, like the tedious 'blacklisted' issue... next will be making an screenshot based quick layout picker where there is a choice, to get the best candidate per game directory...

    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!

    Spoiler

    Screenshot_4.thumb.png.545830329352573dc9c6a7a22937c84b.png

    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 :D

    • Like 2

  4. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    5 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Very mini-update - getting close to the end of the first part of the first stage of this multistage process.  It's a big old job!  :)

    Another few hours of running my dev PC, and it should have done all the initial pre-extractions first passes, then I'll go through and investigate the failed ones (I reckon it's done like 99% of the layouts without a problem on this first stage)... So many layouts...

    First part of the first stage, sounds like your PC has a lot of work ahead :D. 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 :)

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  5. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    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 :D

    On 29/08/2022 at 19:30, serene02 said:

    I’m out of the loop with mame dev, are LD’s coming to mame?

    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.

    On 30/08/2022 at 15:12, Altharic said:

    Laser disc games were great to see but not fun to play they looked like mini cartoons but take Dragons Lair you missed the move by a nano second and you were dead remember seeing the completion tips in Amiga Format it read like l,r,l,l,r,r,r, draw sword, jump l,r,l,r,l finish game

    On 30/08/2022 at 16:05, serene02 said:

    I have a soft spot for the Laser disc games, the technology was fascinating for 1983, I remember being totally blown away by Dagon’s Lair, the game was rather frustrating for me to play but still amazing watching someone else.  I only ever one Space Ace.

    That's most Laserdisc games for ya :D 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.

    27 minutes ago, johnparker007 said:

    William's tried this, I think there may be some use of pan 'n' scan going on, the racers I believe are sprite overdraw... so more like a traditional (if slightly rigid) racer, but with better background graphics than any racer - it was a bit of a flop I think, but I saw one being tested (in a sitdown Hang On cabinet) in Cleethorpes, and I remember being totally blown away at the time... as I had no idea how it was doing those graphics :) 

    Yeah, Star Rider has some serious hardware in it for a LD game, will be interesting to see that one emulated :)

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  6. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    18 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    The window title (circled in pink) is extracted from a truncated copy of the raw decrypted layout header (thanks again to @SomeRandomGuy, it's real handy to have this :) ).  I'm also retaining a zipped copy of the full decrypted layout (they are larger than normal due to no compression) for future use, if I ever go down that road.

    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.

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  7. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    14 hours ago, woodsy said:

    @Altharic @johnparker007 @SomeRandomGuy you guys are astonishing me with these skills!!

    now i don't pretend to understand any of it so please excuse me if this is non-viable or just not time efficient etc but is there any way you could get spAce working as the reels have a different board??? (very limited knowledge so excuse incorrectness) but oooh what a carry on was a £3 jp game i adored that has a classic built with lamps and alpha all working in mfme but the reel driver is not??

    once again sorry to take away from the progress reports but most of the above is already a dream coming true so i thought i'd ask in the slim chance it's easier than not.. i know @MPU_FIVE owns the machine so maybe the internals are needed and can be facilitated easily over not??

    once again guys awesome work.. thanks for it all

    2 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Added to the request sheet, but it's a long time before it'll go in as I'm currently working on a growing project on MAME (FME internal layout/config stuff).  Plus I need cab model and vid screen component setting up.

    If the reel MCU is not implemented in MFME it'd be a case of waiting for it to be supported in MAME.  At that point the reel MCU can either be dumped (there is one ACE reel MCU dump now with the MAME team, otherwise it'll be reverse engineering it, they're 'relatively' simple hardware... so we can record what comes in, what CPU is expecting back etc, and slowly get it working through trial and error.

    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 :D

    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 :D

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  11. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    2 hours ago, Altharic said:

    There is a new MAME out however MPU1 does not seem to be in it?

    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 :)

    • Like 1

  12. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    7 hours ago, wolf676 said:

    cool, Lite a Line has an undumped (?) brother:

    Interesting stuff, I thought Lucky Casino/Club Casino was the only club SRU machine, guess I was wrong :D Haven't seen any dumps for this one.

    2 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Work continues on the MAME internal layout stuff, here's a different one (as it shares the same reels with Adders & Ladders and they're just hardcoded for the mo):

    Police lamps aren't working properly here, this is just a snapshot of what I'm currently looking at :) 

    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.

