DADsFME

I will update the original release thread with the latest version and list build/version changes here

PFME 0.2.8 - sound fixes, and a faster engine
Second build. Mostly this one is about sound, which two separate faults were spoiling.

Sound

• The click at the end of a sound was not the sound at all. It was the space left over at the end of the file on the card image, being read as audio and decoded at full volume. Empty space on a real card is erased flash, and it reads as silence now.
• The crackle on a machine with several boards was the opposite problem: silence was being dropped out of the stream rather than played. The sound chip's clock does not stop between one sound and the next, so the gap has to be carried like everything else.

Also in this build

• An optional engine can be activated in settings that may help users who are having speed issues on their PC.
• The machine costs about half of what it did to run before either engine is chosen, which is what makes a four-board cabinet keep up.
• Option added to settings that will tell George to use the Party Time method of nudging (lining up reels then waiting for them to move into position).

Updating
If you are already running 0.2.7 you should not need to download anything. This is the first release the built-in updater has had anything to offer, so a copy with update checking turned on will find it by itself within a day and install it for you. If you would rather it did not, the setting is in Settings.

Hiya, many thanks for the updates. One thing I noticed though, is when I updated it, it deleted the existing games. I changed the default folder for the games. Would that be why it deleted them?

Quote from: MultiRetroMan on Aug 21, 2026, 05:48 PMHiya, many thanks for the updates. One thing I noticed though, is when I updated it, it deleted the existing games. I changed the default folder for the games. Would that be why it deleted them?

It was a bug and will be fixed in the next version

Partytime player plays a tad faster now although the sounds still slow as for double decker still the same on my crap top but that's a slow laptop anyways

Since turning on the new option i am now able to play both the games fine i am looking forward to more releases on this emu

To @BarXQueen
When designing classic layouts when i click on 5p or 50p (Coin slot 6 & 7) button whether selecting with select tool, or clicking on these two coins, or attempting to delete them in the left had side tool box, or even just trying to move them, the PFME comes to a stop and terminates the programme this seems to be a bug cos I cannot move these around in the layout to make space to move reels etc, can this be looked into please?

Quote from: lotechking89 on Aug 27, 2026, 06:39 PMTo @BarXQueen
When designing classic layouts when i click on 5p or 50p (Coin slot 6 & 7) button whether selecting with select tool, or clicking on these two coins, or attempting to delete them in the left had side tool box, or even just trying to move them, the PFME comes to a stop and terminates the programme this seems to be a bug cos I cannot move these around in the layout to make space to move reels etc, can this be looked into please?

Which ROM are you seeing this on?

Quote from: BarXQueen on Aug 27, 2026, 10:16 PM

Quote from: lotechking89 on Aug 27, 2026, 06:39 PMTo @BarXQueen
When designing classic layouts when i click on 5p or 50p (Coin slot 6 & 7) button whether selecting with select tool, or clicking on these two coins, or attempting to delete them in the left had side tool box, or even just trying to move them, the PFME comes to a stop and terminates the programme this seems to be a bug cos I cannot move these around in the layout to make space to move reels etc, can this be looked into please?

Which ROM are you seeing this on?

On a couple of Party Time versions, most notably on Party Time Platinum v0.07. Also all Pluto 6 multiplayers, the slaves and top box do not go into full attract mode, often slaves are lamps all off or all on fixed. Is this something you are aware of? Many thanks. Loving the work so far!

PFME v0.3.0

In this build

• Bring your own ROMs. Opening a bare program now builds a working face by itself: the readout, a reel window for every reel that homes, the coins and notes the board takes, and a button for every switch line the program scans. It is plain and it is ugly, but it plays, and the cabinet can be drawn around it at your own pace instead of before you can start.
• A board nobody has looked at yet gets numbered buttons rather than another machine's names guessed onto it. Nothing is labelled unless the program says so.
• A button matrix listing every switch line the board scans, each one pressable with a click, so a button can be found by pressing it and watching what the machine does.
• New Layout asks which machine the face is for, so it works from the welcome screen instead of needing a cabinet open already.
• A coin slot names the money instead of a channel number. It says 50p because it puts 50p in, and the emulated validator works out which channel that program keeps 50p on.
• The note acceptor takes notes.
• Clicking a 5p or 50p slot no longer closes the program. Thanks to lotechking89 for reporting it. The properties panel only knew about six coin channels, and small coins are routinely higher than that: 5p on channel 7 is normal, and of the 74 programs measured here, 72 put some coin above channel 6. Selecting, moving or deleting one of those slots took the whole application down.
• Seven-segment displays lit from the lamp matrix, which is how a lot of these machines drive their digits.
• Several lamp lines behind one coloured lens, so a panel that changes colour reads as one part rather than three overlapping ones.
• The digits on the top glass read their value from the board's own tables instead of being guessed at.
• A reel window can show a single symbol, for the machines whose glass only shows one.
• Plugs and Switches has grown into a proper Game Configuration window, and the doors and keys window knows all three doors.
• Boards no longer stop dead partway through a run. Two separate faults, one in how the processor resumed after an exception and one in a device list that stopped walking at an empty slot.
• Several boards that would not finish commissioning now do. They were waiting on an electronic meter and on a memory chip that reads back in two halves, and both now answer properly.
• Twenty-three more machines recognised, seventeen of them Betcom Hi-Tech boards, plus a catalogue of every Pluto 6 title known to exist so the gaps are at least visible.
• A linked cabinet can be built to seat one player instead of three, which is the setting to reach for if your PC struggles with a multiplayer.
• Autoplay reads the nudge lamps the program names, so an offer is played as an offer rather than guessed at from the reels.

Known problems

• On a linked machine the top box lights nothing. The master board runs its attract sequence perfectly well, around 200 lamps of it on the Party Time Platinum, but none of those lamps has been placed on the face yet, so there is nothing on screen for them to light. They are all listed in the lamp matrix if you want to start placing them. It is a picture that wants drawing rather than a board that has stopped, and the same goes for most of the lamps on the seats.
• The Betcom Hi-Tech boards boot and reach their operator menus, then stop at the coin mech, which wants an encrypted validator that is not written yet. They are on the shelf to be looked at rather than played.
• Please back up your layouts folder before letting this one update. It is a much bigger jump than the last release, and the update path is the part that cannot be tested properly here.
• The Double Decker still has no automated test of its own. Its station-only leg cannot pass, because a station with no master is correctly refusing to trade, so the machine ships on the strength of the live four-board cabinet.
• The second engine is still experimental and still off by default. Boards drift from the interpreter on interrupt timing at block boundaries, which is reported rather than corrected.
• The nudge-trick autoplay method is still experimental. Which reel the machine leaves for the player has not been measured, so the driver aims at the cheapest one.

Download
https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

Check for updates will install it automatically.

The installer is not code-signed, so Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" on the way in. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

As before, if something misbehaves, say what ROM it was and what it did.

Wow thanks for this big update will be trying it out now :-P

Dear @BarXQueen
I have tested a few layouts. 1st of all the 7 Seg digital displays now work on single players, such as PT & BB Single player where the top display is in addition to Alpha displays on the base game (fantastic!).
However on all multiplayers, such as PT Platinum, Treasury - except Double Decker - the 7 seg top box display does not work still. I checked the edit settings and it says machine not giving any input for display? Think a bug still present.
The top masters all lamping works in attract now spot on, however the slaves to not interact with the attract in line with the top box, just stays dormant. I have noticed this is the same on single players Bullion Bars also, zero attract for some unknown reason.
Mutliplayer and single player layouts that feature the streak symbol made in previous version when loaded in this new update the Streak reel symbols disappeared - but I soon added these back in - other wise previous layouts work fine except the listed above.
Wow Cabbed Party Times, and Bullion Bars do not detect correct reel matrixes. These were the last pluto 6 tech game Astra released so may be a bit premature expecting these to work in the infancy of the Pfme - hope this feedback helps you. Looking forward to the good work coming. :-)

Many thanks for this update.

