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Capcom emulation is already a reality
- Thread starter Kemetman72
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This is better than learning how they make sausage.
Or Head-Cheese
superballs
Active member
- Apr 12, 2012
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I love vp and have a lot of respect for the community and the amount of work that goes into that project. I must have missed the memo on sound not being emulated because before you replied it had never occurred to me. Now it all makes sense that the pro mode volume controls don't have any effect. I'm wondering if the sound guy used a hard limiter to compress the audio. I find running theough an analog loop to produce better results (I love my rack compressor).
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
And I agree. The sound on centaur is impeccable. In fact I'd never played it until tpa and love it because of tpa
What I wouldn't give for some access to real information about the wpc asic! Even more so for some of the strange things they do with the sound board data that gets sent over to the dcs and pre-dcs boards. Unfortunately I asked FS repeatedly to get some help from Williams, but we never had any luck with that. All I do to find info is study the schematics, and watch the rom code alot to try and understand it. I also learned alot from looking over the great wpcfree project that Brian Dominy did.
To be fair, I would be remiss in mentioning that I have had two situations where either I or FS reached out to former Williams programmers to help resolve a particularly difficult ( table specific ) emulation issue I was having, and I was amazed at how willing and helpful those guys were. I'm not really sure if I'm allowed to or if they'd want me to post who it was, but I'm very grateful to them for their help in resolving those 2 issues.
To be fair, I would be remiss in mentioning that I have had two situations where either I or FS reached out to former Williams programmers to help resolve a particularly difficult ( table specific ) emulation issue I was having, and I was amazed at how willing and helpful those guys were. I'm not really sure if I'm allowed to or if they'd want me to post who it was, but I'm very grateful to them for their help in resolving those 2 issues.
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David Pannozzo
New member
- Mar 6, 2012
- 536
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Hi Steve how are ya, I was going to post a couple of things on your Facebook page, but your not on much and also the really nice folks here on The Pinball Arcade forum might be interested hearing what I have to say. Well one thing I wanted to say is (which might be kinda early to know anything), is do you think the S.A.M. Emulation could be done on these two next gen systems. Microsofts Xbox One, and Sony's Playstation 4, they seem pretty powerful systems so I was just curious. The other question is one I have mentioned a few times on here, when I play Attack from mars every country has a beginning quote and an ending quote when you destroy the U.F.O. Germany's last quot after you destroy the UFO, says "Germany is Victorious". Well moving on the USA says when the UFO shows up "we have to save the Statue of Liberty" then when you destroy the UFO it's supposed to say "Nobody Messes With The USA", problem is it doesn't say anything after you destroy the UFO in the USA. To make it easier play the game and play a couple different country's then play USA, then you will see what I'm talking about. I've played it on my IPad 3, Playstation Vita, and Playstation 3 so far and I never hear a finishing quote on the USA. Sorry for being confusing, I think theirs a bug in the ROM or something. I love all pinball tables from the late 80's up till now which is Jersey Jacks Wizard Of Oz, sorry but I can't get into EM machines.
Tuomas Hämäläinen
New member
- Jul 2, 2012
- 136
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+1 for this! I'm seeing it on the Mac too and I've always wondered about it.
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DCS sound and sound quality in general could use an improvement. Higher frequencies seem to be missing and there's a strange noise present.
I don't know how FS captures audio from the machines themselves.
In the link below are some music samples from Road Show which I recorded directly from the driver board audio outputs and while I don't want to brag, the quality is a lot better than what TPA currently offers. Is the sound in TPA compressed so heavily or is it about the sound capture process itself? I'd be interested to hear more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwmVzZvZpiU (beware: country music on the other side of that link)
Yeah, I was wondering. I wonder how the first wpcmame guy came about getting the internals of the ASIC. There's just so much it does. And by wpcfree, you mean FreeWPC, right? I know they have some great documentation on the ASIC itself, though I think a lot of that came from pinmame in the end.
About those two issues you had - you probably shouldn't name who helped you out, but can you name the issue? It would be interesting to see if pinmame has those issues or if they were resolved ages ago. Just out of curiosity. I know you shouldn't look at pinmame or probably even try running it to find out, but others certainly can...
