72 replies to this topic

[niallquinn]

Thanks for the updates, it's interesting stuff, and I'd be interested to see where you're at, even if it means running it in 150.

[captainhaddock]

Thanks for updating us with your progress TGA.

[tga]

yh been quite ill, nothing done this weekend, found some interesting stuff online to do with motor emulation, a university paper about it, need to have a read and try and get familiar and try to learn its secrets.  Was thinking about branching this project online to try and pickup a few more people to work on it. I herd there might be a generic layout designer for mame, so you can craft templates quite easy , but not found it yet.  So having a simple editor to manipulate a page you design into xml information used in the .lay / should be easy to knock something like this up in VB.

 

Looking at mame information was pretty scary at first , but after you delve into the files a little you notice its a case of mounting hardware, creating the emulation by mapping  - port ins and outs to declared functions and moveing this information about as if it were being done by the machine.

 

With this being said, why the hell cant i make it work grr

dont ask me why but i think the answers lie in here

 

http://alexandria.tu...enzuela2009.pdf

 

a masters guide to real time step motor emulation .  soon as im better i will try and give it a look over and see if it can be applied to this problem.

[tga]

little update ,  had some issues with mame, might be why .152 isn't displaying layouts, gonna see if i correct it, a bug with define'in the res and screen setup, would also cause mame to fail to initalize.

[niallquinn]

You might want to look at Hazes 153u3 build.

 

http://mamedev.emula...log_0152ex3.txt

 

The Ecoin driver has been altered 4/5 times since 153 was released.  HAve to get the git to find out exactly what.

 

NQ.

[Guitar]

That PDF isn't a very good explanation of stepper motor emulation as it's designing a hardware emulator not a software emulator. Its also way way more complicated than it needs to be.

 

For a stepper motor you have 4 electromagnet coils which can either be set '1' on, or '0' off.

 

This gives you 16 possible input patterns some of which should never be used in normal use. In normal use you would never expect more than 2 coils on simultaneously.

 

What exactly are you having trouble with? I can probably help.

 

I do know that Bar-X systems used 200 step reel motors as opposed to the standard 96 step motors used on most systems, so its possible ecoin used 200 step motors for their hi-tech stuff.

[tga]

had a quick look at ume 152ex3, reels still incorrect , but i think guitar has solved it for me, when playing sphinx in mame the nudges are the wrong way round they tend to go up instead of down on the reels. and when the reels spin, there out of alignment 90% of the time.  Would this mean the pattern is wrong or mapped incorrectly ? the sphinx driver is calling a 200 step driver from steppers.c in mame, but not sure if the reel issues are from the stepper driver, or the way its being handled by the game driver

 

ecoin200 driver in here

http://mamedev.org/s...steppers.c.html

or the game driver here

http://mamedev.org/s.../ecoinf3.c.html

[stevedude2]

There's no way the reels use 200-step motors on these games.  You can tell by the bounce when you play the Reel Skill feature and aim for the Jackpot when it doesn't want to stop on it.  I'd say 48-step reels with 16 symbols on each.  The number reel goes 2-12 without a 1 on it, and the other 5 positions are Reel Skill, Spot-a-Win, Pick-a-Win, Nudge Time and Skill Climb.  This is the case for Labyrinth and Pyramid.  For Sphinx and later games in this cabinet I remember the reels were wider and therefore the symbols were bigger, but I would still say 48-step, even if the manufacturer was different (Gamesman instead of Starpoint for example).

 

Best of luck with the project

[niallquinn]

Cheers Steve, hope this helps TGA get a working layout sorted!

 

 

 

[Guitar]

Just had another look at those reels from a video. They look very much like the JPM/BFM style reels.

 

I had trouble with this type of reel and managed to solve it in a very complex manner. Chris Wren's MFM2.1 code has a much more elegant solution.

 

Use this table...

 

static const int newjpm[8][16] = {
  { 0,  0,  0,  0,  2,  1,  3,  0, -2, -1, -3,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0, -1,  3,  0,  1,  0,  2,  0, -3, -2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0, -2,  2,  0,  0, -1,  1,  0,  0, -3,  3,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0, -3,  1,  0, -1, -2,  0,  0,  3,  0,  2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0,  0,  0,  0, -2, -3, -1,  0,  2,  3,  1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0,  3, -1,  0, -3,  0, -2,  0,  1,  2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0,  2, -2,  0,  0,  3, -3,  0,  0,  1, -1,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
  { 0,  1, -3,  0,  3,  2,  0,  0, -1,  0, -2,  0,  0,  0,  0,  0 },
};

 

When calling the table the [8] call is the reel phase (reel position 0-95 modulus 8), and the [16] refers to the 4 bit input data.

 

The number you get back, simply add it to the reel position, remember to wrap around.

 

Reel position 7 should fire the opto.

 

If that still doesn't work can you see the pattern that is being sent to the reel during a spin.

 

BFM Typicially use the pattern

 

0x9

0xA

0x6

0x5

[tga]

yeah i need to debug the input , double check the match and throw it onto 48,  thanks for the info, i need to break down the 2.1 source and have a good read through.  Im still working on mame emu stuff, have just finsihed some HLSL settings that make the video output look pretty much arcade perfect.  Going to post that for all fo you now......

[tga]

just setting up a dropbox for some of the stuff

[Guitar]

Just remember that a 48 step reel will have 96 half steps. Fruit machines can and definitely do use half stepping.