- Mar 17, 2012
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Whitestar would beg to differ.
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Welcome Back to Digital Pinball Fans - please read this first
Capcom emulation is already a reality
- Thread starter Kemetman72
- Start date
Indeed! Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think we also have (only going by tables already in TPA) emulation of System 11, Steen Electronics' M-200, most of the Williams early solid-state MPUs, System 1, System 80 and Bally's AS-2518-35 (the MPU Centaur uses). If FarSight are really looking to impress me, though, they need to step up their EM emulation...
superballs
Active member
- Apr 12, 2012
- 2,653
- 2
These ancient consoles are still more powerful than mobile devices. Better CPUs better GPUs better shader architectures and are dedicated to gaming.
Funny though, ToTAN was released for the iPhone a month or two before TPA was even released on XBOX and PS3 release was even later. No tables have been exclusive to XBOX/PS3.
SWEP1 table is a better table than it gets credit for. It's like an EM with holograms. It's quite fun to play, wouldn't be any worse than playing BoP. It even has lasers.
Regarding Capcom emulation. Just because it was available on a completely different architecture doesn't make it automatically easily done on another platform. It is going to require optimization. Given the collective software development expertise being thrown around here, I'm absolutely shocked that I haven't seen a TPA killer pop up on iTunes or Play made by our own members considering how simple it must be to create this kind of software.
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gooche77
New member
- Jul 30, 2012
- 1,070
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Thank you. I was beginning to think i was to only person who enjoys SWEP1.
Rudy Yagov
New member
- Mar 30, 2012
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System 11 would as well.
superballs
Active member
- Apr 12, 2012
- 2,653
- 2
I know some that think it's way to simple, and I can buy that because it is. I'm pretty sure a lot just don't like it because of the license. I've never had that much hate toward the movie (episode 2 is easily the worst movie ever made and i mean that from the bottom of my starwars fanboy heart) so i can get past that.
What I know is that when i first shot the ball through the "hologram" spinner my poor mind was blown.
LanceBoyle
New member
- Jul 5, 2013
- 216
- 0
I think there was another interview with Bobby where he mentioned they did do a proof-of-concept version of Big Bang Bar but it wasn't running very smoothly, and that they had to optimize the emulation code.
Ripley's runs on Whitestar hardware which dates back to Sega and the mid 90's. It's using 8 bit processors which are pretty light weight even on mobile. The fact that it runs 2 of them, vs. Williams WPC only running one make it run 50% slower than those games. Depending on the device, you might not notice any difference at all in performance, but on slower devices, you definitely would see the hit.
Newer hardware used 16 & 32 bit processors, which would not necessarily run well on mobile devices.
PS - I share your thoughts 100% about BBB, truly unique and awesome game. Shame game play never got fully fleshed out, though it's still a great player as is.
Newer hardware used 16 & 32 bit processors, which would not necessarily run well on mobile devices.
PS - I share your thoughts 100% about BBB, truly unique and awesome game. Shame game play never got fully fleshed out, though it's still a great player as is.
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Not exactly, Bobby and Jay asked me about how I thought Capcom would perform, and I gave them some very rough estimates and did some extrapolations based on how our slowest performer ( ripleys ) performs on mobile. We never got farther than talking about it, because there would be a lot of work to write up the emulation just to see how it would perform. FS has expressed interest in Capcom so I believe at some point we'll see it happen, just not sure if/when.
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I happen to love SWE1 as well as RFM. No doubt SWE1 is a very, very shallow game, but the audio visual package is awesome.
That's 100% correct. Although I can use the knowledge I gained while working on pinmame, I can't use the code due to it's license. Plus, it was actually far easier to write my own emulation core then to try and take out all the junk in mame we didn't need, so I'd have done it that way even if the license was friendly. Mame's core is very flexible, but doesn't make for optimal performance, especially since we don't need all that flexibility anyway.
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To set the record straight, I retired because I didn't have any free time to work on pinmame anymore; My first kid had been recently born and my regular job requirements had ramped up significantly. It wasn't until a few years later that FS contacted me; in fact I recall being really rusty on my emulation programming skills when we first got started.
You're right about me having to rewrite all the code for FS, although that's not why DCS isn't emulated, that was done for pure performance reasons, and to get the most accurate reproduction of the sounds themselves. I posted already, earlier, in this thread why we didn't / couldn't use pinmame's code ( some reasons which you already pointed out ).
In the beginning, it was true that we only had WPC emulation since it was the 1st thing I wrote for FS. Actually it was WPC95 to be exact, not the full spectrum of WPC era hardware, ( that came later ).
Since TPA's launch I've been working as hard as I can to add more systems as FS requests them. I also spend a considerably amount of time each month on each emulated table, so new systems can often take a long time for me to introduce.
Currently we have:
Williams WPC ( all generations from WPC89 - WPC95 )
Williams System 9,11 ( System 6,7 are mostly finished but not implemented / tested )
Sega / Stern Whitestar ( 1st generation )
Bally MPU35 ( MPU17 also written but not implemented / tested )
Stern MPU200 ( MPU100 also written but not implemented / tested )
Gottlieb is being worked on at the moment, not sure if I'm allowed to post details yet.