Thanks for the update:)

PFME v0.3.1
In this build

• Saving a machine no longer throws away its reel symbols. This is why the release exists. Two people reported it the day 0.3.0 went out, one as "after save and reload all the reels gone" and one as a face built by hand that never showed a symbol at all. Symbol pictures are the one thing inside a bundle that nothing names by path, so the tidy-up that runs on every save deleted the lot, and the reels and the printed prize glass came back blank on the next open. Over the 34 shipped faces the old code lost the artwork on 34 of them, 157 pictures; this build keeps all 160.
• If it has already happened to a machine of yours, the pictures are not gone. The copy unpacked before the save is still in %LOCALAPPDATA%\PFME\layout-cache\, which nothing ever cleans out, and that is the one to import back rather than redrawing.
• A face you start from scratch now begins with the symbol pictures of the machine it was opened from. Before this it began with none and nothing on the save path ever put one in, so a hand-built face could not show a symbol however long it was worked on.
• Replacing a symbol now changes it on the reels and on the printed prize glass together, instead of turning on the bands while the old picture stayed on the glass.
• The seven-segment display in the top box works on the multiplayers. Thanks to lotechking89 for reporting it, and he was right on every count: not one of the 73 program records carried a digit map for a master board, so the editor was correctly telling him the machine was giving it nothing. Fourteen masters have theirs now, read out of their own images, and it was proved by watching the glass rather than by reading the code. The Party Time Platinum master scrolls PTPLU0.07 and Treasury scrolls TR5RYU1.02, each spelling out its own program's name and version, which a wrong row or bit could not do by accident.
• Opening a bare ROM with no face names the program it is actually running, so the reel symbol editor offers that machine's symbols rather than the fallback program's, and the face can be saved and opened again. A face saved with no ROM binding declared no game and would not reopen.
• You can name the symbols your machine prints. Only four of these ROMs label their own symbols; on the rest the name is the raw bitmask, so a machine arrives printing something called Mask-04000000. Rename now sits on every row of the reel symbols window, and it writes into your own copy of the program's record rather than into one layout, because a symbol's name is a fact about the machine and true of every face you ever build for it. The picture moves with the name and one undo reverses both. Which symbol sits at which stop is untouched, and tested for; that is what the ROM pays on.
• Fifteen programs no longer need renaming, because their symbols now come out named. Those images carry two label tables, one per reel set, and the two disagree about exactly the two middle drums: on Solid Gold, 0x04000000 is TOP GAME on the base reels and SOLID GLD on the top box, both printed on page 9 of the machine's own service manual. Read one table per reel set instead of one per image, no symbol in the library is called Mask-anything any more and the unnamed count falls from 88 to 21.
• You can align a reel against the machine itself. Put the board into TEST 2.1 or TEST 2.2 and the ROM prints the symbol on its own win line; the reel symbols window shows that next to the one PFME is drawing and turns the row amber for as long as they disagree. Two settings per reel, the whole-symbol home offset and the resting step, both saved into your own program record, both undoable with Ctrl+Z, and the instructions for reaching the test are in the window so nobody has to know them. Band Nudge stays for artwork trimming, and is still clamped to half a cell, which is why it could never fix any of this.
• Solid Gold's top box was drawn two whole symbols from where the ROM has it, and 69 of the 143 reels measured here were turned by a separate fault where one number was doing two jobs. Both corrected. Nothing failed a test in between, because the check was computing its own answer the same wrong way.
• Reel symbols draw at full resolution. The framework decodes a picture once, at the size of whichever window lays it out first, so a 58-pixel thumbnail in the artwork editor could set the resolution for the 150-pixel reels behind it. That is why soft symbols came and went, and why a zoom cured it. Each reel window now keeps its own copies.

Known and untested

• On a linked machine the top box still lights nothing. Unchanged from the last release, and it is a picture that wants drawing rather than a board that has stopped: the master runs its attract sequence perfectly well, around 200 lamps of it on the Party Time Platinum, and none of those lamps has been placed on the face. A Platinum station lights 109 of its 114 named lamps against a face that can show 20, and Bullion Bars 37 of 43 against a face that can show 12. All of them are listed in the lamp matrix if you want to start placing them.
• Party People scrolling NO COMMS TO MASTER is correct, and is not a missing top box. Its master is a separate controller cabinet on the community wire, which nobody has dumped. Party People is also the only community terminal in the archive with no top-box reel set at all, three bands where seventeen of the eighteen drive six, so the absent box is a true observation about the cabinet that says nothing about the banner.
• Thirty-three of the shipped program records still point every symbol at the same placeholder picture, so those machines print one ring on every stop. That is artwork nobody has drawn rather than a fault, and it is now something you can fix yourself.
• The Betcom Hi-Tech boards boot and reach their operator menus, then stop at the coin mech, which wants a DES-encrypted validator that is not written yet. They are on the shelf to be looked at, not to be played.
• The Double Decker still has no headless gate. Its station-only leg cannot pass, because a station with no master is correctly refusing to trade, so the machine ships on the strength of the live four-board cabinet.
• The second engine is still experimental and still off by default. Boards drift from the interpreter on block-boundary interrupt timing, which is reported rather than corrected.
• The nudge-trick method is still experimental. Which reel the machine leaves for the player has not been measured, so the driver aims at the cheapest one.

Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

@BarXQueen Hey, hope you are well.

I was just having a tinker.  I have Solid Gold Deluxe layout in the works.

Could you give me some pointers regarding DIP settings.  I can't get them to stock when I change them?

Also I noticed in the button section, there is no STAKE button, on credit you could change stake from 10p to £1, though on this version it's likely only 25p, 50p £1.  I can't seem to find the button and all those 25p 50p £1 lamps are always on even though it's set at £1.  It would usually only display the current stake lamp.

Excellent work, I can't believe it's possible to run these, massive thanks.  I might have an image of my actual Solid Gold I had a few years back, so it's likely I can produce a graphic layout on this machine once I get my head around all the tools :)

J

Quote from: re-emulated on Aug 30, 2026, 01:17 PM@BarXQueen Hey, hope you are well.

I was just having a tinker.  I have Solid Gold Deluxe layout in the works.

Could you give me some pointers regarding DIP settings.  I can't get them to stock when I change them?

Also I noticed in the button section, there is no STAKE button, on credit you could change stake from 10p to £1, though on this version it's likely only 25p, 50p £1.  I can't seem to find the button and all those 25p 50p £1 lamps are always on even though it's set at £1.  It would usually only display the current stake lamp.

Excellent work, I can't believe it's possible to run these, massive thanks.  I might have an image of my actual Solid Gold I had a few years back, so it's likely I can produce a graphic layout on this machine once I get my head around all the tools :)

J

If you make a dip change you'll need to scroll down to the bottom of that section and perform a power cycle for the changes to apply.

Hope this helps :)

@BarXQueen  Nice, thanks, that works and retains the dip settings :).   I still locate the button for stake change, the lamp is flashing though, but I can't see the button in the button section, if I add a button it's not in there either.  Wonder if there is a specific option on the dips.

You could press the stake change button to scan through the stake options, so if I insert a £1 I would be able to select a preferred stake with the stake button from maybe 10p to £1.

Stake key also not present on the normal non deluxe settings.  I've tried the version I had v06, definitely could change stake on these?

J

Many thanks for this update.

I have a pdf of the user manual for Solid Gold, but it seems to be for the lower stake release, it doesn't mention the stake button on this pdf, it certainly had one though.

