MAME Changes that relate to FME

[johnparker007]

On 01/02/2024 at 13:13, Altharic said:

Mame4droid has been updated in line with the current build

 

https://github.com/seleuco/MAME4droid-2024/

So this isn't a change to 'core MAME', but the MAME4droid spinoff project to run MAME locally on android has been updated, so now it should be possible to play the MAME layouts using the touchscreen.

From the dev on the MAME4droid project:

I tried the issue you mentioned and at the time implemented an option in Mame4droid settings, input, mouse, always gaming touch mode (you have to enable) that makes the virtual mouse always enabled. In that way I tested the rom that you told me and I was able to interact with the layout. Enjoy fruit machines on the go without spend money.
https://github.com/seleuco/MAME4droid-2024/issues/1#issuecomment-1950293891


Oasis for android won't be affected by this since it will be doing its own input pass through, but that could be years away as the priority is Windows, then Mac + Linux... but after doing Linux, it won't be a much work to play standalone 3d Oasis machines on android, with the various fancy rendering etc.  But in the meantime, MAME4droid should allow for some basic 2d fruities on the go  

[johnparker007]

I have checked this, and unfortunately it's of no use for playing fruit machines really, as there's an orange 'mouse pointer' that you move around by dragging your finger on the touchscreen - you can't simply tap on flashing buttons to press them.  And something like nudging up with holding a nudge up button, while tapping hold buttons would be impossible.

Fun project he's doing, but still probably going to need to wait for Oasis android port to play the machines in an enjoyable fashion...

[Altharic]

That seems to be what happens on windows too

[johnparker007]

47 minutes ago, Altharic said:

That seems to be what happens on windows too

Sure - but if he wanted to support multitouch touchscreen layout input in his android wrapper, he'd need to do some work such that the multitouch touch id/up/down/move data is processed in the wrapper, and then the relevant control is triggered in MAME.

I could write such a system, but it's kinda a waste of my FME dev time really, since Oasis android port will do all this anyway, but running under a completely different paradigm.  I've given him a couple of pointers, but I wouldn't expect him to write such an implementation, since it's a lot of work for something he wasn't even aware was not working lol  

He could do a quicker hack for a non-multitouch tap system - so when the wrapper receives a new touch down, it sets the relative MAME mouse pointer to that position... but that wouldn't support multitouch so a bunch of games would still be missing functionality... plus MAME is likely never going to look as good as the next version of the 3d machine rendering that'll be going in Oasis, so prob just best to hold out for Oasis android really, to get proper multitouch plus fancy 3d graphics/lighting/reflections  

[Altharic]

This could be potentially interesting for slot machine layouts

MAME now has support for touch screens on Linux and Windows 8 or later, opening up new possibilities for interactive artwork. If you have a suitable multi-touch screen, you can now play chords on systems with on-screen piano keyboards. Check the documentation for specifics on how touch differs from mouse control in menus. You’ll need to turn on the enable_touch option to use touch screen support on Linux.

[johnparker007]

4 minutes ago, Altharic said:

This could be potentially interesting for slot machine layouts

MAME now has support for touch screens on Linux and Windows 8 or later, opening up new possibilities for interactive artwork. If you have a suitable multi-touch screen, you can now play chords on systems with on-screen piano keyboards. Check the documentation for specifics on how touch differs from mouse control in menus. You’ll need to turn on the enable_touch option to use touch screen support on Linux.

I did spot that one recently   Should be good for playing MAME internal classic layouts that require simultaneous button holds (nudging reels up, holding cancel to slow skill stops etc)

[Altharic]

Oooohhh yes please

jpmimpct: add layout to Cluedo? Murder Mystery Quiz Game 

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/12879

[johnparker007]

29 minutes ago, Altharic said:

Oooohhh yes please

jpmimpct: add layout to Cluedo? Murder Mystery Quiz Game 

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/pull/12879

I did notice that one, if he does more by hand I'll give him a heads up to let him know we have a visual Layout Editor in development that will have a MAME .lay export feature, in case he wants to hold out.  Hand-coding MAME layouts is a major time sink, that one he committed is over 1,000 lines!

[Altharic]

Problem is as always that that code could be sitting there months because of the analy retentive way mame is governed.