The best part of this process has been that I've rarely actually looked at the pinmame code; instead I started from scratch pulling out the schematics and doing it all 100% myself. This really forced me to understand and learn how everything really works, which is why I love to do this stuff in the first place. For example, I believe Martin originally wrote the MPU35 code for pinmame. I never had a clue how that system worked, and I could barely follow it from his code since he tended to write better / faster, but harder to read code. I've always tried to write easier to read code rather than some cryptic c notation which may shave a few cycles off the end result. Not trying to knock Martin's work btw, there are many in the C world who take his approach, it's just not the approach I personally favor. Having had to figure it all out myself for TPA and then code it up and get it working, was great fun and a great learning experience.
On a further point, the decision way back in the beginning to not emulate the sound hardware has really paid off, especially with the older tables like Centaur & Flight 2000, and even the preDCS games. The emulated versions, for those systems in particular, still sound terrible and way wrong compared to the real tables ( F2K more so than Centaur ). Having direct recordings from the actual tables sounds amazingly better, and I'm extremely pleased with the results ( except for the horrible distortion that you can hear on the phones due to what I assume is really junky compression - i've complained about it, not sure what they can do to improve it ).
You're right about me having to rewrite all the code for FS, although that's not why DCS isn't emulated, that was done for pure performance reasons, and to get the most accurate reproduction of the sounds themselves. I posted already, earlier, in this thread why we didn't / couldn't use pinmame's code ( some reasons which you already pointed out ).
In the beginning, it was true that we only had WPC emulation since it was the 1st thing I wrote for FS. Actually it was WPC95 to be exact, not the full spectrum of WPC era hardware, ( that came later ).
Since TPA's launch I've been working as hard as I can to add more systems as FS requests them. I also spend a considerably amount of time each month on each emulated table, so new systems can often take a long time for me to introduce.
Currently we have:
Williams WPC ( all generations from WPC89 - WPC95 )
Williams System 9,11 ( System 6,7 are mostly finished but not implemented / tested )
Sega / Stern Whitestar ( 1st generation )
Bally MPU35 ( MPU17 also written but not implemented / tested )
Stern MPU200 ( MPU100 also written but not implemented / tested )
Gottlieb is being worked on at the moment, not sure if I'm allowed to post details yet.
The best part of this process has been that I've rarely actually looked at the pinmame code; instead I started from scratch pulling out the schematics and doing it all 100% myself. This really forced me to understand and learn how everything really works, which is why I love to do this stuff in the first place. For example, I believe Martin originally wrote the MPU35 code for pinmame. I never had a clue how that system worked, and I could barely follow it from his code since he tended to write better / faster, but harder to read code. I've always tried to write easier to read code rather than some cryptic c notation which may shave a few cycles off the end result. Not trying to knock Martin's work btw, there are many in the C world who take his approach, it's just not the approach I personally favor. Having had to figure it all out myself for TPA and then code it up and get it working, was great fun and a great learning experience.
On a further point, the decision way back in the beginning to not emulate the sound hardware has really paid off, especially with the older tables like Centaur & Flight 2000, and even the preDCS games. The emulated versions, for those systems in particular, still sound terrible and way wrong compared to the real tables ( F2K more so than Centaur ). Having direct recordings from the actual tables sounds amazingly better, and I'm extremely pleased with the results ( except for the horrible distortion that you can hear on the phones due to what I assume is really junky compression - i've complained about it, not sure what they can do to improve it ).
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One last thing to say:
As far as Capcom emulation:
1) Capcom was way more processor intense by multiple factors than all the other systems Pinmame supported at the time. SAM would be the only one that runs considerably slower than it.
I would predict that mobile might have trouble with it, but it's hard to know for 100% sure.
2) I'm not sure I could rewrite the cpu core for it as it's way more complex than the 8 bit processors I've been dealing with, so we'd have to possibly license it from either the author(s) from mame or somewhere else. Of course given enough time I certainly could rewrite it, but my current schedule doesn't really allow for it, and that might not make financial sense for FS anyway, might be cheaper to license it.
3) Much of how Capcom works was never fully understood, and still today there are some hacks we injected into the rom at run time to make it pass the hardware tests on boot up. Surprisingly, I recall the Visual Pinball tables played pretty good despite this, so I'm optimistic in this regard while being pessimistic at the same time.
4) Simulating the sound system may be considerably harder due to how the main cpu communicates to the sound cpu, i.e., I'm not sure I can reverse engineer it so easily. I recall trying to do that prior to implementing the MPG2 support in pinmame, and being very unsuccessful.
Having said all that, I'm still confident that we could see a decent enough emulation of Capcom to make people happy if most of the above issues can be worked out and if FS wants to include it bad enough..
FWIW - I'm a huge fan of Capcom games, I've liked them all and would love to see them included in TPA.
As far as Capcom emulation:
1) Capcom was way more processor intense by multiple factors than all the other systems Pinmame supported at the time. SAM would be the only one that runs considerably slower than it.
