9 replies to this topic

[s1500]

No, not a post while sitting in my basement wide awake at 3am holding a beer. A much more clear though than that.

If PinMAME can emulate the ROMs of a given table, what would not stop it from driving a real table's playfield? A switch pressed in VP means a switch got pressed to pinMAME.

I mean, if you had pinMAME running a ROM, some interface board(and a whole ton of wires) & a logic board-less pinball table, could you make it work? The only challenges would be getting all the input(switches & such) & output(driving solenoids) and interfacing it with pinMAME.

But man would that be neat. Did the logic board die? PinMAME to the rescue. heh.

[destruk]

Google says such an idea would be entirely possible -
http://membres.multi...a.fr/regismalt/

Edited by destruk, 11 January 2012 - 06:17 PM.

[s1500]

Google says such an idea would be entirely possible -
http://membres.multi...a.fr/regismalt/

The site design is horrible, but cool to know it has indeed been done.

[MikeDX]

I was going to attempt something similar, a pinball table created from scratch, with vpinmame as the brain. Something simple would be very achievable, even on a small scale. Obviously the more modern table and the more toys you have, the longer the process will take. Essentially the easiest way would be to run a jpac run hit 'switches' from all buttons and wire them to vpinmame.

Somebody with more time on their hands than me will do this i'm sure

[russdx]

these guys have done exactly that!!
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com/

there kit is designed for you to write your own custom code BUT im sure iv seen them run pinmame on a real machine as well!

[gstellenberg]

Indeed, we've been using the P-ROC to run original ROM code on real machines for nearly 2 years now. It works for all WPC and Stern Whitestar generations of machines. Here are a couple of youtube vids:

LOTR:
BoP (switching between custom code and pinmame):

We also can also run our pinball framework and custom code on VP:

Custom JD code in VP:

- Gerry
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com

[EalaDubhSidhe]

The only drawback with using PinMAME to drive a machine would be potential latency issues and response delays with control switches, but that's down to the nature of PC hardware.

[gstellenberg]

The only drawback with using PinMAME to drive a machine would be potential latency issues and response delays with control switches, but that's down to the nature of PC hardware.

With generic computer hardware, I'd agree. However, we spent a lot of time and effort eliminating these concerns with PinMAME and the P-ROC. There is a P-ROC branch of the pinMAME source tree, and there's a lot of code in there to make proper use of the P-ROC hardware to reduce latency concerns. Specifically, when running pinMAME through a P-ROC, the P-ROC handles coil pulse times, and those times are configurable by the user in a machine configuration file. This still lets pinMAME decide when to start a coil pulse, but pinMAME does not necessarily decide when to stop it. If the machine configuration file says to do so, the P-ROC stops the pulse automatically after the configured amount of time elapses. This is configurable per coil so that the user can tune the machine performance. It even works properly for duty-cycled coils using the P-ROC's 'pitter-patter' functionality.

Further, for fast responses to flipper buttons, slingshot switches, jet bumpers, etc, the P-ROC has 'switch rules' which automatically fire the appropriate coils when the switch events occur. This again is configurable per feature, and pinMAME automatically sets these rules up at startup.

Since implementing these features, we've had zero complaints from P-ROC/pinMAME users about latency issues. Further, we've demo'd pinMAME running on real machines at pinball shows like Expo in Chicago, and players (unless told) had no idea software was running through an emulataor. Latency simply isn't a problem with the P-ROC.

- Gerry
http://www.pinballcontrollers.com

[numiah]

Very impressive stuff !

[Thomas Ruggiero]

I found this link on Pinball News about something on this subject:

http://www.pinballne...ndmd/index.html