Your editor could well be out before this goes in.

[johnparker007]

13 hours ago, Altharic said:

Problem is as always that that code could be sitting there months because of the analy retentive way mame is governed.

Your editor could well be out before this goes in.

Later down the line, I'll likely be spending a good few months at least working on (fruit machine) emulation bugs in MAME.  I have seen some of those PRs hang around for quite a while before, so I was planning to fork it, and also push my fixes to my fork's mainline.  So then if that happens with my fixes (that they don't get merged for months), it won't affect Oasis since the 'MAME_FruitFixes' branch will have the latest MAME.exe periodically updated in Releases, with all my latest fruit fixes. 

Once they get caught up and all merged into the official MAME repo, of course it won't be needed anymore, but yeah, I have a plan for that so I don't get pee'd off in the interim   

Edited October 20, 2024 by johnparker007

[Jolt-Z]

Kind of wish MAME had internal "generic" artwork for all the common reel symbols on it's built in classic layouts instead of using text.

[Altharic]

32 minutes ago, Jolt-Z said:

Kind of wish MAME had internal "generic" artwork for all the common reel symbols on it's built in classic layouts instead of using text.

Agreed there is a surprising amount of playable stuff in there 

[Altharic]

Just noticed changes to mame I missed, Maygay M2 is being added

- New AGEMAME games: Aladdin's Cave (Maygay M2, SW8-323 SW8-299), Aladdin's Cave (Maygay M2, SW8-322 SW8-298), Aladdin's Cave (Maygay M2, SW8-298 SW8-144), Big Break (Maygay M2, SW6-656 SW6-635), Big Break (Maygay M2, SW6-657 SW6-636), Bullion Blox (BWB) (BVM_____.1__) (MPU4 Video), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_128 SA6_114), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_129 SA6_115), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_130 SA6_115), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_281 NONE), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_282 NONE), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_283 NONE), Each Way Gambler (Maygay M2, SA6_284 NONE), Guinness Book Of Records (Maygay M2, SW8-146 SW7-360), Guinness Book Of Records (Maygay M2, SW8-147 SW7-361), Jack & Vera (Maygay M2, set 2), Jack & Vera (Maygay M2, set 3), Jack & Vera (Maygay M2, set 4), Krypton Factor (Maygay M2, set 2), London Underground (Maygay M2, SW8-233 SW8-155), Pinball Wizard (Maygay M2, SW8-099 SW8149), Pinball Wizard (Maygay M2, SW8-099 SW8149), Risk (Maygay M2, SW9-025 SW9-023), Risk (Maygay M2, SW9-024 SW9-026) and Super Clue (Maygay M2, SW8-153 SW8-131).

This could be a biggie if the sets are complete these are the quiz machines Maygay made

[johnparker007]

On 19/10/2024 at 19:19, Altharic said:

Problem is as always that that code could be sitting there months because of the analy retentive way mame is governed.

Your editor could well be out before this goes in.

Ok - so to give a bit of variety to my FME dev stuff, I've bit the bullet and got the stuff sorted out so I can build MAME locally.

First fix is to the Scorpion 2 broken volume, I made the edit I mentioned in the BFM Showtime Spectacular thread, and with a bit of debug, we can see the Volume is now emulated correctly   
 

I'll figure out a way now so I can have these commits in Github, without needing to wait for the MAME dev team to merge them, which has often been rather problematic.  At some point in the future when convenient for them, they could grab all of the fixes and merge them in to the official MAME.

Once that's done will update with a link to the repo here (and prob in my sig).

Edit: the base repo on github for now that will contain the bugfixes/features is: https://github.com/johnparker007/mame
 

Edited October 29, 2024 by johnparker007

[johnparker007]

Got some serious 'old school' MFME on the go over here, running in Windows XP!  


