334 replies to this topic

[Agua]

Any news about updates or has all interested been lost...

[Agua]

hmmm...there's been no response from anyone at all for over 2 weeks...i'd say this post is dead!! Pity because it was really progressing @ 1 stage...

[Heihachi_73]

Palindrome has gone interstate doing a TAFE (university) course AFAIK, that is why there are no updates. You're not missing anything in terms of emulation.

I don't really post here much these days as when you start getting 30 messages (being mostly ROM requests and 'how do I get running in MAME, it's only a black screen') and friend requests (absolutely pointless BB feature) in your inbox in a matter of weeks it becomes a bit monotonous.

[palindrome]

I hope someone else can contribute to the driver whilst I am away!

So far none of the inputs have been mapped and the only dips that are emulated are the 4 rotary switches on the board which are used to set the 4 digit machine number. I am able to kludge the signals from the coin optic sensor to the VIA ( which prevents some later MK IV games in the driver from going into coin fault lock up ) but I don't fully understand how it works so that needs to be fully investigated. Some other minor things like the flipy in the video driver was fixed too, so now line tags show up properly when they are drawn. Still no sound...

I still have all the metering errors coming up and the machine is still going into accounting mode by itself with no control over the signals at this stage, not sure if the metering error is actually caused by the lack of mechanical meter signals or if the 3 way electronic meter ( nvram ) is mismatched.

[Mr_Cash69]

I still have all the metering errors coming up and the machine is still going into accounting mode by itself with no control over the signals at this stage, not sure if the metering error is actually caused by the lack of mechanical meter signals or if the 3 way electronic meter ( nvram ) is mismatched.[/QUOTE]

How about borrowing some of the things from the 4 that do work....

nvram is the same for each?????

I hope this helped...

[Agua]

First off, the 4 you're referring to are MKVI emulations and that's not even correct. They're exe programs - not a proper mkvi emulation. MKVI are still in use around the world! The current emulation is for an MKIV - and the whole idea of Mame is to properly document the system not just so you can play the games!

[Heihachi_73]

In simple terms, think of MKIV, MKV and MKVI as game consoles for a second - NES, Mega Drive and PlayStation; no matter what you do they will not be compatible to swap code among machines.

[Agua]

Well put Heihachi! Hey btw,i heard from the grapevine that the early Konami Slot Games were made with the original Konami Drivers (which are already emulated in mame) and that it wasn't until 2002 that the new machines had new specifically developed drivers - not sure if this is true or not but if it is it'd be awesome!

[Heihachi_73]

The earlier Konami 'Tasman' games use a standard 68000 CPU, which is used by a lot of arcade games and also the Mega Drive/Genesis. The later 'Endeavour' games use an IBM PowerPC chip IIRC.

Another machine which should be very simple to emulate would be the VLC 8274 'Winning Touch' multi-game machines. These machines usually had up to 10(?) slot games, video poker, blackjack, keno and other similar gambling games and each game could be set individually (for example denominations, some games could be set to 5 cent while others could be 10 cent on the same machine). It had an 8-bit CPU, simple NES style music, and a low resolution display with only 16 colours I think (e.g. the 'orange' symbol on the slot games used a dithered red/yellow rather than a solid colour).

[Agua]

Not sure if the new games added were complete roms - but some of them seemed to be missing bin files - when u72, u59, u86 and u87, swapped with eforest the graphics loads through cmb - but still in meter disconnected mode....have examples of all new games loaded if anyone requires them

[Heihachi_73]

You're about 2 months behind the rest of us, that's how we got White Tiger to 'load' before it was redumped. There are no missing files in any of the sets in MAME. The reason why the graphics loads is because the games only check program code, not graphics.

have examples of all new games loaded if anyone requires them

Unfortunately you're not helping anyone by putting that at the end of your post, it almost looks like you're offering to send people games and that could attract hundreds of unwanted attention from ROM kiddies like the 'Fruit Machines from Australia' topic. This topic was strictly for work in progress only. Do not try to 'help' anyone by posting stuff like that. The games will be ready when they're ready, but it won't be for a while since there's no-one to work on them just yet.

[Agua]

Fair enough....

[Agua]

I was only trying to assist btw:cool:

[Agua]

So does anybody have any news of progress? The forum's been pretty quiet on the home front for a while...

[Heihachi_73]

No news, no-one around MAME seems interested in looking at it, or it's just plain too hard. As always, gambling games take a back seat to arcade machines, and getting newly decapped protection chips is much more rewarding than seeing a 'boring' old slot game boot up into a ton of errors. I can't see why the MK4 games haven't really been looked at though, input wise.

[Agua]

If the remainding emulation comes down to just mapping the inputs then maybe we should submit it for testing so that it's looked at and resolved. The sound issue is simply because the machine is in audit mode. Once audit mode is switched off (side switch on normal machines), sound will appear.

[Agua]

For some reason, no graphics are appearing on screen at all for any of the MKIV games as of mame version 134u1

[Agua]

Back to normal version 134u2 - it's nice to see that no-one at all is taking any interest in this and in fact can't even be bothered making any comments on this post!! I'm signing off!!!

[Heihachi_73]

I don't regularly post on these forums (being on the other side of the world to the server, it's painfully slow even on broadband, and no-one likes 'S16 games' here), and coupled with MAME not applying Palindrome's MK4 source updates (or the updates ending up in MAMEdev's spam folder somehow), there hasn't been anything worth posting as of yet. The only other devs who actively seem to test gambling games (Roberto, Kale etc) are possibly too far involved with working on another game's hardware at the time, and something that boots and accepts button input (unlike MK4) is far more rewarding than looking at a black screen (like MK5) which runs code in the debug window for a few frames then dies all the time!

With MK5 stuff, it is on semi-permanent hold; originally it was only going to be a skeleton driver just for preserving a few games anyway. What should have been dead simple ended up nasty with the way the programs run, that coupled with the preliminary emulation of Acorn-on-a-chip hardware, where no-one can tell how much different MK5 is, it's been time consuming and not very rewarding, especially when you run a few lines of code and it hangs in an endless loop or crashes a few bytes after each and every workaround.

With MK6 stuff, there won't be anything touched for a long time, despite any coincidental similarities with the newly emulated NAOMI (Dreamcast-based) hardware. Hardly any boards or EPROM sets have even been bought for preservation either.

[Sterling7]

Hey all, this is my first post on this forum. I live in South Africa and have been following this and other threads similar for years. Our casinos over here are full of MK5 machines and MK6 machines, I have never seen a MK4 before. I was just interested to ask a couple of questions.

You mentioned Palindrome was away at the moment, is he still working on the mk4 emulation or will he only carry on when he is finished, you also mentioned that his source updates were not being applied, why would that be?

It may be possible to get hold of some mk5 boards, most machines when they finish their life here get exported to countries like zambia,botswana etc as it is not legal to own the machines here. There must be thousands of them floating about up there. To dump the games do we need the whole board or just the eproms?

After spending a fortune on these stupid things it would be nice to play some on the PC.