17 replies to this topic

[NickYerPesos]

Hi guys. I know there was a big issue regarding emulating Red Gaming Machines because the mpu5 CHR was hard or impossible ( or whatever) to find.. however.. I found these roms at work.. which include three different versions. It also includes the PIC Code in the notepad, but its only 4 characters long and includes the letter R so certainly isnt a hex code..

Just wondering if anyone who has done work with Red Gaming and pic codes and chr's and knows what theyre looking at would make any use of this. (especially the notepad file)

Cheers Guys, hope this helps.

Nick

 

Oh.. also included crazy cobra and club 5 star

Attached Files

•  RedX Red Gaming.rar   2.34MB   15 downloads
•  cobrared.rar   1.83MB   9 downloads
•  5 STAR CLUB DE-REG.ZIP   2.61MB   9 downloads

Edited by NickYerPesos, 20 November 2013 - 08:23 PM.

[Bencrest]

Almost looks like RG25 stand simply for "red gaming 25", but that would be very simplistic.  Hopefully an interesting find.

 

bj

 

RG25 is presumably the 'stock code' of the PIC that was used, so presumably it'll be a £25 jackpot PIC for Red Gaming machines. 

 

Bit like when I tried to downgrade my Showtime £70 to a £35 jackpot, it needed a new PIC chip to do so, no doubt to stop operators from simply copying new ROMs and not paying the upgrade costs when the jackpots are increased by government. 

 

Nice to have a good set of ROMs though, even if I can't see them working at the moment in any publicly available emulator. The more sets we have, the better

[Guitar]

Cracking the PIC isn't the hard part, first off you need an emulation enviroment in which to crack it. I've just had a brief look in the MFME debugger and it doesn't look all that hard to crack, but the first thing you would need is a decent debug suite rather than the cut down tools available in MFME. The same is true for MPU4-Video, once you get far enough to get PIC/CHR errors a few days and a decent debugger should see them running.

[Guitar]

It is the sort of job Nicola Salmoria would have really enjoyed in his day. Shame he objected to fruit machine code being in MAME for so long.

bj

 

To be honest the debugging in MAME isn't good enough for FME work. For video games its reasonably good, all you really need is debugging for the video screen and a few I/O ports for switches/coins. For FME you need debugging for reels, alpha displays, 7 seg displays, lots of lamps, dot matricies, and other components. For that sort of debugging an interactive debugger is a must, which unless I am mistaken, MAME doesn't have.

[killcrazy]

Thanks for the ROMs Nick  My intention is to get these running after finishing Epoch...  I agree that it shouldn't be too hard to crack whatever it is the PIC does (ROM checksums??)...  I'm pretty good at working things like that out

[nails]

sorry for being the thick one, but are we suggesting that all reg gaming machines are potentially emulatable ?

[killcrazy]

^^ Yes, potentially... I don't know the exact reason why they don't boot but I'm guessing it's something fairly simple...  Could be wrong though

[Guitar]

I loaded a set of those roms up last night using mfme, it gets stuck in a tight branch if not equal loop, if you bypass it then it gives you PIC fail. Normal proceedure for the complex PALs was to get a set of values from the PAL at initialise time and then use the values later on in the program. Its certainly not getting very far into the program before giving the PIC fail error. I would imagine by the time you get Barcrest games running it will be fairly easy to solve the PIC problem. When the time comes I am willing to lend a hand for sure.

[Guitar]

sorry for being the thick one, but are we suggesting that all reg gaming machines are potentially emulatable ?

 

Eventually yes.

[nails]

i read you thread guitar about what really is missing from mfme, but i do strongly think an up to date emulator is still very much a way forward?

[Guitar]

Well KC looks to be on the case, but I know my way around C++ now, it is 7 years since I started Amber, so I can help him out if he would like.

 

Amber is pretty much limited to 8 Bit CPU emulation, whereas C#/C++ can already handle Nintendo Wii emulation, so any FME tech is a doddle. I've spoken to KC and seen some of the test art for his Epoch emu, and its another step or two ahead of Amber (DX11 Compatible as opposed to DX8), which is already several steps ahead of MFME graphically.

 

But it all takes time, eventually we will see Red Gaming I have no doubt, but personally I would still like to see MPU4-Video before MPU5.

 

There's no reason why the techs in Amber could not be ported to KC's emulator at a later date which I will be prepared to do if it means even better graphics.

 

The main concern is that we start collecting ROMs and artwork while they still exist rather than waiting for the emulator first, I did say the same thing about EPoch years back too but was ignored in favour of people flaming Andy T*****.

[killcrazy]

Yea would be great if you wouldn't mind helping out sometime  Got plenty of really cool ideas going forward - far too much for one dev!!  Would love to implement some kind of online 'virtual arcades' evetually.  They could have leader boards and run competitions for fun etc!  Would be quite cool as machines would be loaded in the state the previous player left them so you've no way of knowing how it was going to play...

 

MPU4 video would be cool too but do we have a good set of ROMs for it?  Must admit I've never looked...  Used to enjoy watching my dad and a few others play these machines, even though I never really contributed much!!

[Guitar]

Yea would be great if you wouldn't mind helping out sometime  Got plenty of really cool ideas going forward - far too much for one dev!!  Would love to implement some kind of online 'virtual arcades' evetually.  They could have leader boards and run competitions for fun etc!  Would be quite cool as machines would be loaded in the state the previous player left them so you've no way of knowing how it was going to play...

 

Amber already has Virtual Arcades in it, the server just isn't running 99% of the time and development got shelved until the emu was stable (about 2 days away now). This could be a very interesting project!

 

MPU4 video would be cool too but do we have a good set of ROMs for it?  Must admit I've never looked...  Used to enjoy watching my dad and a few others play these machines, even though I never really contributed much!!

There are several complete ROM sets available, the big hurdle is the BWB characteriser used for MPU4-Video. MPU4 video utilises an MPU4 mainboard (motorola 6809) connected to a seperate video board (motorola 68k), which is far too much for VB to handle. If you can get the system put together with reasonable debugging tools I can crack the CHR pretty quickly (probably).

Edited by Guitar, 22 November 2013 - 03:34 PM.