Thanks for any input.

J

PFME v0.3.2
In this build

• The reels move properly again. They were reported gone clunky the day after 0.3.1 went out, symbols jumping about as a band is dragged, and the cause was the resting-step correction in that same build. It moved a reel's symbol index onto one frame of reference and left the sub-cell paint measured from another, so on any reel parking below its middle step, 125 of the 143 measured here, a steady one-step walk painted a leap forward and a slide back at every symbol boundary. Party Time Player parks on the middle step, the one phase where the two frames agree, which is why nothing here caught it before the build went out.
• Reels are smoother than they have been in any build, and the difference is largest on a PC that is working hard. They used to repaint from a 33 ms timer and snap to whole motor steps, and that timer slips under load. The painted position now chases the reported one on the display's own clock, so two short frames cover exactly the ground of one long one and a spin has the same shape whatever else the machine is doing. It is paint and nothing else: a stopped reel repaints nothing, homing is still a jump because that is what the mechanism does, and the stop the ROM pays on is untouched.
• Solid Gold, Pure Gold and the rest of that family have their STAKE button. People went looking for one and were right to: the machine's own manual lists STAKE START among the eight panel buttons, the v1-08 test report records the stake being changed in game, and the ROM pairs a STAKE lamp with a switch on scan row 2, beside TEST and DUMP, the one measured exception to the rule that rows 2 and 3 are service switches. Nineteen programs carry it, the whole community family, every one at the same switch. Party Time Player, the machine most of this was built against, has no such button, which is the entire reason it was missing. Proved on Solid Gold rather than argued from the code: a two pound coin at 100P PLAY, then three presses walking the readout 100P, 25P, 50P, 100P. The shipped faces gained the button by surgery rather than being redrawn, so hand-fitted artwork is untouched, and a face you generate from now on gets it in the same place.
• The help page told you PFME had no interface for the plugs. It has had one since Cabinet > Game Configuration shipped, stake key included, and the page now says so.
• Pure Gold Community no longer scrolls NO NOTE STACKR. The cause was PFME fitting a note acceptor to every machine whether that cabinet has one or not. What is modelled of the acceptor is still partial, one of the questions it cannot answer latches a fault bit that this program has no way of clearing, and the saved machine state carries the latched bit back on every restart. That is exactly why an in-app power cycle cleared it and reopening PFME brought it straight back. A note acceptor is now a fitment: fitted by default only on the four boards that will not run without one, an empty connector everywhere else, and "Not fitted" is on the picker in Game Configuration if you want to change it.
• The font box lists the fonts this PC can actually draw. Font family was wired up all along and honoured on the alpha readout, the LED display, labels and the money readout, but it read as dead for two reasons at once: typing a name and pressing Enter did nothing until you clicked away, and a font you do not have installed is quietly swapped for the default. All four places now share one picker of the installed families, the name already stored stays visible even on a PC that lacks that font, and typing still works and now commits on Enter.
• A machine saved outside the PFME folder packs its card inside itself. A face built elsewhere and sent here pointed at a path that existed on exactly one PC in the world, and it opened on none of the others. Saving anywhere outside the installation now writes the whole CompactFlash card and its artwork into the .pfme, so what you hand somebody is a machine. A face whose ROM path has gone stale is now matched on the fingerprint the binding already carried, which is how bundles built before this build open as well.

Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

@BarXQueen WOW the latest release those reels are super sleek smooth!! And thanks for fixing the 7 seg display on the 0.3.1.
Is there any chance you could look into the attract lamping on single players and multiplayers. It's only the slaves and singles that seems to stay dimly lit, fully lit, or not lit at all. Instead of the usual machines flashing attract mode if that makes sense. I have tried both classic and DX and looked in lamp matrixes the lamps are the same - its only the top boxes individually that flash in attract mode correctly.
Keep up the fantastic work!!!

@BarXQueen There is still an issue with the STAKE button, the button is fine, but the machine is not acting like it did in the wild.  On earlier software of all those games, Solid Gold Community, Bee Rich, Silver Bells etc.  In the dip settings there is a setting for Normal zero credit alarm, this can also be set to subdue.  Most arcades had this set to normal, like we have on Dad's Solid Gold Community DX.  The issue is we can now change state but no matter what stake you select and play, after the machine has no credit and goes back to attract mode, the stake always should automatically revert back to £1 play like it did on the original.  So say I was playing 25p play, if I left the machine in attract after using my credits, after about 20-30 seconds you see the machine change the stake to £1 play live.

On mine real machine running 1.06 it did this, unless I set dip to subdue zero credit alarm.

Wonder next time you take a look at the emulator you could look into this issue.

The emulator is running so well on mine, reels, everything is so smooth, thank you so much :)   Keep up this insane work :)

J

The setting is Bank 1 Switch 2.  I believe in this normal mode it should make the machine default back to £1 stake, not matter what you were playing previously.  It did this on most units initially until they found that you could manipulate this mechanic. You could essentially take the £1 value without playing it on £1 per spin.  The machine had to have some value in £1 already, it wasn't an emptier, however people where playing these on £1 ago when they were first released so you could make huge profit.  Be great to get this to do the auto state change to have a play. 

J

PFME v0.3.3
In this build

• Most of the lamps on a machine were never coming on. A Pluto 6 board drives its lamps two ways and PFME only read one of them, so anything on the second way was listed in the editor and stayed dark whatever you did. That is 785 lamps across 51 of the machines here. Bullion Bars Streakin' lit nine of its thirty-five named lamps and now lights thirty-two, and the three still dark have reasons of their own. Two smaller faults came out with it. The board dims a lamp by switching it on and off very fast, and PFME was reading it mid-flicker, so a lamp that was steady could report itself blinking hundreds of times in a game. And on one machine five lamps on the glass were showing the state of a seven-segment digit that shared their position.

• Lamps that the machine dims now look dimmed. A Pluto 6 board can hold a lamp at part brightness by switching it on and off faster than the eye follows, and PFME was reading that as simply on. Twenty-eight of the machines have red, green and blue lamps behind their glass, and on at least one of them, Bullion Bars Community, the board fades them continuously rather than switching them. None of those colour lamps is drawn on any layout yet, so this changes nothing you can see today; it is what makes them fade rather than blink when somebody comes to place them. What you will notice now is Super Reels Streaking, which holds its whole glass one notch below full and is therefore very slightly softer than it was. On every other machine measured, and on all the reel-window and button lamps everywhere, the board only ever drives a lamp fully on or fully off, so there was nothing to dim.

• The win line on both Bullion Bars Streakin' programs sat a row low. Neither had ever been checked against its own reel index, so the band was drawn one whole symbol out on every reel. Both are measured now rather than assumed, and the check stays switched on for them, so if either drifts again the build fails instead of somebody having to notice.

• Two of the machine's own option switches were shipped set the wrong way, and both were things people had written in about. Singles and community stations stood still in attract while their top boxes flashed away. The switch responsible is the zero credit alarm, and on these machines that alarm is what holds the attract lights down: with it off, a commissioned Solid Gold chases twenty-three lamps across its front glass instead of none. The other switch pinned the stake, so a stake chosen with the STAKE button never fell back to one pound once the credit had been played out. It now drops back on its own about twenty-three seconds after the machine empties, with no coin in it and nobody pressing anything. The other fourteen switches are as they were. One thing to know: if you have ever opened Cabinet > Game Configuration on a machine and pressed Apply, that wrote the switches as they stood at the time into your own copy, and your copy keeps the old settings. Setting those two back by hand in the same window is the way round it for now.