    • Like 3

  13. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    43 minutes ago, johnparker007 said:

    Ah cool :)  So I guess the (slightly convoluted) path to a polished classic MAME layout would be building in MFME v20.1 and get non-extended lamps/reels/buttons/coinslots/labels/frames correct, leave a copy of the extended lamp matrix on there for debug.  I can then build a MAME .lay from that, that anyone can run (placing in their MAME Artwork folder), they could then figure out which lamp numbers map to what by testing in MAME, and copy those correct numbers back to the MFME layout (and remove the temporary debug matrix).  Then I could reconvert through AS, and that final .lay would then be good.  All doable, if a bit of a faff!

    At least you've already put together a working basic layout for it to be going on with :) 

    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 :)

    • Like 2

  14. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    14 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Excellent work on getting this mystery Dutch SRU rom running, and Sodoku-ing through to build up the layout!  I'm guessing this ROM cannot be made to run in MFME?  Once I'm up and running with this new conversion stuff, people can make MFME v20.1 classic layouts to be converted for MAME internal reference layouts, though it's always loads easier to create if it can be playtested in MFME first.

    Those symbols look perfectly playable, and you've probably got them pretty close anyway :)  Since the consensus was not in favour of the SVG fruit symbols - for most fruit symbols like the ones in the layout, I'll just do filled ellipses, but they will be colored appropriately (green for melon, red for cherry etc), with potential a second 'primitive' to differentiate same colored shapes.  So on your layout above for instance, I might do something to differentiate between lemon and bell as they'd both be yellow.  So with the word and the color and the shape(s), it should still end up somewhat 'playable' I think.  Reels on the test Adders & Ladders look like this, pretty easy as it has very few symbols:

    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.

    1 hour ago, wolf676 said:

    "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." (Sherlock Holmes)

    @SomeRandomGuy has to verify my theorie... 

    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 :)

    • Like 2

  15. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    6 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    I do also plan at some point to build in a zoom function for when playing with keyboard&mouse / joypad (so something like the mouse scrollwheel would be used to zoom into the machine a bit).

    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 :D. 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":

    Screenshot_1.thumb.png.ad67fea093e7082924903f24879da793.png

    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 :D). 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)

    • Like 3

  16. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    21 hours ago, Altharic said:

    While you are here can I ask you to look at Ace Sidewinder it runs with sound on mfme but on mame its mute its like the sound isn't hooked up on the driver.

    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.

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  17. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    44 minutes ago, Altharic said:

    Looks like the reviewers have asked for some changes :o

    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 :D

  18. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    On 14/07/2022 at 23:26, johnparker007 said:

    I've had some other stuff on, but have still been chipping away at the MAME layout builder/config extractor thing... current task is getting the correct number of rows and arranging the MAME text to best make use of the rows, as a lot of existing classic layouts rely on MFME's internal wrapping, along with many different fonts/dimensions, so a slight bugger to figure out:

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

  20. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    On 02/07/2022 at 00:08, Altharic said:

    Appears to be SRU runs in MFME (lamps light)  but does not rebuild to MAME when used as source for rebuild

    zzz_unk s-sh (Unk) [Rom].zip 2.83 kB · 1 download

    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.

    22 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    More work on the internal MAME classic layout builder thing :) Buttons are now clickable with mouse pointer for MPU4.  Thin horizontal line artifacts on the reel lamp rendering are down to potentially a bug in MAME's layout renderer (when it scales the layout to different window sizes, I think it's rounding a number to an integer somewhere)... so I'll leave those as is for now, and hopefully can see a problem in MAME source later.

    Quick vid showing the layout in use (some lamps are wrong, lots of other things to improve/fix yet), and also playing with Save States :D The saves states will be very useful for Arcade Sim - instant startups even for Scorpion 5, none of those infernal On/Off errors on DES machines, and multiplayer arcade stuff

    Nice job! Definitely more of a fresher look compared to the old pile of flat colored rectangles :D Save states are a very neat feature, particularly handy when it comes to doing reel skills for example :)

    • Like 1

  21. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    23 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    Inching along with this thing, got displays in (all 7 segs are forced to red for the moment), spent far too long trying to make the 14/16 seg render its fade effect properly (the component is a bit broken in MAME, but I don't want to add unnecessary SVG bloat) - looking ok now :)  Still quite a way to go, but slowly shaping up...

    Great work, keep em coming!

    On 29/06/2022 at 00:44, Altharic said:

    Do you have a list of machines i can have a look some look the correct size?

    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.

    5 hours ago, Altharic said:

    The new Mame out today rather underplays the effort gone in this month most MPU4 now boot and of course as mentioned the SRU changes are now in 

    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 :)

    • Like 7

  22. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted

    18 hours ago, Altharic said:

    Out of interest what MPU1 machines have you found so far, what are the 6?

