killcrazy

Hi all,

Just dumped a load of ROMs I acquired a while ago that have no labels.  If anyone's able to identify any of them please post here

From the batch they came from I'm guessing at least some will be MPU5, but they could be from anything (even quiz machines)

Thanks

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.

Hi all,

There's a job lot of Epoch boards on eBay with a full set of proms for this machine:

http://www.ebay.co.u...016.m2516.l5255

Never seen this machine before... anyone know if it's worth getting?  We're missing the sound ROMs for it.

Alternatively if anyone's looking for some spares and wants to buy them, I'll contribute half for them if they'll get the proms dumped (don't need the boards)

Hi Guys,

Time for another quick update...

The tool set for the emulator is really starting to take shape...  You can now add components to a layout (alphas and lamp panels) and drag/drop with the mouse to position and resize them.  I'm currently working on functionality so the properties can be changed (colours of lamps, alpha glow levels etc).  Once this is done we'll have a lot of the basics for the 'workshop' editor finished.

There's quite a lot still to do though before it's fully functional.  I still need to code editors for the reels and a transparency map editor so you can create DX layouts.

In the last month I've also found and fixed a few more issues in the core.  I've also implemented one of the last missing features which is the lamp and LED flash controllers.  The core is now pretty much release-ready

Hopefully I'll be able to start some testing with layout creators soon so the toolset can be improved and all the bugs ironed out..

The other good piece of good news is that Guitar is hopefully going to join the project soon  Once he's up to speed we'll hopefully be able to work together on a lot of the missing functionality to progress a bit faster.  This will be fantastic for the long term development of the project too as he's a lot more knowledgeable than me on various other systems and CPUs.

The bad news is we've just started a massive new project at work...  It's not really clear yet how it will progress but I  imagine there'll be a good 6-10 weeks around march/april time where unfortunately I'll have very little free time to progress the project.  I'll of course keep everyone posted on this in next month's update.

Until then