• Seven machines had buttons doing each other's jobs, with AUTOPLAY changing the stake instead of playing, and some machines were missing lamps their own test mode lists. Two separate faults in how PFME reads a program. Lamp names stopped dead at the first pound sign: a name such as STAR followed by a pound sign was thrown out, and a thrown-out name ended the whole list, so every name after it went with it. Both Bullion Bars Streakin' builds were keeping twenty-eight of their thirty-five lamps, and one Bullion Bars build was losing eleven of its fifty-four. The button fault was a rule about which switch lines carry the service buttons, applied more widely than it should have been. A machine whose panel PFME refused fell back on Party Time Player's panel, which wires those lines to different buttons, so only START landed where you would expect. Seven machines have their own panel now, both Streakin' builds and five Platinum and Base Game boards among them.

• You can give a layout you drew yourself its STAKE button. The editor's list of what a button can be set to was a fixed one taken from Party Time Player, which has no stake button, so somebody who had built their own Solid Gold layout could not add one and was stuck on one pound play. That list now comes from the machine's own button panel, the same list the new-layout scaffold and the Button Matrix already used. A button wired to something the panel does not name says so, instead of quietly showing you the first entry on the list.

• You can copy a layout onto a different ROM. Someone on the forum asked whether the Solid Gold layout could be opened with the Solid Gold Deluxe program, and it could not: a layout is pinned to the one program it was drawn for. File > Duplicate Layout with New ROM writes a copy bound to whichever program you pick and leaves the original alone. The copy gets a battery of its own, so it commissions from cold rather than carrying another program's settings across. Before it opens, a report tells you how many of the lamps and buttons the layout uses exist on the new program and names the ones that will stay dark. A close relative usually comes across nearly whole. Something from another family will not, and the report is how you find that out before you start drawing.

• You can turn off the amber bar under the machine you are playing. On a linked cabinet PFME draws a bar under whichever machine the keyboard is pointed at, and there was no way to switch it off, which spoiled a screenshot. It now has its own item, View > Station Marker, and its own switch in Settings under Visuals. The gold outlines round each machine are still the separate View > Station Outlines. Turn both off and the glass is clean, with nothing then saying which machine answers the keys.

• The Bloom radius box in the layout editor told you the wrong number. A lamp or button that carries a photograph of itself lit gets no bloom on purpose: the lit photograph already holds the light, and a halo painted on top of it looks painted on. The editor did not know that. It showed the standard 14 next to those lamps, so you were reading a number the cabinet was not using, and turning it up did nothing until you typed a value in. The box now reads 0 on a photographed lamp, and typing a radius in is still how you ask for both the photograph and a glow.

• Party Time Double Decker: fifteen lamps of the bottom glass are now there to place. These are the bulbs behind the lit legend along the belly of each machine, seven behind DOUBLE DECKER, four behind PARTY TIME and four behind ALL ABOARD. The board has always driven them. PFME's list of that machine's lamps was short, so nothing you could do would put them on the picture. They are in the lamp picker now, as ddecker-legend-1 to 7, partytime-legend-1 to 4 and allaboard-1 to 4.

• Three lamps that belong to a different cabinet have gone from that same list. They were called TOWER 1, 2 and 3, they came from the version of this board fitted in another machine, and they have never lit in any run. Drawing one would have got you a bulb that never comes on.

• The middle award row on that machine is now called ASTRA, which is what its own program calls it. It read BAR, which is the name the other cabinet uses. Nothing has moved and no layout needs changing; only the name in the picker is different.

• The Double Decker top box no longer lists another machine's buttons. Its program does not name its own lamps at all, so PFME was falling back on Party Time Player's names, and the lamp matrix showed you START, HOLD 1 and so on for a top box that has none of them. Every one of those names was wrong. The cells are now named by where they sit, such as lamp-r7-c3, which claims nothing except that the board lights that cell. That is enough to place them: run the machine, watch a cell flash when something happens on the glass, and bind it.

Putting a missing lamp on a machine
Every machine drives far more lamps than anyone has drawn yet, so this is worth knowing. It is the same job on any machine, not just the Double Decker.
The short version. Leave the machine running, press F2 for the layout editor, drop a lamp from the toolbox onto the panel you want lit, and click its Lamp box. Turn on Learn, then make the machine light that lamp. Anything that changes while Learn is watching is listed underneath, most recent first, so the one you just provoked is usually at the top. Click it, and you are done.
Making the machine light one particular lamp is the awkward part, and the machine has a tool for it. Open the cash door with F7, press the test switch with F5, and step through the tests with Transfer until you reach the lamp test, then press Start to go in. On most of these machines that test flashes everything at once until you press Cancel, after which Transfer and Auto step through the lamps one at a time. One lamp lit, one name in the Learn list.
If you would rather work from the glass than from the machine, View > Lamp Matrix shows every cell the board scans, lit exactly as the board lights it. On a cabinet with more than one board pick the one you want at the top: the top box is board 0 and the stations are 1, 2 and 3. Outlined cells are the ones the program gives a name to, and the rest are shown so a lamp nobody has named yet can still be found by watching it flash. Right-click a cell to copy its reference, then paste that onto a lamp in the editor.
A lamp with no artwork glows in its own colour, which is enough to get the positions right. Fitting a photograph of the panel lit is a separate job you can do afterwards.
Known and untested

• The Double Decker top box lists each of its cells twice, once as lamp-r7-c3 and once as lamp-b1-r7-c3. Some boards drive a second bank of lamps and some do not, and PFME cannot yet tell which. On this machine the two names are the same bulb, so use the shorter one.

• The station's stake panels are still guesswork. The program drives two of them and the machine is on dual stake, but no photograph of a dual-stake glass has turned up, and the artwork in the shipped layout is from a cabinet fitted for a single stake. On a fixed-stake machine the equivalent is the round 10P PLAY disc at the top right of the reel glass, beside the coin entry, so that is where the pair most likely sits.

• Roughly seventy machines still have no reel index of their own, so PFME cannot check that what it draws in the reel window is what the ROM thinks it is. On those, a win line that looks a row out is worth reporting. The two Bullion Bars Streakin' programs above are what that fault looks like.

• Beyond the option switches and the seven button panels above, nothing has changed about how a machine plays. The reels, the sound, the coin gear and the displays behave as they did in v0.3.2, except where a lamp now lights that did not before.

Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

@BarXQueen WOW what an amazing improvement on lamping! And great bug fixes.

I can solve the 'Tower lamping' for you, in return I may need you to do a little exploring, when multiplayers for example Double Decker, Treasury and both Platinum machines were made by Astra the game card was made# to default to Sit Down 'Panther' cabs, the upright cabs were set to upright cabinets via a wired plug on the loom to tell the machine it was not a sit-down cabinet but an upright model, which in turn alters lamping layouts, for example TOWER 123 was the player indicator lights that were used on uprights to show which player was on the feature, in Double Decker, the PARTY TIME / DOUBLE DECKER LOGO and ALL ABOARD was lamped for sit down panthers - NOT for uprights, which these would not then light up when plugged for an upright kinda cab. As with emulators sit down cabinets are trickier to emullate with artwork, uprights are easier to design for DX-ing, is there a way you can look to see if you can find from within the pluto software where you could do a 'switch' for us creators to change from sit - down to upright via a virual plug so to speak? As you will see a lot of creators probably suggesting that lights aren't going with their upright artworks because ASTRA defaulted all or most game cards to sit down cabinets with their alternative button layouts (which I think has previously been mentioned) and affects lamping numbering and attracting. I hope this is of use to you :-)

Hey @BarXQueen Is it all possible to somehow bundle any roms into the layout.  I've started working on a SX for Solid Gold and it includes two fonts that are not native to Windows11.  Be great if there was a way to save the layout with embedded fonts?

J

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 06, 2026, 11:05 PM@BarXQueen WOW what an amazing improvement on lamping! And great bug fixes.