Kemetman72
Banned
- Sep 12, 2012
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- Thread starter
- #51
I remember the sound on VP to start clipping at 28 for me. How difficult would SAM emulation be for you. I know Brian and whoever is helping have emualted it. But I though the major deal was the additional sound chips introduced into SAM. Like the Mame guys once told me it can take between 20-50 times the power to truly emulate something and that came from Aaron Giles himself. I don't know if SAM is properly emualted but it is up and running. I would also love to see Zaccaria tables, but if I remember correctly getting proper sound dumps was quite diffcult.
Thanks Steve I still remember the day you brought Capcom emulation to Vpinmame. A lot of stuff wouldn't have happened without you. You knew me as Marv75. I think...I can't remember the old forums AJ used to run. But thank you for all your hard work. Pinball is relaxing to me. I am so tired of the glut of shooters. Pinball rules and always will. How is wpcmame doing and Fuseball did they not help as well during the early days? I wonder if Gerrit is still involved. Destruk can't do everything by himself. Thanks again for your wonderful mind and the magic it produces!
Thanks Steve I still remember the day you brought Capcom emulation to Vpinmame. A lot of stuff wouldn't have happened without you. You knew me as Marv75. I think...I can't remember the old forums AJ used to run. But thank you for all your hard work. Pinball is relaxing to me. I am so tired of the glut of shooters. Pinball rules and always will. How is wpcmame doing and Fuseball did they not help as well during the early days? I wonder if Gerrit is still involved. Destruk can't do everything by himself. Thanks again for your wonderful mind and the magic it produces!
Kemetman72
Banned
- Sep 12, 2012
- 398
- 0
- Thread starter
- #52
I remember the sound on VP to start clipping at 28 for me. How difficult would SAM emulation be for you. I know Brian and whoever is helping have emualted it. But I though the major deal was the additional sound chips introduced into SAM. Like the Mame guys once told me it can take between 20-50 times the power to truly emulate something and that came from Aaron Giles himself. I don't know if SAM is properly emualted but it is up and running. I would also love to see Zaccaria tables, but if I remember correctly getting proper sound dumps was quite diffcult.
Thanks Steve I still remember the day you brought Capcom emulation to Vpinmame. A lot of stuff wouldn't have happened without you. You knew me as Marv75. I think...I can't remember the old forums AJ used to run. But thank you for all your hard work. Pinball is relaxing to me. I am so tired of the glut of shooters. Pinball rules and always will. How is wpcmame doing and Fuseball did they not help as well during the early days? I wonder if Gerrit is still involved. Destruk can't do everything by himself. Thanks again for your wonderful mind and the magic it produces! And you are correct Capcom emualtion is more intensive but I had a harder time running Gottlieb's System 3 based pins. Too bad they didn't hire JPSalas he had only photos to go by (As most VP authors do) and he did wonderful work. I actually miss Pac-Dude. He did come up with a lot of work-a-rounds that helped when VP was only cpu based...and his fading light system. Sorry just reminiscing.
Thanks Steve I still remember the day you brought Capcom emulation to Vpinmame. A lot of stuff wouldn't have happened without you. You knew me as Marv75. I think...I can't remember the old forums AJ used to run. But thank you for all your hard work. Pinball is relaxing to me. I am so tired of the glut of shooters. Pinball rules and always will. How is wpcmame doing and Fuseball did they not help as well during the early days? I wonder if Gerrit is still involved. Destruk can't do everything by himself. Thanks again for your wonderful mind and the magic it produces! And you are correct Capcom emualtion is more intensive but I had a harder time running Gottlieb's System 3 based pins. Too bad they didn't hire JPSalas he had only photos to go by (As most VP authors do) and he did wonderful work. I actually miss Pac-Dude. He did come up with a lot of work-a-rounds that helped when VP was only cpu based...and his fading light system. Sorry just reminiscing.
Nice catch on AFM! I just checked and you're right it's missing. At first I got nervous that it was an emulation bug, but thankfully further investigation revealed it to be a corrupt sample on the FS server. My sample which I submitted was fine, so I just submitted a new one. No idea when they'll roll out an update to that table, but when they do, it should be fixed.
Actually I am the one who emulated it for pinmame, even though I had already retired ( I think I did it in 2006 ). Brian maintains the file ( i.e., adding new rom support ).
I've spoken with FS about adding support for it, but as is a common theme, it would not run well ( if at all ) on current mobile devices. It probably could run fine on consoles but obviously it was never tried since FS will only add a table that it can run on all platforms. They may change their policy about this in the future, but that's the current one I'm told.
