1790 replies to this topic

[wiesshund]

apophis pointed that out some posts ago.. (also thanks for that, its great to have all you guys as QA!!!!)

 

 

New build is up in the first post:

 

Make Williams Flash L-1 and T-1 use the Sys6 board (as these are newer than the yellow flipper based L-2)

 

Fix recent regressions: Sound distortion; F6 sound dump not working properly; Inputs in VPM config windows always shown as unsigned value

 

 

Please verify.. Thanks!!

going to test it now

 

Do you know how you fixed blackhole with out trying to fix blackhole?

cause that has been broke for like ages

[toxie]

No clue, could just be a sideeffect that may vanish any time again.  :/

Lets see how long it stays this way.

[Mrtr32]

I can confirm Black Hole is not fixed!

[earbiter]

Are psychedelic drugs legal all of a sudden in the US? 

In Oregon - YES!!

 

Oregon became the first state to legalize the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms on an election night that saw more states ease restrictions on drugs across the country.

[apophis]

The altsound F6 dump is working again. Thank you, toxie.

[wiesshund]

No clue, could just be a sideeffect that may vanish any time again.  :/

Lets see how long it stays this way.

 

Sadly blackhole working much better has vanished back into the ether

Something you did in testbuild3.zip directly had a direct effect on it, as it played the end of game tone sequence completely through with out the audio
reducing itself to crackles and pops, and the basement votrax sequences played as they should.
And when it loops back to the will you enter the blackhole attract audio, while not 100% perfect, the votrax was still talking.

I wont go on about it too much as this round of betas is not about blackhole, but still is worth noting.
Maybe it can be looked at next round?
It does seem though to suggest that to cause is in the emulation rather than the ROM dump, and that it could be fixable since we were so close by accident.

wish there was a better way that i could test and observe, love to know what its doing different in A than in B

 

The last one you uploaded today
It shows volume level as it is supposed to, and actually follows the level

The audio distortion between subsequent restarts of a table is gone


 

[toxie]

Thanks guys for testing!

 

So seems like either the gottlieb 80 core or the votrax core have some uninitialized memory somewhere or some other glitchy behavior. Will check for that next.

 

At least we're back now to the state before the recent bugs. 

[wiesshund]

So seems like either the gottlieb 80 core or the votrax core have some uninitialized memory somewhere or some other glitchy behavior.

 

As the same glitch can not be duplicated in Taito cores that use the votrax
perhaps it is with the gottlieb 80?

 

When blackhole goes totally south, the audio preceding that event is not votrax, as votrax does not do those kinds of audio.

 

Something else of interesting note perhaps, and not seen in other votrax equipped machines

When the ROM starts, the 1st sound played is from the votrax "Hey do you dare to enter the black hole"

The 1st iteration of that phrase is perfect, timing, inflection pitch etc. And the audio is totally clear.

 

Now if left untouched, the next sound to come from the ROM is that phrase repeated again.

 

The repeat is no longer crystal clear, nor are subsequent repeats (and this is even present in the so called good black hole vpinmame revision).

it takes on a hint of distorted static and the audio is weaker.

 

In the previous revisions besides the black hole oddity, by the time you get to the basement, the votrax is already dead.

 

Anyways, now i an going to throw out another WTF

 

So i needed to clean VPM up anyways, as it had a dozen revisions tossed in and out of it, and i have a reg export that is chopped down to just save
my DMD placement and size, colours and F12 volume levels
So uninstalled vpinmame com objects, deleted the vpinmame folder, nvram and all, just kept my roms of course.

Unzipped a fresh copy of your last upload
ran setup even on the 64bit though we are not using it for vpx

registered the com objects, put my roms back, and reimported my DMD locations (and black hole has no DMD so nothing to import for it)

 

I am getting black hole to work, at least for 2 sequential games with pinmame set in the following manner
I have no idea why.
It is not perfect, votrax gets grungy after the 1st perfect rendition of Do you dare to enter the black hole
And he remains kind of edgy ever after.
It makes me want to start checking the board for failed caps or a flakey diode, but yea none of those in pinmame, so..
I do not know why this is working as it does not really make any sense to me, but might to someone else?

 

 

I played the game, i let him say his attract phrase 3 or 4 times, then dropped a coin and started the game
I got into the basement a number of times
It continued with the little votrax phrases for the basement.
It clearly said re-entry has failed, when i left the basement.
Well a bit distorted, and had a little trouble maintaining the pitch from one re-entry to the next, but i could still hear and understand it.

 

I lost the game, it played a number of the counter sequences, as it counted out the basement score and counted out the lit multipliers
Then it played the game over note sequence and sound effect, completely, it did not turn to total crackling noise at the last half

 

and then

 

"Hey, Do you dare to enter the black hole"

A bit edgy, but no different from what happens when it is said the 2nd and subsequent times from a fresh ROM boot.

 

It is not 100% guaranteed to work every time, some times it messes up anyways
but it works more than it messes up set like that, just no idea why.

 

Anyways, that's a hole for another day.

 

I tried forcing vpinmame to log, but it does not show anything of use to this in that kind of logs

[Thalamus]

Not cleaning up at all - just firing up the game. Waiting and letting it play the rom sounds. First I hear maybe an "I", then it cuts, after that, without starting the game I can clearly hear the repeated sequence in what I would describe as OK emulation, slight crackle.

 

 

Weird value from Fast frames, I'm quite sure I've never adjusted that one. I wonder, weisshund, does changing the sample rate change anything for you ?

I'll give the game some play, been a while since last

 

Btw. The fastframes seems to become a "random number" from each time I start the game. Setting it to 0, and it stays 0. Set it manually to 1 and it stays 1. Probably something happened a while back - giving it a value that it can't handle and after that it becomes odd.