I can solve the 'Tower lamping' for you, in return I may need you to do a little exploring, when multiplayers for example Double Decker, Treasury and both Platinum machines were made by Astra the game card was made# to default to Sit Down 'Panther' cabs, the upright cabs were set to upright cabinets via a wired plug on the loom to tell the machine it was not a sit-down cabinet but an upright model, which in turn alters lamping layouts, for example TOWER 123 was the player indicator lights that were used on uprights to show which player was on the feature, in Double Decker, the PARTY TIME / DOUBLE DECKER LOGO and ALL ABOARD was lamped for sit down panthers - NOT for uprights, which these would not then light up when plugged for an upright kinda cab. As with emulators sit down cabinets are trickier to emullate with artwork, uprights are easier to design for DX-ing, is there a way you can look to see if you can find from within the pluto software where you could do a 'switch' for us creators to change from sit - down to upright via a virual plug so to speak? As you will see a lot of creators probably suggesting that lights aren't going with their upright artworks because ASTRA defaulted all or most game cards to sit down cabinets with their alternative button layouts (which I think has previously been mentioned) and affects lamping numbering and attracting. I hope this is of use to you :-)

You're right about all of it, and it's fixed in the next version (I will release in the next day or so).

Nine machines here carry both sets of lamps: both Double Deckers, Treasury, the three Platinums, Hall of Fame and the two Base Games. The board reads that wire once when it starts and picks its whole lamp and button list off it. All nine default to the sit-down, which is why that was the only one anybody could get.

It's in Cabinet > Game Configuration, on the picker called Cabinet type strap. Leave it alone for a sit-down, set it to Soldered high for an upright, then Apply and power cycle, since the board only reads that wire at boot. You set it per station rather than once for the bank, and it saves into the layout, so one you send on opens as the cabinet you built it as.

Set an upright and TOWER 1, 2 and 3 turn up in the lamp list, the DOUBLE DECKER, PARTY TIME and ALL ABOARD legends drop out because an upright hasn't got them, the award row goes from ASTRA to BAR, and AUTOPLAY and TRANSFER stop lighting each other's buttons. That last one I could measure. The button the machine drives 14 times over a run was called TRANSFER on an upright and AUTOPLAY on a sit-down. It's AUTOPLAY on both now.

Quote from: BarXQueen on Sep 07, 2026, 05:23 PM

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 06, 2026, 11:05 PM@BarXQueen WOW what an amazing improvement on lamping! And great bug fixes.

I can solve the 'Tower lamping' for you, in return I may need you to do a little exploring, when multiplayers for example Double Decker, Treasury and both Platinum machines were made by Astra the game card was made# to default to Sit Down 'Panther' cabs, the upright cabs were set to upright cabinets via a wired plug on the loom to tell the machine it was not a sit-down cabinet but an upright model, which in turn alters lamping layouts, for example TOWER 123 was the player indicator lights that were used on uprights to show which player was on the feature, in Double Decker, the PARTY TIME / DOUBLE DECKER LOGO and ALL ABOARD was lamped for sit down panthers - NOT for uprights, which these would not then light up when plugged for an upright kinda cab. As with emulators sit down cabinets are trickier to emullate with artwork, uprights are easier to design for DX-ing, is there a way you can look to see if you can find from within the pluto software where you could do a 'switch' for us creators to change from sit - down to upright via a virual plug so to speak? As you will see a lot of creators probably suggesting that lights aren't going with their upright artworks because ASTRA defaulted all or most game cards to sit down cabinets with their alternative button layouts (which I think has previously been mentioned) and affects lamping numbering and attracting. I hope this is of use to you :-)

You're right about all of it, and it's fixed in the next version (I will release in the next day or so).

Nine machines here carry both sets of lamps: both Double Deckers, Treasury, the three Platinums, Hall of Fame and the two Base Games. The board reads that wire once when it starts and picks its whole lamp and button list off it. All nine default to the sit-down, which is why that was the only one anybody could get.

It's in Cabinet > Game Configuration, on the picker called Cabinet type strap. Leave it alone for a sit-down, set it to Soldered high for an upright, then Apply and power cycle, since the board only reads that wire at boot. You set it per station rather than once for the bank, and it saves into the layout, so one you send on opens as the cabinet you built it as.

Set an upright and TOWER 1, 2 and 3 turn up in the lamp list, the DOUBLE DECKER, PARTY TIME and ALL ABOARD legends drop out because an upright hasn't got them, the award row goes from ASTRA to BAR, and AUTOPLAY and TRANSFER stop lighting each other's buttons. That last one I could measure. The button the machine drives 14 times over a run was called TRANSFER on an upright and AUTOPLAY on a sit-down. It's AUTOPLAY on both now.

WOW I am now I am getting my creative cogs in gear knowing this! This was one bug bear I had with io3 spec on MFME as the Bullions were defaulted to stand up so I could never do the Arena's quite justice! Many Thanks for the reply mate - glad to help where I can :-) And eagerly looking forward to your next update!

PFME v0.3.4
Fixed

• Machines went flat and dull in 0.3.3. Every photograph of a lit panel was being drawn at 75 to 90 per cent instead of full. All back to normal.
• Bloom on a photographed lamp drew as a square. It is now cut from the lit photograph, so it takes the lamp's shape and its colour. Nothing blooms that did not before.
• On a linked cabinet drawn out past its canvas, the amber marker sat up inside the top box instead of under the machine, and the outlines round each machine came out too thin.
• An image loaded into the editor landed in a fixed 160 by 120 box, so a tray front drew as a sliver with the handles bunched together. It now arrives at the picture's own size. Right-click gives Size to Artwork for a box you have already stretched by hand.
• A box pinned to the backdrop photo ignored a width or height typed into the properties dock. It keeps what you type now.

New

• Sit-down or upright cabinet, and the lamps follow. Nine multiplayers were built both ways: both Double Deckers, Treasury, the three Platinums, Hall of Fame and the two Base Games. Set it in Cabinet > Game Configuration under Cabinet type strap, then Apply and power cycle. It saves into the layout. On an upright this stops AUTOPLAY and TRANSFER lighting each other's buttons.
• TOWER 1, 2 and 3 are back on the Double Decker, on an upright only. The 0.3.3 notes said they had gone; they are an upright's lights and every run had been a sit-down.
• The award row is named by the cabinet: ASTRA on a sit-down, BAR on an upright. Nothing has moved and no layout needs changing.
• The payout tray drops real pound coins. Five different ones, turning as they fall, spreading along the tray rather than towering where they land. Coin brightness and Coin wear settle them into your photograph. Pile or Vanish decides what happens at the bottom; Pile is what every tray does today. Coin face and Coin edge have gone, so check those if you had set either to a see-through colour.
• Machine > Save Sounds writes every sound the game has as a WAV file, with a list of lengths and duplicates beside them. A linked cabinet gets a folder per board.
• A layout carries the typefaces it is lettered in. Opening one on a PC without them offers to install them, per-user, no administrator needed. Install a font before you save; one sitting loose in a folder cannot be carried.

Known

• The Double Decker top box lists each cell twice, as lamp-r7-c3 and lamp-b1-r7-c3. Same bulb; use the shorter name.
• The station's stake panels are guesswork. No photograph of a dual-stake glass has turned up.
• The volume setting in a machine's refill and test menus still does nothing. No manual states what its sixteen steps do, so guessing would put a made-up number into the sound. Use the volume in Settings.
• Roughly seventy machines have no reel index of their own, so a win line that looks a row out is worth reporting.
• Sit-down and upright are checked both ways on the Double Decker only. On the other eight, a lamp lighting with no name in the editor is worth reporting.
• Nothing else has changed in how a machine plays.

