This is better than learning how they make sausage.
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!
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'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
+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)
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.
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 ).
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.