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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sellenoff" data-source="post: 94192" data-attributes="member: 1090">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 ).</blockquote>

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