Reported or asked for by lotechking89, re-emulated and Dave on the forum.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

Many thanks for the update, excellent work :)

j

Nice, I can add bloom to the outer plastic rgb and it doesn't affect the png border :)

@BarXQueen I'm not sure if this is possible, but for the rgb around the plastic, I'm using overlapping tube section, so they sit on top of each other.  I wonder if it is at all possible to be able to have all the rgb colours in just one object?  So just one rgb strip that contains all the colour streams?  If that makes sense, I don't know if it's possible or even if I might be not getting how these objects should behave in the emulator.

Thanks for the ongoing updates, amazing stuff, thank you so much for all your hard work on this project.

J

Quote from: re-emulated on Sep 08, 2026, 11:45 AMNice, I can add bloom to the outer plastic rgb and it doesn't affect the png border :)

@BarXQueen I'm not sure if this is possible, but for the rgb around the plastic, I'm using overlapping tube section, so they sit on top of each other.  I wonder if it is at all possible to be able to have all the rgb colours in just one object?  So just one rgb strip that contains all the colour streams?  If that makes sense, I don't know if it's possible or even if I might be not getting how these objects should behave in the emulator.

Thanks for the ongoing updates, amazing stuff, thank you so much for all your hard work on this project.

J

Yes, that is possible, and you have had it since 0.3.0 without knowing it. I described it in the release notes as "several lamp lines behind one coloured lens".

Select the lamp and look down the properties panel for the row called "Blend lines (slug=#colour, ...)". The lamp's own binding at the top is the first colour line, and its On colour is what that line contributes. In the blend row you type the other lines as one comma list, so for a three-colour strip you would leave the red line in the Lamp box and type something like this into the blend row:

brda-grn=#00ff00, brda-blu=#0000ff

That gives you one object. The lens then lights in the mix of whichever lines the machine has on at that moment, so red and green together read amber and all three read white, the same as the real strip does. Leave the colour off an entry and it takes the lamp default. Clear the row and the lamp goes back to being an ordinary single one. The slugs come off the lamp matrix window, and Learn will give you them if you would rather press a button and see what lights.

Now the part you would have run into, because it is exactly what you are working on. Until now the bloom did not follow the mix. It was built once in the lamp's colour and after that only got brighter and dimmer, so a lens showing amber would have carried a red glow. Your overlapping strips do not have that problem, because each one owns its own bloom. So if you had swapped to a single object today you would have kept the right colour on the plastic and lost it on the glow, which is not a trade worth making.

That is fixed and it will be in the next release. The halo now takes the same mixed colour as the lens, so one strip blooms the colour it is showing. One thing I left deliberately: if you set a Glow colour on the lamp yourself, that is respected and stays put, on the grounds that if you have set the halo to match the surround you probably did not want it chasing the lines behind the glass.

So I would stay on your overlapping sections for now and switch to the single object when the update lands. It is a two minute job on each strip and you will end up with a third of the elements.

One thing back at you if you do not mind. Which machine is this? Some of these boards fade their colour lines rather than switching them, and I have the fade working but currently turned off, because there was nothing in anybody's layout to see it on. Yours would be the first, and if it is one of the fading boards I would like to turn it back on for the same release rather than have you place the whole strip and find it stepping between colours.

It's Solid Gold v1.06 romset :)

Oh, and that's great, thank you once again.  I'm only just building it so it will be when I get time, I'm still ironing out some artwork issues on the base layout anyway :)

J

@BarXQueen Out of interest is there any reason why these don't offer a 'community game' feature.  Even on a single unit these would offer this now and again, I'm nearly £450 in without one at all.  I know mine had 2 pluto6 boards, so I don't know if that had specific software on it for community stuff.  I never checked the CF card when I had it sadly.  Or is it just a quirk of early emulation issues?

Also, those Deluxe versions that would change feature board values every now and again, I can't seem to trigger that instance and it was fairly often in the wild.

Keep up this great work, this is fast becoming my favourite emulator :)

J

Quote from: re-emulated on Sep 08, 2026, 06:49 PM@BarXQueen Out of interest is there any reason why these don't offer a 'community game' feature.  Even on a single unit these would offer this now and again, I'm nearly £450 in without one at all.  I know mine had 2 pluto6 boards, so I don't know if that had specific software on it for community stuff.  I never checked the CF card when I had it sadly.  Or is it just a quirk of early emulation issues?

Also, those Deluxe versions that would change feature board values every now and again, I can't seem to trigger that instance and it was fairly often in the wild.

Keep up this great work, this is fast becoming my favourite emulator :)

J

theres 2 different versions standalone or community 2 different roms profiles same as pure gold standalone and pure gold community which have link

Yes, but this is running exact software v1.06 community as mine and it offered community games on my single non linked unit.  Unless I'm mistaken.  But installed this exact software on my single unit.  I purchased a single unit, from a 3 unit set.

J

Just to add, mine did have two pluto6 boards, one in the bottom panel, I imagine it was connected to the other board in some way and maybe that was something to do with it, maybe a master and slave in my single unit?

Funnily enough, they had two connected units in my local teddies back in the day, when one was switched off the other just gave some kind of communication error, I believe I just got lucky and my single unit had the link up board installed.

J

@BarXQueen Not sure if I can already do this, but whenever I'm changing anything and another window comes up, so say I'm loading reel symbols.  I upload an image, then the window gets lost behind the emulator window everytime, can these windows stay on top at all?  Same with if I'm changing dip or keys etc.  It's only a minor annoyance but it would be great if there was a setting to make those windows stay on top when I'm using them.

J

Also.  In the reel editor.  Could you implement a way to drag a copy form other positions, so I could drag a X symbol to another position etc?

J

Quote from: re-emulated on Sep 08, 2026, 10:05 PM@BarXQueen Not sure if I can already do this, but whenever I'm changing anything and another window comes up, so say I'm loading reel symbols.  I upload an image, then the window gets lost behind the emulator window everytime, can these windows stay on top at all?  Same with if I'm changing dip or keys etc.  It's only a minor annoyance but it would be great if there was a setting to make those windows stay on top when I'm using them.

J

I just drag the main window to one side while doing stuff like that so I can see both. I get what you mean though.

Quote from: re-emulated on Sep 08, 2026, 10:11 PMAlso.  In the reel editor.  Could you implement a way to drag a copy form other positions, so I could drag a X symbol to another position etc?

J

Yeah that's like MFME but again it's not a great hardship loading one at a time.  It would be a different if it was something other than a lo-tech as that would be a bit of a pain.

Gotta say I'm loving the interest in PFME,  It's proving even more popular than I thought.

It's an amazing emulator.  I wasn't expecting it.  So it's a nice little surprise on top of the Electrocoin emulator. :)

We are spoilt right now.

I'm not really interested in those barcrest video slots, I find them boring, it was interesting to see but just not my cup of tea.

J

Yeah, my comments above for those improvements are not a necessity but be great if those could be implemented, certainly not essential, more for a faster workflow.