    There is a Fruit machine rom dat and under the unknowns and such there might be more 

    I think this might be a mixture of machines rom 1 and 2 are mpu1 and the other is a different machine minus its mask rom?

    Match It (JPM) [Rom].zip 18.74 kB · 2 downloads

    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.

    • Like 1

  23. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    On 25/06/2022 at 00:06, MPU_FIVE said:

    @SomeRandomGuyI hope you don't mind me asking, but while reading above i noticed a mention of a reel microprocessor to drive reels... I own a (broken) PCP What a Carry On machine running on Sp.ACE tech. It has'nt been emulated in MFME as it needed the PCP Reel Micro to be emulated which sadly never got put into MFME.

    There is a dump of the PCP Reel Micro out there, I have a copy of it, so is it likely I will finally get to play my beloved "What a Carry On" machine once again, in MAME one day? - Is it possible?

    TTX posted the MCU controller in this thread, if you don't already have it...

    spACE is definitely doable, everything needed to emulate it is there. The dumps were taken care of, they're already catalogued in MAME.

    On 25/06/2022 at 01:45, johnparker007 said:

    Also, thanks so much for taking on these new early tech  drivers!  This is very impressive that it's your first foray into building real world software, you are smashing it :) 

    I have somewhat of a vested interest, as long term that's how I can do lots more stuff with FME within Arcade Sim, MFME works stably on Windows PCs to drive Arcade Sim machines, but through a ton of hacks and bodges; I need to get a new solid cross-platform MAME solution developed for proper future-proofing. It's definitely good to get these early techs working first and slowly move forward, everyone always asks for the new 'modern' ones lol ;) 

    Those internal layouts, I've been tinkering with getting reel symbols instead of the grotty text (using colored unicode characters, and potentially SVG), and better alpha lamps, so the internal MAME layouts can hopefully look better than the old ones I did back in 2016 :)  WIP screengrab showing buggy but improved reel experiments (this is purely from a text file file (.lay XML), no actual graphical resource files used):

    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.

    On 25/06/2022 at 01:45, johnparker007 said:

    It is possible, but as you say painful.  Especially as the old mfme2mame was a tool others could run, but this new process needs to run on my machine really, through the massive AS Unity project.  That said, someone could make MAME layouts in MFME 9.6 and use the old mfme2mame tool to generate internal classics or something like that to get lamps etc figured out (so they use MFME to design, but MAME to run).  Then I could convert that 9.6 -> 20.1 FML, then reconvert using Arcade Sim (to get the new higher quality configs/debug/internal layouts).

    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 :D More SRU layouts sounds great!

    • Like 3

  24. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    2 hours ago, andrew96 said:

    yes it is a masked rom inside the cpu, as you say no direct way of reading it out and far to expensive to get it dumped using the nitric acid and microscope technique.

    1 hour ago, Altharic said:

    Are these chips still available I don't mind contributing if it means we can get this dump?

    Well there's people working with MAMEdevs specialized in doing decapping, I could ask around if anyone's interested?

    2 hours ago, andrew96 said:

    That really was the way they protected MPS technology from being easily copied!

    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 :)

    1 hour ago, serene02 said:

    @SomeRandomGuy

    From a purely selfish here but I would love to see Pluto 6 emulated.  I believe you could buy the development boards from Heber?  Not sure how feasible the tech is to emulate though.  I imagine the game roms are encrypted.

    J

    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 :D. 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 :D 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.

    31 minutes ago, andrew96 said:

    It was a few years ago now when I was into repairing them. It was one of those surplus suppliers, when its gone it's gone! they was new original stock too. I will see if I can find out where it was from through going through emails

    as I say it was a masked rom at manufacture, I remember I also looked into what the processor was and all that but cannot now remember what it was, I have looked in my pc folders to see if I downloaded any sort of datasheet on it, but I didn't.

    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.

  25. Development Updates

    in Arcade Simulator

    Posted · Edited by SomeRandomGuy

    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.

    On 23/06/2022 at 01:39, woodsy said:

    In time will mame be able to do techs that mfme doesn’t? Curiosity

    Well it's no Scorpion 6 but now it soon will :D

    20 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

    As part of my Classic extraction I've been porting/rewriting the old mfme2mame code that didn't get lost as a component in AS internal automation toolset, this is a WIP of conversion from v20.1 FML -> .lay (just some lamps with bugs and labels)

    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 :D

    On 23/06/2022 at 20:15, serene02 said:

    There may never be a public toolset to build layouts easily in mame. 

    Is it still viable to create them via the .lay format?

    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).

    On 22/06/2022 at 15:01, Altharic said:

    There are service manuals for system80 and mps wonder if they ever had eyes on them?

    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.

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