I would predict that mobile might have trouble with it, but it's hard to know for 100% sure.
2) I'm not sure I could rewrite the cpu core for it as it's way more complex than the 8 bit processors I've been dealing with, so we'd have to possibly license it from either the author(s) from mame or somewhere else. Of course given enough time I certainly could rewrite it, but my current schedule doesn't really allow for it, and that might not make financial sense for FS anyway, might be cheaper to license it.
3) Much of how Capcom works was never fully understood, and still today there are some hacks we injected into the rom at run time to make it pass the hardware tests on boot up. Surprisingly, I recall the Visual Pinball tables played pretty good despite this, so I'm optimistic in this regard while being pessimistic at the same time.
4) Simulating the sound system may be considerably harder due to how the main cpu communicates to the sound cpu, i.e., I'm not sure I can reverse engineer it so easily. I recall trying to do that prior to implementing the MPG2 support in pinmame, and being very unsuccessful.
Having said all that, I'm still confident that we could see a decent enough emulation of Capcom to make people happy if most of the above issues can be worked out and if FS wants to include it bad enough..
FWIW - I'm a huge fan of Capcom games, I've liked them all and would love to see them included in TPA.
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superballs
Active member
- Apr 12, 2012
- 2,653
- 2
Wow, thanks sellenoff,
That's a lot of food for thought. Sometimes speculation is good (what tables are next) but sometimes a clear answer is needed to calm the crowd down. Especially in regards to the sound. There's been a lot of discussion regarding the sound quality. To be honest, a lot of tables sound like they are turned up way too loudly. If I recall correctly, in PinMAME, most game ROMS had major clipping if you had them turned up past 27
That's a lot of food for thought. Sometimes speculation is good (what tables are next) but sometimes a clear answer is needed to calm the crowd down. Especially in regards to the sound. There's been a lot of discussion regarding the sound quality. To be honest, a lot of tables sound like they are turned up way too loudly. If I recall correctly, in PinMAME, most game ROMS had major clipping if you had them turned up past 27
I think you're right, I also got the impression that one issue is that the volume is way to high on the samples. This is not an issue on the original recordings however, where we were careful to keep volumes well below clipping levels ( or at least, the ones I did anyway ). It must be getting introduced either in the post processing our audio guy did, or somewhere else..
You're right about pinmame, if you jacked up DCS volume too high it clipped and sounded bad. I'm impressed you remember what volume # it was!
You're right about pinmame, if you jacked up DCS volume too high it clipped and sounded bad. I'm impressed you remember what volume # it was!
The loafer
Member
- Oct 28, 2012
- 494
- 0
Hi Steve,
I think we all appreciate the insight into the work done, great info you've provided. I have to agree 100% with the decision on sound, yep, Centaur sounds pretty freaking great!
Real nice to hear from you, it's been a while sir!
Rob
I think we all appreciate the insight into the work done, great info you've provided. I have to agree 100% with the decision on sound, yep, Centaur sounds pretty freaking great!
Real nice to hear from you, it's been a while sir!
Rob
Glad to hear from you as well. My dev PC had some major issues today so I spent a lot of time waiting ( instead of working ), which gave me a chance to catch up on some posts..
Hi Steve,
I think we all appreciate the insight into the work done, great info you've provided. I have to agree 100% with the decision on sound, yep, Centaur sounds pretty freaking great!
Real nice to hear from you, it's been a while sir!
Rob
N
netizen
Guest
Thanks sellenoff,
It's always nice to get some insight of how things are done to help us, as players, appreciate just how much work goes into TPA.
I hope you realize just how much your work is appreciated; I can't speak for anyone else but I know the number of game hours I have logged, not counting testing, has been large.
It's always nice to get some insight of how things are done to help us, as players, appreciate just how much work goes into TPA.
I hope you realize just how much your work is appreciated; I can't speak for anyone else but I know the number of game hours I have logged, not counting testing, has been large.
I'm not surprised about sound - I knew DCS woiuld always be trouble to emulate. I think it still is even on fast systems if you're using pinmame.
At least, that was the reason why I thought they never did DCS emulation.
Though, I wonder how many more old pinmame people from over a decade ago have moved to TPA.
Steve, when you emulate stuff like WPC, where do you get information on stuff like the Williams ASICs? I know there's two on WPC95 - one on the MPU board and one on the AV board, but do you get actual documentation on those ASICs from Williams under NDA or did you just reverse engineer it?
At least, that was the reason why I thought they never did DCS emulation.
Though, I wonder how many more old pinmame people from over a decade ago have moved to TPA.
Steve, when you emulate stuff like WPC, where do you get information on stuff like the Williams ASICs? I know there's two on WPC95 - one on the MPU board and one on the AV board, but do you get actual documentation on those ASICs from Williams under NDA or did you just reverse engineer it?
Kolchak357
Senior Pigeon
- May 31, 2012
- 8,102
- 2
Thanks sellenoff. Very interesting read. I'm not very tech savy, so post like these are eye openers for me. I like to pretend you guys all have magic wands and can just make anything happen at the snap of the fingers.
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