J

@BarXQueen   Hey bud, here are those community roms for Pure Gold.  Just check them, but I've had these running and the community lamp to light :)

Hi BarXQueen,
Thanks for all your hard work enjoying the emulator. I am still getting CCT coin fail 8.1 error and have to do CTRL & R to reset. Also the sound is still not playing at the correct speed ( slow )on my laptop especially for nudges and feature sound. I do have the experimental recompiler engine enabled with todays 0.3.4 update. Enabling this has sped things up a bit but sound still slow

PFME v0.3.5
Fixed

• Seven machines were being worked through the wrong button panel and have been rewired.
• After a STAKE press on Celebrity Winwall the TOTAL BET box kept the scraps of the stake animation, and on the second spin most of the reel window went black. Both gone.
• Winwall Show Me The Money's top box said no players were connected and never left that screen. The stations were being set up in the factory's soak-test mode, which takes them off the link about a minute after power-up. They are set up for normal play now: the top box finds each station and shows its Winwall attract. A black block in the corner of the top box's screen and a station's status panel painting over its background have gone too, and the top box's two screens sit side by side.
• Twenty-five linked programs were never on the link wire at all, so their top box reported NO COMMS TO MASTER however long it waited. They talk now. Pure Gold Community, both builds, comes as a three-station bank.
• A linked cabinet whose top box has no lamps and no screen kept its speakers off for ever. The cabinet now waits for every station to boot, then the sound comes on.
• The volume control in a machine's own refill and test menus works. Each step is relative to where the machine arrived, so nothing gets louder or quieter by itself; up is louder, down is quieter, zero is silence. A game that asks for a quiet sound under a loud one gets it.
• Bloom on a lamp with a lit photograph landed inside the lamp, washing the lens out, with only the fringe reaching past the edge. It sits outside the lamp now.
• A lamp showing a blend of several colour lines glowed in the first colour only, so an amber lens burned red round its edge. The glow follows the mix.
• Desktop Machine (Ctrl+Shift+D) came up as a black box. It is now a frameless machine sitting on your desktop: drag it by the machine itself, resize with the mouse wheel, and press Ctrl+Shift+D again to come back.
• The artwork editor listed a symbol once per reel, so a picture printed on six reels needed six file dialogs. One row per symbol now, and Replace, Reset and Rename reach every reel in one undo. Game Configuration, the key map and the artwork editor stay in front of the cabinet whichever window you click, and a symbol still on its built-in picture no longer shows an empty frame on an installed copy.
• The help and menus say layout where they said face.

Known

• The first launch of each machine after this update starts it from cold instead of where you left it. Meters and settings are kept.
• Of the Winwall machines only Show Me The Money is checked. Spinwall and Celebrity Winwall are set up the same way and have not been re-tested. Community play on the wall itself is still being worked on.
• A STAKE button on a Winwall station does nothing, and that is the game: each stake plug gives one fixed stake (10p, 25p or 50p), so change it in Cabinet > Game Configuration rather than at the panel.
• The three symbols on the Pure Gold Community top box are a best guess in prize order. If one looks wrong, say which.
• The blended-lens glow has only been checked by test, not on screen. If a lens still glows the wrong colour, say so.
• The Double Decker top box lists each cell twice, as lamp-r7-c3 and lamp-b1-r7-c3. Same bulb; use the shorter name.
• The station's stake panels are guesswork. No photograph of a dual-stake glass has turned up.
• Roughly seventy machines have no reel index of their own, so a win line that looks a row out is worth reporting.
• Sit-down and upright are checked both ways on the Double Decker only. On the other eight, a lamp lighting with no name in the editor is worth reporting.
• Nothing else has changed in how a machine plays.

Reported or asked for by re-emulated and others on the forum.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

@BarXQueen
Hey I managed to get Astra Winwall show me the money 3 player working perfectly, but the top box uses three screens two use one source for the wins (which I can get by default when inserting a screen from toolbox), however the middle screen uses a separate source to pick up the feature board, I saw on Dads release he got two screens working together on single player Winwall (Celebrity), could you tell me how I can change the source of a screen to pick up the second output please? Many thanks for your superb work!!

@BarXQueen ,
One more unusual issue I have found with Party Time Platinum, the slaves attract perfectly in Arena Panther Cab mode, but when you select High Wire, for Casino, the lamps do not attract on slave machines again..?? They stay all lit up.

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 12, 2026, 06:26 PM@BarXQueen
Hey I managed to get Astra Winwall show me the money 3 player working perfectly, but the top box uses three screens two use one source for the wins (which I can get by default when inserting a screen from toolbox), however the middle screen uses a separate source to pick up the feature board, I saw on Dads release he got two screens working together on single player Winwall (Celebrity), could you tell me how I can change the source of a screen to pick up the second output please? Many thanks for your superb work!!

Although I released Celebrity Winwall it's not my work, that's down to BXQ.  As far as choosing different screens I don't think a 'user setting' has been added to PFME just yet.  I'm almost sure that can be added in a later Emu release.

Hey! I have been doing my first layout in DX @BarXQueen - when I have made layouts on MFME lamping had a toolkit for merging clusters of lamps, and on single ones can edit out by drawing a colour around and turning it invisible, will there be a future build update that allows more detailed lamping effects? I have changed from panel to bulb which is circular but when I use this to crop from photo lit and unlit the whole square is lamped rather than the spherical bulb if that makes sense? I can't edit them for round circles only squared items it appears. Or is it already within the emulator to crop lamps into more specific areas but I haven't yet fathomed it out LOL?

Also when lamping reels the lamps make the artwork appear faded rather than lit from behind, would the emulator be able to be adapted for making reels default to dark when a lamp is embedded so the artwork when 'lit' appears like the original artwork provided?
Thank you so much :-)

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 12, 2026, 06:26 PM@BarXQueen
Hey I managed to get Astra Winwall show me the money 3 player working perfectly, but the top box uses three screens two use one source for the wins (which I can get by default when inserting a screen from toolbox), however the middle screen uses a separate source to pick up the feature board, I saw on Dads release he got two screens working together on single player Winwall (Celebrity), could you tell me how I can change the source of a screen to pick up the second output please? Many thanks for your superb work!!

The top box on that machine has two video outputs on the one Pluto 6 board: output 0 carries the wins picture, and output 1 carries the feature board. In PFME each screen element has a setting for which of the board's outputs it shows, but I have not yet put that setting on the property panel, so a screen dropped in from the toolbox always shows output 0.

You can make the change yourself in the config file: a .pfme file is a zip. Rename a copy to .zip, open layout.json inside it, find the middle screen's videoDisplay element and add "card": 1 alongside its "fit" line, then zip it back up and rename it to .pfme.

E.G.

Before:

    {
      "type": "videoDisplay",
      "fit": "uniform",
      "bezelThickness": 2,
      "cornerRadius": 4,
      "id": "f894cac7",
      "name": "Screen",
      "x": 2050.0,
      "y": 66.0,
      "width": 720.0,
      "height": 540.0
    }

After, with one line added:

    {
      "type": "videoDisplay",
      "card": 1,
      "fit": "uniform",
      "bezelThickness": 2,
      "cornerRadius": 4,
      "id": "f894cac7",
      "name": "Screen",
      "x": 2050.0,
      "y": 66.0,
      "width": 720.0,
      "height": 540.0
    }

I'll add an Output selector to the screen properties in the next build.

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 12, 2026, 07:42 PM@BarXQueen ,
One more unusual issue I have found with Party Time Platinum, the slaves attract perfectly in Arena Panther Cab mode, but when you select High Wire, for Casino, the lamps do not attract on slave machines again..?? They stay all lit up.

My first thought is that if it is sent to Bingo rather than Arcade, this sometimes makes the lamps "quieter" as sometimes machines are in the main bingo hall and can be a distraction.

On saying that, I ran the Platinum station on its own in PFME for 200 seconds with no coin in, once strapped Panther and once strapped Casino, and counted every bulb on the lamp matrix over the last 100 seconds. It attracts in both. In Panther it chases 96 bulbs. In Casino it chases 37: the reel window lamps, the three nudge lamps and NUDGE NOW, the stake lamps, and the three prize ladders with their value lamps. Those 37 chase at exactly the same rate in both cabinets.

The other 59 bulbs are the top glass legends: the PARTY TIME and PLATINUM letters, ARENA, the balloons, the stars and ribbons, and the number 1. In Casino mode the program never drives them at all. They are not held on and they are not chased, they are simply dead for the whole run. That fits what you found earlier about the two cabinets being lamped differently: the upright Casino glass does not have those bulbs, so the program has no reason to light them.

