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Amber Update 15/02/2012


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#21 nails

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Posted 16 February 2012 - 10:47 PM

Good luck to all, but in all honesty is this thread needed?

There were dates promised and passed, the Author wasn't posting nor working on it.......and any 'news' was 3rd party.

Guitar, all due respect.....but it now appears the WAS being worked on, yet you saw fit not to post any updates but let others post on your behalf?.......and at the fact it was halted:???????

Bloody confused by it all....


You are totally entitled to your opinion, but seeing as flaming has been done to the death - is it really necessary?

ive read countless threads of how wizard didnt do this and didnt do that. Personally, i dot know him nor do i think he owes me anything. Yes the carrot dangler was a slap in the face, but this is only because MAME stuck its nose in. maybe izard dint do anything wrong - but merely point out that all that could have been ours, given MAME not putting a stop to it.

so, back to guitar. as i said to your personally, im not going to pick sides BUT credit where credit is due. Guitar doesn't owe the scene anything other than perhaps an explianation as to why it went quiet for a while. Since we already know the answer to the question it all becomes a mute point really. what we do have, albeit far later than guitar himself anticipated, is a means to carry fruit machine emulation forward. MFME10 might have this and might have that, even MAME may have something, but until we do, we have amber right on our doorstep, closer to emulation that mfme ever was

here is a quote from elcondor over at dads

"The last thing I wrote was a stepper motor thing that allowed belt reels to run - I've not really been around to do anything with this, but I doubt there's any malice behind a lack of updates.
There's a fair bit of behind the scenes stuff going in for processors and things that might be of use to MPU5, but nothing I would want to commit to making a statement about.
Sorry, but I'd have thought a lack of updates was the default behaviour in FME.

Let me just say it's not dead, but when you have two people for whom it's not priority 1, it starts to get pushed away a bit." elcondor


So there you have it, nothing from wizard and nothing on the horizon from MAME, who have seemingly halted mfme10 for nothing, other than using their code.





Guitar may for the sake of argumet, be the lowest person of this earth. but the fact that he has devoted to writing 50,000 lines of code in his spare time for the likes of you and me, i think he needs a break, perhaps even a medal.
thats it, rant over. if ever we meet in the pub, i`ll still get you that well deserved beer.

#22 vectra666

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Posted 16 February 2012 - 11:20 PM

nice to see amber progressing again lets hope he keeps us upto date with the devolopement of it and to see its releaese sooner rather than later goodluck and thankyou so far with all the hard work/hours you,ve put in guitar may one day be able to play simpson,s duff beer guide once again hopefully
The more I do today, The less I do tomorrow.
Fme is alive and screaming into the 21st century!
Enjoy FME and Happy Gaming!!!!

#23 Guest_robinhood75_*

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 12:24 AM

Things have been rather quiet in the amber camp for a while now, sure their are reasons but for now my purpose is to bring everybody up to date with how amber stands.

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.


Don't forget the editor tools to nails. A few new tools on top of what MFME already has which is aimed at making layouts faster and easier to create :)

Ady, I can see your point and I understand what your saying but guitar is the one who is making the layout so it's up to him if he decides not to work on it/ give updates but given how this has happened in the past with other stuff it was probably not a good idea to be silent for so long. I for one am just glad to see it's now back on track and is being worked on.

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#24 nails

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 07:09 AM

Don't forget the editor tools to nails. A few new tools on top of what MFME already has which is aimed at making layouts faster and easier to create :)


your right, the editor tools `look` extensive, but the only thing ive ever edited is my CV, so couldnt really comment. needs a DX producer to give a step by step..

#25 letemspin

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 08:04 AM

Looks great. Many thanks Guitar, looking forward to it.

Sorry to hear you have been ill.


Cavey

#26 Darienne

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 01:48 PM

Any chance of actually having a tool similar to the "Lasso" on PS to do the lamping (rather than a rectangle) - would make it easier for odd shapped lamps

#27 ady

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 02:41 PM

Steve, nails and rob....

erm guy's I think you'll find I haven't got involved in ANY of these threads on ANY site.

My point is this......and it was TOTALLY misread (or mabey not posted well)....

All I see is thread after thread on it, and yes they do get really boring with the same thing being said over and over. From there on they just create non-stop bad feeling between what WAS a generally peaceful community...

Then nothing come's of it..this HAS torn the community...shame it wasn't thought more about earlier.

#28 stevedude2

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Posted 17 February 2012 - 05:03 PM

The thing is Ady, and I mean this with the greatest respect, if I knew that every time I posted an update for something half of the replies were going to be from people determined to find something to complain about, I wouldn't bother either. You end up with a situation where you can't win. Shall I -

a) Post an update with a new release date and get people moaning that the date has been pushed back again, or

b) Stay away for a while so the next update is more positive, but then have people asking where I have been and suggesting that they have a right to expect an update every week, and that I'm out of order for just disappearing and not telling everyone where I am.