I've spoken with FS about adding support for it, but as is a common theme, it would not run well ( if at all ) on current mobile devices. It probably could run fine on consoles but obviously it was never tried since FS will only add a table that it can run on all platforms. They may change their policy about this in the future, but that's the current one I'm told.
I'm guessing the reason you had more issues with Gottlieb System 3 is because it's running FOUR cpu cores ( 2 for sound, 1 for main, 1 for dmd ), while Capcom is running 2 ( main & sound ). Although the main capcom is running at a higher clock rate and is a 16 bit cpu vs 8, perhaps the additional 2 sound cpu cores made it worse for you. I recall hearing differing results from different people back in the day.
Yeah sorry, FreeWPC. He didn't pull all his info from pinmame, because some of it is different. The 2 issues I had have not been resolved in pinmame, since I did check the code to see if someone had figured it out. If I name the issues, you'll easily guess the people who helped. What I can say is that one was related to a mechanical toy on the table not having proper timing in relation to switches and a motor, which caused the emulation / rom code to never operate the thing properly. The other was related to a special piece of hardware used specifically on 1 table ( or maybe others ) which I couldn't get the timing right for and caused the game to always report the device as bad ( infamous credit dot ).
Nice work on the Roadshow audio, definitely sounds nice and clean. Can you document your recording procedure a bit more so I can pass it on to FS for future tables?
There's definitely compression ruining the sounds, and I'm sure that is a lot of the issue, but I also feel the original DCS samples could have been better.
There's definitely compression ruining the sounds, and I'm sure that is a lot of the issue, but I also feel the original DCS samples could have been better.
Tuomas Hämäläinen
New member
- Jul 2, 2012
- 136
- 0
Thanks for the response.
To record audio from the pinball machine, I soldered a headphone jack into the leads of the left backbox speaker (doesn't matter which, DCS is mono). This circuitry had a bunch of resistors to lower the volume to safe headphone levels, which also makes the signal suitable for feeding directly into computer audio input (line level).
On the computer I simply record the mono signal coming from the pinball machine. I used GarageBand on my Mac for recording and post-processing, but that doesn't really matter - any computer with sound recording capabilities should do.
As the connection was made from the backbox speaker only, the sound is very thin (WPC splits mid-to-high frequencies to the backbox speakers and low frequencies to the cabinet speaker). Bass can be restored in post-processing by applying an equalizer curve to boost low frequencies (I went a bit overboard with this, have to admit). I also attenuated the 5 kHz band a bit to make it less "nasal" and then boosted the high end for the final crispness, although there isn't really anything beyond 10 kHz.
In the end, it's the matter of trial and error - finding out what sounds "right" and best one can do, the source material being what it is. There probably are better ways to tap into the sound board for audio capture (somewhere before the audio is amplified and filtered for the speakers which I believe happens on the driver board), but that's what I did.
Ah, that's pretty cool. I thought he got some information from pinmame but maybe it's diverged since he's actually having to use the information to code against. Like some registers you thought were correct aren't anymore - or that the ROMs used in pinmame never hit those registers, but when FreeWPC does, things went awry.
I guess I can figure out who helped you from that - I thought it would be more generic Williams people, and not specific ones, but it's good to know. I suppose the question is - could you detail the fixes? Like the playfield toy - did you simply adjust how fast you ran the emulated motor and the motions? And the other was just figuring out the proper timings? (Dang, you got me curious...).
As for DCS - I wonder if Farsight is digitizing them wrong - I'm guessing most pins work fine if you digitize the sound at 22kHz or so, but I know DCS runs at 32kHz - not quite CD quality, but fairly close. It is what makes DCS tables sound so good.
So Steve, outside of FS - I thought you were a full time employee but you mentioned you're not - what do you do with your non-TPA time?
Tuomas Hämäläinen
New member
- Jul 2, 2012
- 136
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I can only comment based on what I can hear, but the low sound quality doesn't affect only the DCS tables. Just compare something like TZ or BOP to the real thing. There's not much missing from the CVSD-compressed sampled voices and sound effects given their original quality, but the synthesized music should be pretty high-quality.
It may of course be that the sampling frequency isn't sufficient for pre-DCS music either - go and tell. It would seem logical to record any sound, regardless of what kind of sound system it uses, at the highest reasonable quality, say 44,1 kHz like on CD, and only after that start compressing it down, all while carefully listening to the results to avoid audible overcompression.