Ive spoken to guitar and had a good play with amber version 1.0051 alpha, truth is that there is *so* many new features that im sure i wont address them all. i`ll start with a walk through and get to the better points later.
Installing - Amber comes in 2 flavours being 32-bit and 64-bit. an installer comes with both that leaves you with a BUILD direcotry that consists of components, current, libraries and manager directories. notably the librarys dir contains the layouts and ROM dirs.
Running Amber - Amber has a unique feature i would describe as arcade mode, somebody say ploggy could play a machine with £10 one end, and i could play £10 my end using the ram state of the machine after his play. The graphical option are totally superior here - scale to natice size and scale to machine size aswell as anti analising from 1 to 16 samples are avail. (once booted you can use the arrow keys to move around a layout. kinda like what union jackpots did with their online game that used 2 screens. this is particularly good for layouts with small writing. this also paves way for much higher res DX games that cam now be viewed and zoomed with ease). finally you can also create your own play area with the Width and Height resolution box - nice!
Apply and launch to play amber you now have 2 options, click to continue and load via the onscreen menu or load a layout just like MFME.
At the time of writing, the blues boys and aladins cave come to the table as layouts not previously available in mfme. also is a dual release by RH called ret hot fever. this is now avail for mfme and amber.
as i understand it, layout designers will have a field day here, quite simply amber does alot of the work for you i.e. masking lamping etc etc. this is a feature you will have to wait for to explor yourself. but as i understand it an mfme layout can be converted in under 20 mins.
one of the best features ive seen so far is the back bright option. this option allows you to quite literally dim the whole machine so just the feature lights stay bright. ive just had a quick play and you can turn this down to ZERO so you can actually only see the reels and feature lit lights. priceless! also to note here, switch bank 2 is fully enabled in this version.
at the time of writing, guitar has implemented reel masking, kinda like the back light option explained above, but for reels. it also supports triac driven lamps.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What next?
well it appears the last part of the jigsaw is the OKI sound emulation, once that is done then a formal release date will be announced. Some of may cry `yeah yeah heard it before` to which one of guitars replies was - after coding 12,000 pages of code, you cannot always get it right and release on time.
Its an ongoing project, and according to the horses mouth, there is no reason why various others cannot be implemented in the future such as M1a/mpu3/sys83
the whole project is in its final stage, please be patient.
Attached Files
-
1.png 11.18KB
217 downloads
-
dimmed-lights-andycapp.png 1.55MB
234 downloads
Edited by nails, 16 February 2012 - 12:15 AM.