So you're f***ed whatever you do, and then you wonder why you ever bothered in the first place.

This is one of those threads where people with positive responses should post them, but if you don't have something good to say it's better to just keep it to yourself.

Having just said that I doubt I should post this now!

Ah f*** it, can't do any harm!

Keep up the good work :)
Watch out! There's a SIG thief about...

#29 Guitar

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 12:58 PM

So you're f***ed whatever you do, and then you wonder why you ever bothered in the first place.


Bingo.

Project Amber 2 - Coming Soon


#30 nails

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 01:22 PM

well there you have it, amber plays bingo too!

#31 ady

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 01:24 PM

Bingo.

well there you have it, amber plays bingo too!


Now we are talking guy's ;)

lol

#32 Guest_robinhood75_*

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 01:42 PM

Any chance of actually having a tool similar to the "Lasso" on PS to do the lamping (rather than a rectangle) - would make it easier for odd shapped lamps


Its not needed Darienne due to the way it works. When you import the off and on image and hit transparency all the lamps are done, when you move the lamp box over the area your lamp will light up it's that easy. If the lamp box overlaps another lamp you have to export that lamp and then make any part you want to mask in black(this is invisible in amber like the bottom left pixel in mfme) then save it then import it back in and set it to new DX lamp. This will then enable the mask to work so the lamps do not overlap.

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#33 ady

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 02:02 PM

Now this lamping (as you just posted rob)....

I read what you said, and I hate 'multi-lamping', mabey because i'm shit at doing it!!

Please excuse my ignorance (could have been a PM but i've nowt to hide (or so my Dr said lol))

Is this a case of........take an image.....say a 4 lamp Jackpot One....clip at a 'random' (as long as the 4 lamps are within the clipping), and NO image overlap will be duplicated?. If that is the case how does it 'decide' what images (Quaters) takes president?

#34 Guest_robinhood75_*

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 03:04 PM

Hi ady, what happens is if a lamp has say 4 lamps amber has a neat way of lining them up. You can use the arrow keys to move one pixel at a time so you can get it lined up dead on so there is no overlap. That middle image I posted up there /\ for instance, If I left it like it like it is overlapping, the left lamp has been extended over the second lamp. When the lamps flash the 1st lamp will also make the second overlaying part flash too regardless of the second lamp. So all you have to do is line them up using the arrow keys so they are right next to each other. Using the arrows to line up the lamps has been very useful especially the £5 notes to the left. They all overlap so I have had to mask them all. When trying to drag them into place with a mouse it is not always easy to get it dead on. so I used the arrows which lined them up and they was all spot on:)

hope you understood that ady, not had any sleep since 2pm yesterday and feeling a bit dizzy lol. BTW can u pm me ur num(home) as my phones screen is broke, need to have a chat :)

#35 Guitar

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 04:50 PM

Well the Oki chip is pretty much solved now, so on to the NEC chip, all being well it will get a public release in approx 2 weeks.

I need to write the NEC chip which DT has kindly given me source for from JPeMU. Write a reel editor, and then I have all the finishing off to do so its idiot proof (wish me luck!).

Synthesized sound will NOT be included in release one, again, thanks to DT finding a sound library that works in WIn 7 it will be implemented eventually but as the main reason for the emu is to support BWB, Coinworld, and Crystal games, the synth sound is not required for those games so I am not going to hold up the release to support it. To be 100% honest I have hated doing the sound and have to give credit yet again to DT for walking me through the process several times until I understood it, the man has the patience of a saint.

Project Amber 2 - Coming Soon


#36 Chopaholic

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 05:12 PM

Christ almighty, the last publicly active emulator author the scene has and he's being given a hard time?

This really is the stupidest emulation scene in the history of the world.

Fruit machine emulation YouTube shenanigans - https://www.youtube....c/DegsyDegworth


#37 nails

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 05:20 PM

Christ almighty, the last publicly active emulator author the scene has and he's being given a hard time?

This really is the stupidest emulation scene in the history of the world.


i though we had DONE the battle of the wills, and now we just look forward to its release?

the bit i cant get my head around is the sheer amount of 2 faced people who will end up using guitars release....

#38 letemspin

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 06:04 PM

Christ almighty, the last publicly active emulator author the scene has and he's being given a hard time?

This really is the stupidest emulation scene in the history of the world.


Indeed. Guitar - just like all the other emu coders - must have a hide of titanium-plated leather.

#39 stevedude2

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 07:52 PM

Bingo.


Watch out! There's a SIG thief about...

#40 nails

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Posted 18 February 2012 - 10:41 PM

Indeed. Guitar - just like all the other emu coders - must have a hide of titanium-plated leather.


very possible, but most of all he's proud of what he's achieved and has great will to carry on




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