334 replies to this topic

[Heihachi_73]

Not missing much with Geisha, those iPhone games are using the US paytables (5x Geisha is 3000 instead of 9000). The Bet365 ones are most likely by the US division as well; I doubt the Sydney group would ever do anything like that (also, the US companies IGT, Bally, Williams (WMS Gaming) all have PC versions of their games in the stores).

[Heihachi_73]

MAME 0.141u4 released.

MK2.5 / MK4 driver:

Real time clock disabled (games will no longer hang in audit mode)

A few US games added (Arctic Wins, Fortune Hunter (2 sets), Caribbean Gold II none work as they use the same type of system as the non-working Enchanted Forest; Carib.Gold was missing 2 graphics/shape EPROMs when it was dumped).
A New Zealand MK2.5 version of Clockwise is added (it is missing its program EPROM however, if you have this please submit it to MAMEdev)
Gone Troppo (MK2.5) added and working. Make sure the graphics "U22/U47" DIP switches are set to off/off or glitches will happen in the feature. Note that on this game, U22/U47 was in fact U8/U11 on the game board being from a MK2.5 machine.
Top Gear promoted to working (it had already been working since 0.139u3 but the flag was never removed).

Also, two video poker games were added, Golden Poker (MK2.5) and Wild One (MKIV, New Zealand).

No new games added to MK5 however, just a few fixes for now (no 'visible' progress though).

Edited by Heihachi_73, 28 March 2011 - 01:00 PM.

[Sterling7]

Cheers for the update.

[freddy1]

Any news on the mk5 games. Whats progress at the moment. Is angelo or anyone working on them.

[freddy1]

Palindrome did you get your favorite MK5 game working any visible picture
also is it possible to use the debugger tool in mame to get it running.

[Heihachi_73]

The video offset has been recently fixed, so the start-up text is now where it should be.

It is not possible to get the games running until the 2KHz timer passes its self-test on its own. If you bypass the start-up tests (e.g. cheat/hack), the game simply resets (watchdog) shortly after, so that doesn't work at all. Once the 2KHz timer is sorted, it will be interesting to see what it attempts to do, but don't hold your breath.

[freddy1]

Cool man thanks for the info.

[xanadu]

Best gameas are http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOrfelin this is what i believe folks

[stevedude2]

Best gameas are http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOrfelin this is what i believe folks

Yes but is any of that Novomatic stuff shown in the video available for download, or are you just saying 'Hey everyone, look what I've got!'

I'd rather play some real games than watch a video. No offence...

[xanadu]

Yes but is any of that Novomatic stuff shown in the video available for download, or are you just saying 'Hey everyone, look what I've got!'

I'd rather play some real games than watch a video. No offence...

OK CHECK MY tOPIC you will find download link and instructions to see ann play real:)

[palindrome]

Best gameas are http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOrfelin this is what i believe folks

You should read the forum rules on advertising and spamming.

At least keep it in your own thread instead of hijacking this one.

[Heihachi_73]

To anyone wondering, MK5 is not dead... yet.

The security checks are very tight on this system, only one thing has to be imperfect and the whole thing won't even boot to graphics! It has nothing to do with protection or encryption, it's the hardware itself which has been a royal pain to emulate.

Edited by Heihachi_73, 11 July 2011 - 04:25 PM.

[John Galt]

Any further updates on MK4 / Mk5 and beyond?

I know there's a few emulators for MK6 machines out there stand alone (50 Lions, Atlantis, Indian Dreams and Orchid) but these were a special one off thing.

I have the ROMs for Queen of the Nile and a couple other MK5 ROMS but none of them work so far.

Pretty frustrating really as we're seeing Aristocrat releasing EMUs for some newer machine via the US iTunes store, but as usual, are completely screwing the Australian population who's only access to these games are down at the local pub/RSL where millions are lost each year.

If there's any further updates to the EMU side of things to Australian pokies, let me know!

[freddy1]

I see MAME 0.143u1 is out i noticed theres a few aristocrat mk6 games in there
mk6 would be the ultimate games to play i guess its new so who knows when we can play them
would it be easier to emulate them than the mk5 games.

[freddy1]

Heihachi_73 do you think itll be easier to emulate the mk6 games than the mk5 ones.

[Heihachi_73]

@ John Gait:
The MK6 Emulator was seemingly a factory program for testing games; it cannot actually run MK6 game EPROMs by itself. Instead, other in-house programs would seemingly dump the EPROM data, merge it with the system (BIOS) code and compile the game/system as Win32 for the 'emulator' platform, whilst leaving the game's graphics/sound archive (AVL) as a standalone file. These developer programs were not leaked with the emulators unfortunately, so there is no real way to get other games working with the MK6 emulator, unless someone really wanted to spend many hours/days converting SH-4 assembly code by hand! Virtually, the emulators are actually a Windows port of the original games rather than a true emulator.

Additionally, the CRC checks have been patched, and the emulator lacks hopper and printer emulation (among others, like the Hyperlink/progressive jackpot server/comms required for Indian Dreaming). On a side note, the set 50lionsa is in fact the exact same revision as the 50 Lions game in the MK6 Emulator; maybe the so-called emulator could shed some light if there is any identical program code between the two versions (albeit x86/Win32 vs SH-4).

There have been no substantial updates with the MK4 or MK5 games yet.

If more MK4 games are dumped, they will be added and will most likely work straight away (unless they are the US ones, which need some minor tweaks that no-one seems interested in doing). Currently the US MK4 games fail because of an unemulated printer and lack of bill acceptors - these games also require a special paper 'note' to be inserted which contains configuration data for setting denomination and similar items (basically like US set chips do).

With MK5, the games are getting stuck due to the remaining unemulated minor hardware and some nasty, nit-picky security checks which do constant checks on the aforementioned hardware, making the game 'lock up' or error out if it fails; it cannot be simply bypassed or hacked around. Once the MK5 system does work though, it is built like a tank - many machines are still running 24/7 in gaming rooms 15 years later using the same boards and components!

Recently though, a few of the main devs have moved onto emulating fruit machines, which are badly in need of some sorting out (whilst MFME and co. have done a remarkable job in getting many games up and running in emulators, complete with high resolution artwork, there is still a long way to go in terms of true preservation). The fruit machines use more common hardware which is easier to emulate, and most of the hard work has already been done over the years - it only needs hooking up and cleaning the code and ROM images, which are quite messed up. The drivers mpu3.c, mpu4.c and mpu5.c show how 'bad' some of the ROM images actually were.

@ freddy1:
I think the MK6 games will probably have the same or more enhanced checks that the MK5 has. To top it off, the MK6 uses a different, unemulated video chip (it is not the same PowerVR chip used on the Dreamcast/NAOMI system). Most of the MK6 games actually have similar code to the MK5, but of course compiled for the SH-4 instead of the ARM250 CPU. I don't currently have any of the MK6 games, so I can't tell what they do yet. Since it's only a skeleton driver at the moment (a placeholder for the game CRCs and a list of known games), it will be just a black screen for now.

Edited by Heihachi_73, 22 July 2011 - 06:52 AM.

[Heihachi_73]

Edit from the above post. Each game is most likely compiled from the original game's source code to either SH-4 or Win32 (aka MK6 Emulator). There is no way they would bother dumping EPROMs, disassembling and recompiling it!