You Me (You I?!)

UME (Universal Machine Emulator) target. Just drop these files into the /src folder of a MESS tree from the GIT on the left and compile with ‘make TARGET=ume’ and you’ll have a combined build* Not much changed from before, just cleaned up a few bits which were no longer necessary. I’ve asked again if this can be put in the official MESS SVN tree, because I’d really like to be able to build a 0.146 version come the next release and say the sources are entirely untouched.

I decided I prefer UME over UNE, simple because it sounds like ‘You+Me’ and that’s rather appropriate for something which is the combination of two projects. Amusingly enough if somebody did a UI build it would be “You Me You I”

In saying that I notice Robbert has been putting some Arcade games in his latest MESSUI builds, but I think it would be better if he just compiled a UI version of this target, although it might require some code tweaks. That would give a build with Arcade support, but without annoying people who want the pure MAME / MESS builds as well.

Of course ****UI is horribly broken anyway, and probably shouldn’t be used, but some people don’t want to drop it.

* although at the time of writing you’ll have quite a few validity fails, but those happen in the regular builds too.

Other news, continued to look at the Fruit Machines, summary follows:

Electrocoin: identified where the VFD data is written on Pyramid, Sphinx, Pennies from Heaven and Labyrinth. Doesn’t seem to be one of the supported VFDs (it’s writing mostly ASCII and in the first case doubled up letters) but I’ve redirected it to the commandline so we can see the errors. Half the games complain about a 10MS TIMER (which should come from the Z180 afaik, core bug?) the others complain about COIN TAMPER. Not tried hooking anything else up because the games are stuck in a reboot loop because of said issues, so wouldn’t be interesting yet.

Scorpion4: added hookups for the reel writes and opto reads, allowing the games which were complaining about REEL 2 ER to pass that test and usually fail on a RAM test instead. Couple of games continue to run in the background anyway tho, will probably see what the RAM fail is all about then try hooking up some lamps.

ProConn (Project Coin): identified what should be the VFD port, it writes text in a few games, but garbage in the majority, not sure why… the board has a whole stack of Z80 peripherals with a weird hookup, so it’s possible there are errors anyway, doesn’t look like any of the stuff is extensively tested

Global Games Stealth: James found the VFD, see the update on his AgeMAME site.

‘JPM 7’: I think this is actually Pluto 6, It’s Coldfire based and behaves like the other ‘Pluto’ stuff otherwise, which would fit the profile. Not actively going to work on it.

‘unkpcp.c’: Pretty sure these are ACE System 1 sets, should move them. I did a bit of poking around with ACE System 1 but have no progress as such to report.

‘astrafr.c’: Seems to be an earlier revision Pluto board, I’d guess either a custom one made for them or something between Pluto 1 and 4. Actually there seem to be at least 3 different variations in here, so could be all of them, or just the boards were configured differently.

Also looked at Epoch, but I hate the H8, and their custom chip could well be a CPU in it’s own right, no progress to report there sadly.

I’ve also continued to sort out and attempt to pair up various sound ROMs and the like, situation isn’t pretty for a lot of systems.

Finally, for anybody who thinks these things aren’t worth emulating and should be forgotten about, I challenge you to look at the following page and draw the same conclusions

Mr. P’s Classic Amusements
This guy collects, and operates the classic machines in his arcade, and if you look at them, and the enthusiasm for them you’ll see that they’re every bit as much classics as Pacman or Street Fighter and many of them are exceedingly rare these days (some probably already lost forever) Unlike arcade games these have a more serious problem, the games are useless if separated from their cabinets, and storing unprofitable or weaker playing machines isn’t economical so they’re more likely to be destroyed whereas an arcade PCB might be unlucky enough to have it’s cab destroyed but the PCBs are usually saved and the cabinets usually served for decoration purposes only, and weren’t critical to operation of the games. He also has a whole bunch of videos on YouTube demonstrating many of his machines. These is even a video of the earlier mentioned Sphinx, complete with classic 8-bit tunes. Many of the machines are genuinely entertaining and works of art unlike the soul sucking Vegas ones which offer nothing but a chance to get lucky.

So yeah, things are being looked at all the time, and while we might not have reached tipping point as far as working sets go I still consider this a very worthwhile venture, and an extremely important one.