It's the trusty Cash On The Lash test layout... as there are some bugs in MAME that don't happen on this old version of MFME... so I think the strategy for some of those types of bugs will be trying to spot the internal difference between MFME and MAME emulation states/ram/irqs/read/writes etc as the bug happens, may help with developing fixes for MAME... that's the idea anyway  

[johnparker007]

Not quite finished, but there was some code in Chris's source that was not implemented in MAME - I've implemented it, and now I have a working representation of the digital volume pot that is part of the Scorp 4 hardware, that is adjusting with the sound test   Showing test value 69 of course  


So tomorrow, I'll continue, and work on implementing that so it scales the output waveform in some accurate way to cleanly represent what's happening in the MAME source (perhaps see how other drivers do it), and that'll be another minor audio bug fixed

Edited October 29, 2024 by johnparker007

[Altharic]

There is something really wrong with m1a it's like the sound isn't hooked up at all

[johnparker007]

15 hours ago, johnparker007 said:

Not quite finished, but there was some code in Chris's source that was not implemented in MAME - I've implemented it, and now I have a working representation of the digital volume pot that is part of the Scorp 4 hardware, that is adjusting with the sound test   Showing test value 69 of course  


So tomorrow, I'll continue, and work on implementing that so it scales the output waveform in some accurate way to cleanly represent what's happening in the MAME source (perhaps see how other drivers do it), and that'll be another minor audio bug fixed

Ok the Scorpion 4 Volume control emulation is implemented (in 'our' fork, it'll make it to the main branch 'at some point'  ).

 

[johnparker007]

2 hours ago, Altharic said:

There is something really wrong with m1a it's like the sound isn't hooked up at all

Ta I'll have a look, while I'm looking at sound stuff.  Just tried Eastenders (m1eastnd) and it doesn't even boot, gets stuck on 'RAM CLEAR' even after repeated forced resetting...

[johnparker007]

3 hours ago, Altharic said:

There is something really wrong with m1a it's like the sound isn't hooked up at all

Ok I tried Eastenders Queen Vic instead (also Maygay M1 A/B hardware) and that one does boot and play.  However, something funky is happening so the machine seems to keep briefly freezing as if it's waiting for the end of every sound sample it plays before it can continue... so I'll have a look into that  

If you lemme know the names of a couple of those M1A/B hardware games that play but don't have sound and they seem like they should, I'll also have a look at those and see if I can spot a problem in the code - ta  

[Altharic]

Spotlight has a partially working layout a quick go suggests the sounds are truncated the BOOM when you get trail held is wrong

[Altharic]

Gladiator works kind of sounds seem correct but no reels in the layout.

[johnparker007]

53 minutes ago, Altharic said:

Spotlight has a partially working layout a quick go suggests the sounds are truncated the BOOM when you get trail held is wrong

Yeah that kinda gels with what I've been seeing with hacking around with 'Eastenders - The Queen Victoria'.  I think there may be bugs not only in the core emulation but in the sound chip emulation.  For instance on Eastenders QV, when the numbers count up from the reels onto the word 'Eastenders' you have to fill up, the ascending 'ding' samples fire slowly, then it plays a couple of wrong samples, then finally the next credit is available to play.

It has a Oki M6376, apparently this is a ok substitute for the Oki MSM6376... but yeah, it might be what is causing at least some problems.  

When the chip receives a request to read NAR, if I always return 1, then it break some sounds, but then all the things that did go slow, such as the Eastenders letters, the actual feature board, and the bank counting up 10p at a time... then go either really fast (feature board), or about the right speed (Eastenders/Bank 10p anim).  So I do think it may be the sound chip causing these speed issues... 

I've definitely seen something like this before on other fruit platforms in MAME, where it's clearly waiting too long for a sample 'callback'... so I think there's some low hanging fruit around those areas to get started with  

36 minutes ago, Altharic said:

Gladiator works kind of sounds seem correct but no reels in the layout.

Gladiator - I believe that needs an alternate Reel MCU... there's a part-done implementation commented out in MAME.  If it works in that really old MFME I have, then there's good potential of porting Chris's rev engineered version over into MAME's framework.

[Altharic]

Noels house party seems to also boot

[johnparker007]

6 minutes ago, Altharic said:

Noels house party seems to also boot

Just tried that - again, the sound sample stuff seems a bit iffy.  I'll stick on this M1A/B platform for a bit, and work on the Oki MSM6376 - maybe make a new chip driver or summats, get the datasheet, all that jazz.  Might not be able to get progress, but it seems worth a shot, since the machines are 'sort of' working!