Evening all, time for an update on the Epoch emulator!! Sorry it's been a while! I've been quietly busy on the emulator for the last 2 months and have made some big changes and tidy-ups!!
The biggest change has been to the rendering engine for the reels. One of the major problems I was struggling to solve was how to render the lamps behind the reels. This was really easy to achieve for stationary reels, but being a bit of a perfectionist I wanted the lamps to animate with the reels in motion.
I tried all sorts of ideas such as pixel shaders and interchangable textures but none could give acceptable performance. I've now added an engine that pre-generates and caches all the graphics for the reels which gives super fast rendering performance. The cost of this is the emulator requires a lot more dedicated memory (300-400mb). This probably means you're going to need at least 1.5gb total in your system.
The other big change was to the lamping editor. The emulator will now generate all the lamping images based on a transparency mask. The emulator integrates tightly with an imaging editor called Gimp which is used to define these transparent and semi transparent areas.
A feature has been added to automatically name all of the lamps and mark all un-used ones. The way this works is the emulator puts the machine in to test mode and auto extracts all the lamp numbers and names using the standard bacta test. This means you should have all the names and numbers of the lamps to hand when building a layout.
There's also been a huge number of bug fixes and improvements.
So the release plan:
There's still a few more things I want to finish off and improve before releasing the new version to layout designers for testing. I'm hoping to put it out at the end of this month to willing volunteers - even if it's not quite not where I want it to be as the feedback will be valuable. I know everyone else is keen to get hold of it too - I promise it'll be worth the wait!
I have to do jury service in early November which I'm *hoping* means I'll have a few mornings/afternoons free to do some more final bits of development!!
As always please could everyone be on the lookout for resources. We're mainly after artwork/high quality photos now as we have loads of ROMs (thanks to all who've helped with this). I've got the reel bands for duff beer guide and a few photos of other machines, but nothing substantial unfortunately.
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