 

While investigating the fastframes, I let it play the "opening sequence" several times. I agree with Weisshund in that first time the sample is played (except for the very very first time I opened it and it just said "I" and nothing more) it starts to get a slight distortion after saying the repeated sequence. Rom tested is : blkhole7

 

And, yes, once a game ends. It becomes really distorted.

Edited by Thalamus, 17 December 2020 - 12:45 PM.

[Thalamus]

Here is a sample of that end game distortion : http://thalamus.no-i..._distortion.wav

 

and the startup : http://thalamus.no-i...ol7_startup.wav

Edited by Thalamus, 17 December 2020 - 11:07 AM.

[wiesshund]

Yes i also noticed many crazy values for fast frames

4 billion 7 billion etc

ran into a few at -1

 

odd thing is, i have never changed any fast frames setting, as i never ran into a reason to use it

from its description, it seems like a fixed fast forward amount at rom boot

but these are pinball machines, not an emulation of konami's gauntlet dark legends, they dont take 4 minutes to boot

most dont even take 4 seconds.

 

But, it seems to only be tables that i have run during this testing

I went and looked at firepower, since i had run it alot testing the distortion

it had a value in there of 34 something billion

 

i turned it back to 0

 

Maybe one of the betas screwed that value up?

 

I did a registry export, then a search and replace, and set them all back to 0, then reimported.

 

Changing the sample rate drops the audio quality, for an old table, makes it seem more like the table sounded i suppose
it seemed to make black hole less prone to screwing up, though i honestly do not know why?
I mean the sample rate, i though, took place post emulation? and so should have no part to play in properly running the emulated audio hardware

but who knows, maybe it makes it less prone to poke some memory address at play or something.

 

I tested blkhole7

blckhole (v1.4 6 digit ROM)

and blkhole2 (v 1.2 6 digit ROM)

those are the 3 that had the votrax chip on board

 

They all demonstrated pretty much the same behavior

Mostly i noted minor volume variations, at the same dB setting, blkhole7 being the quietest

but that could have been Gottlieb simply trying to reduce distortion that is prevalent in a lot of arcade hardware

[Thalamus]

Ok, my testes, and don't put too much into it, but, I feel that 44000 gives a better sound on my machine than using 11000. Actually, during testing, sometime the voltrax didn't start at all with 11000. Might be a fluke that too though. Jumped a couple of times between 44, 22 og 11 and I was not able to reproduce it afterwards.

Ah. I did look through registry and my entries for fastframes is almost everywhere set to fffffffff - I guess it used to mean -1 ?

Set blackhold to that value and the randomness comes back. So, might be something new that was introduced ? Toxie ?

[wiesshund]

Here is a sample of that end game distortion : http://thalamus.no-i..._distortion.wav

 

Oh yes, if it is going to go south at end game, that is where she does it.

 

I tried to get a perfect playthough, figures when i want to show it she refuses, but i got it where she stays together until the very end
does not come apart until the very very tail end.

If it gets past that intact, votrax does not break.

Wish i knew what was taking place at that point in time.

 

Here is a complete playthrough with it almost working to the 2nd play

https://drive.google...iew?usp=sharing

 

Thalamus, you asked about the 11k sample rate

at the moment it is mostly just doing what you hear
but it was behaving a lot better earlier

[wiesshund]

Ok, my testes, and don't put too much into it, but, I feel that 44000 gives a better sound on my machine than using 11000. Actually, during testing, sometime the voltrax didn't start at all with 11000. Might be a fluke that too though. Jumped a couple of times between 44, 22 og 11 and I was not able to reproduce it afterwards.

Ah. I did look through registry and my entries for fastframes is almost everywhere set to fffffffff - I guess it used to mean -1 ?

Set blackhold to that value and the randomness comes back. So, might be something new that was introduced ? Toxie ?

 

44000 or 48000 yes, will give "better" quality
Better than a lot of these tables had even

I do not know why it makes any difference to the audio screwing up, probably for reasons that are not supposed to be.

 

blkhole2 will not start for me with any audio at 11000 rate, do not know why

7 does consistently blckhole is a bit random on if it has audio or not at 11khz 

 

I set all my fastframes to 0
they seem to remain that way, does not like when i put numbers in them at all though, reboot rom and comes back with crazy number, but does not seem like a setting much used anymore either, no idea what effect crazy values might have.

 

I have a feeling it is misinterpreting the hex values like volume was doing maybe?
0 was the only value volume understood too.

[Thalamus]

I'm an idiot. I read that the fix was out, brain told me I had updated. But, I didn't update it until now. So, that fastframe that I reported seems to be fixed now. Sorry.

Edited by Thalamus, 17 December 2020 - 12:46 PM.

[toxie]

Thanks guys! Will need to digest all that info later-on.

 

In general:

I really like that you just provide as much info to problems as possible. This is of course more to read, but also can give me that bit of an additional hint what i need to actually search for and then (hopefully) fix things!!

[wiesshund]

I'm an idiot. I read that the fix was out, brain told me I had updated. But, I didn't update it until now. So, that fastframe that I reported seems to be fixed now. Sorry.

 

I would not say you are an idiot

i still got the weird fast frames values on any ROM that i had previously ran, with the various test builds we were testing.

 

and that is with removing pinmame all together
and doing a fresh install of the last one toxie put up

[Thalamus]

Oh. That is odd.

[toxie]

3.3 just went final (https://www.vpforums...&showfile=11571).. Thanks again for the great testing, guys!

 

 

C ya all in the next cycle..

[Thalamus]

Uh. Said it before, it is we who need to thank you and the other devs ... Gaston is seldom mentioned, so, I just want to take the opportunity.