dec1962

Sorry, I don't have a scan of manual and I don't have a scanner. TBH, the manual is pretty bad, just a bit of text but little info of any use. It doesn't even mention of the dot matrix display. I'll get it scanned if I can find someone with a scanner

It's quite a fun game. The cabinet was called Pinnacle. I can't find any photos but here's a sketch from the break ball manual

Where are you getting your version of mame from which supports cobra3 ? Can you post it ? The official mame does not support cobra3, the driver is just a very bare skeleton

Just been told the software on archive.org has been changed for a new version. I'm not home so can't try it

Compression was just mpeg1 at CD data rates. i've a small collection of Video CDs, anyone remember those ?, and the quality is dreadful

AFAIK this is the only emulator supporting cobra3, it's not emulated in mfme or mame. There was a video released on youtube showing this at the start of the year but all went quiet after that until now.

I don't normally use a vpn so ended up having to download opera as a quick fix. After trying various browsers on different devices and operating systems including my phone it looks like it's an isp issue. Trying to view on my phone over wifi fails too but switch to 5G network all works fine. Looks like something odd with virgin media as my neighbour as the same issue, very odd. Anyway, the important bit is the emulator works so that's something new to play with

I’ve tried chrome and firefox and neither can connect to the site. Opera also fails unless I turn its vpn on

Don't know if anyone has seen this on archive.org ? https://archive.org/details/@itmightbeme For some reason I can't access archive.org without using a vpn

Thanks for your reply and links. I’ll take a look at the code this evening

Can I ask how you get the information from MAME for you to be able to do the rendering? I assume there’s a way of getting info such as whether a lamp is on or off and if it’s on what brightness it is. I didn’t know this was possible with MAME. thanks

Pluto uses the same cpu as Scorpion 5 - 5206e, so it should run full speed

Brain Box has been merged so will be in next months release. The Pluto submission doesn't seem to be going anywhere for some reason

This is what the machine looked like. I'll try and post a video of the emulation running tomorrow

Brain Box 2 (BFM Cobra1) added https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/13498

Wow, a lot of work there for it just to get cancelled Sadly there are quite a few folk who won't even consider contributing to MAME because of the difficulty of getting stuff approved.

Yes, I never really understood the reasons for merging AGEMAME back into MAME 'blueonesarefaster' previously added the BFG dot matrix vfd to MAME.

There are quite a few people who think that, including me. FME in MAME would be much further on than it is now without having to jump through hoops. If I'd done the black box emulation I would've withdrawn it after all the messing around they did. I gave up on it long ago unless it's a really simple fix and even then I've had them moan about extra or missing spaces in "if" statements and similar irrelevant stuff. Makes you wonder whether it'd be a better option to do a version concentrating on FME ?

OK, I'll keep the changes and wait for them to merge my current PR. I guess not much interest in MPU3 in MAME, or FME in general in MAME at the moment.

Hi, Just wondered if anyone was working on MPU3 for MAME ? I've a fix which solves the lockup on power up with TURN-ON-DELAY on the alpha and didn't want to start messing if someone else was already doing stuff with it. I can't do a PR for a while anyway as I'm waiting for another PR to be merged.

Inquizitor was the first BFG SWP machine using the Flare chipset. The BFG boards were Viper, Cobra and Cyclone. Other games were every second counts, treble top, beeline and a few others. Also a pinball style game Break Ball. There's no readable floppy disk for Inquizitor so the PR was just to correct the mapping of the ROMs.

Ooops, in my last post that should be Sharks of the Caribbean and not Game of Gnomes

Thanks for replies. If Sc5 Gnomes is anything like the Sc6 version the leds aren't connected direct to ScX but via a driver board which is connected using the I2C bus. The driver board has a number of commands such as setting a group of leds to a particular colour or fading a group of leds between two colours. From the comms it looks like the leds are 24 bits for RGB, so I assume they're those single wire chinese devices. Without being MFME specific, how would you use the led RGB colour to create the correct illuminated image ? Obviously you can't store 2^24 different pre-processed images. Do you have a single white lit image and then multiply each image pixel RGB by the led RGB ? So, if led is red full on and blue & green off you effectively end up removing blue and green from the image or is it far more complicated than that. Have tried this method and it doesn't look too bad, just not sure it's right. I'll see if I can get an image or video to show it. As for the top logo on Gnomes, that has multiple separately controllable leds behind which makes things tricker.

Hi, I've been having a play with emulation when time allows and I've started to look at artwork lit by multi-coloured leds. This doesn't apply just to fme but any emulation which has lit artwork. Normal artwork lit by a single lamp obviously has an off and an on image, or just an on image which is overlayed on top of "off artwork". But how would you implement artwork lit by multi coloured leds ? Looking at MFME and other emulator games there just seems to be three images, ie red, green and blue, but that assumes that only a single led is lit at a time. It also gets more difficult if the leds can have different brightness. I assume it must be possible to provide a single image and then modify it with the relevant rgb brightness of the leds, but how ? The logo on Sharks of the Caribbean is what got me thinking about this, it's lit by multi-coloured leds but is reasonably colourful when unlit. Anyone got any ideas ? Thanks

I'm a firm believer in having emulators which target specific things or groups. MFME was really good and this. MAME on the other hand is trying to be the go to place for anything which needs emulating whether it be space invaders or the latest games unit and as such doesn't always do a particularly good job. Scorpion6 is certainly possible in an emulator targeted just at fruits but starting from scratch and having artwork editors etc is a massive job. As Wizard kept MFME closed source it'd probably be wrong if it was ever released.