So on a layout drawn for the sit-down glass, switching to Casino leaves every legend lamp showing whatever the layout uses for off. If the backdrop is a photo taken with the glass lit, off looks lit, and the whole top glass appears stuck on while the small lamps carry on chasing. If yours looks like that, that is what is happening. If the reel and nudge lamps are also frozen, that is a different problem and I would like to see it: the layout name and a screenshot would do.

I also checked that flipping a station that has already been set up as Panther over to Casino does not upset the machine. It boots straight through CHECKING CSUM, CASINO CAB and INIT REELS into the attract roll with no alarm and no request for a RAM clear.

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 14, 2026, 08:15 PMHey! I have been doing my first layout in DX @BarXQueen - when I have made layouts on MFME lamping had a toolkit for merging clusters of lamps, and on single ones can edit out by drawing a colour around and turning it invisible, will there be a future build update that allows more detailed lamping effects? I have changed from panel to bulb which is circular but when I use this to crop from photo lit and unlit the whole square is lamped rather than the spherical bulb if that makes sense? I can't edit them for round circles only squared items it appears. Or is it already within the emulator to crop lamps into more specific areas but I haven't yet fathomed it out LOL?

Also when lamping reels the lamps make the artwork appear faded rather than lit from behind, would the emulator be able to be adapted for making reels default to dark when a lamp is embedded so the artwork when 'lit' appears like the original artwork provided?
Thank you so much :-)

Round lamps first. At the moment a lamp is either a panel or a bulb, and the bulb does draw as a circle, but the moment you crop a lit and unlit picture into it the crop fills the whole box. There is no way yet to mask that crop to a circle, so what you are seeing is the editor working as built, not something you have missed.

There is a route that gets close to the MFME trick. Cut the bulb out in a paint program, fill everything round it with one flat colour, save the lit and unlit pair, then use Insert > Add Lamp from Sprites. That import treats the flat surround as see-through, so the lamp keeps the round edge. It only works on the sprite route, not on crops taken straight off the cabinet photo.

Merging clusters is not in yet. Group in the editor is only a selection aid while you are arranging things, and it is not saved. The one case that is covered is several lamp lines behind one lens mixing colour, which is what the blend setting on a lamp is for. A real cluster element, one box driven by several lamp numbers, I will look to get in the next version.

On the reels you are right, and I agree with your fix. Today a lit row lays a pale wash over the strip, which is why the artwork looks faded rather than lit. The proper behaviour is the one a real machine has: the strip sits dark until the lamp behind it comes on, and lit means the artwork at its true colours. I will change it to work that way in the next release.

Keep the questions coming, they are what shape the editor.

@BarXQueen thank you so much for your replies, I have read those and helps an awful lot! Look forward to monitor screen options and cluster lamping elements in a future build!! I will give your list to install a second monitor a try later this week ( I am a bit clueless with developing things lol) My Party Time Platinum was on bingo version have edited it into upright arcade and has now fixed my attract issue (huge thanks) always wondered what Bingo mode meant - now I know! Thank you for looking into redesigning the reel lamps in the next build this will improve lit bands perfectly :-)

Quick feedback, Divas Reels 3 Player upright top box, the top reels are showing no lamps for this, as well as the Jackpot balloons each side which flash until it awards one after JP lands on reels, I owned a real top section and these were fed off a different part of MUX on the Pluto 6 board. Would you be able to find these?

On a separate note, some Astras used a 12v chaser lamp board which would do a chain of 4 bulbs that went around boarders example of a Party Time top box or the decals on a Double Decker, which is not off a Pluto 6 board itself, but could you do a little tool box for chasers, its literally a series of 4 bulbs on repeat, 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4 etc one at a time. Sadly MFME never developed this so would be a nice little additional touch for bringing the artwork to life etc :-)

By the way @BarXQueen, its the Dil switch bank 1 switch 2 coin subdued alarm that's affecting the attract! If it is turned on lamps freeze on :-) It may need renaming in the emulator. Needs to be pre set to 'normal zero coin alarm' for attract to work :-P

Could the win line on reels be a central line though the middle rather than boxes on centre reel? with an option to choose thickness of win line if any :-)

Divas Reels top box: PFME is already driving those lamps, so this one is a matter of finding the right names in the lamp picker rather than a fix. You are right that they come off a different part of the board. They are not on the lamp matrix at all; the game program hands them to a second driver that sits on the general-purpose output lines, and PFME has emulated that driver since 0.3.3. I ran the shipped three-player layout for 40 games with a trail on the top box and every one of them lit.

The balloons are L400 to L405 on the top box board. They sit lit once the machine has commissioned and flash in the program's own patterns through a top-box spin. Two clusters of three: L400, L402 and L401 are one side (mystery, jackpot, GBP 25 in that order in the program's table) and L403, L405 and L404 are the other. Which cluster is left and which is right I cannot tell from the emulator, because the program always lights both together; you will know from the box. The shipped three-player layout already has all six placed, so if you started from that you should be seeing them flash on a jackpot.

The top reel lamps are L408 to L416, nine lines in three groups of three: L408 to L410, L411 to L413, and L414 to L416 (the last one in that group is not named in the program's own table, so it may show as unnamed). They are steady on from commissioning and chase group by group at about 100 ms a step for as long as the top drums are turning. What I cannot tell from here is whether a group of three is one drum's three bulbs or one row across the three drums; if you can remember which way yours ran, that settles it. In the editor, open the top box's lamp picker and watch the dots during a top-box spin and you will see the three groups stepping.

Chasers: done for the next build. A lamp can now sit on a chaser board instead of being wired to the machine. Place your bulbs round the border in the order you want the chase to run, select them, and use Arrange > Make Chaser. Each bulb is dealt its count in the order it was placed, 1, 2, 3, 4 and round again, so a border of twelve is three boards' worth running in step. A selected chaser bulb shows the count it lights on, how many counts make a cycle (four by default) and the milliseconds per count (150 by default, which is about what a real four-way board does). Everything with the same cycle and speed runs on one clock, so the whole border keeps step, and it runs whenever the cabinet is powered. The bulbs are ordinary lamps otherwise: photographed or plain, round or square, halo or not. Stop Chasing takes them off again.

Quote from: BarXQueen on Sep 16, 2026, 10:50 AMDivas Reels top box: PFME is already driving those lamps, so this one is a matter of finding the right names in the lamp picker rather than a fix. You are right that they come off a different part of the board. They are not on the lamp matrix at all; the game program hands them to a second driver that sits on the general-purpose output lines, and PFME has emulated that driver since 0.3.3. I ran the shipped three-player layout for 40 games with a trail on the top box and every one of them lit.

The balloons are L400 to L405 on the top box board. They sit lit once the machine has commissioned and flash in the program's own patterns through a top-box spin. Two clusters of three: L400, L402 and L401 are one side (mystery, jackpot, GBP 25 in that order in the program's table) and L403, L405 and L404 are the other. Which cluster is left and which is right I cannot tell from the emulator, because the program always lights both together; you will know from the box. The shipped three-player layout already has all six placed, so if you started from that you should be seeing them flash on a jackpot.

The top reel lamps are L408 to L416, nine lines in three groups of three: L408 to L410, L411 to L413, and L414 to L416 (the last one in that group is not named in the program's own table, so it may show as unnamed). They are steady on from commissioning and chase group by group at about 100 ms a step for as long as the top drums are turning. What I cannot tell from here is whether a group of three is one drum's three bulbs or one row across the three drums; if you can remember which way yours ran, that settles it. In the editor, open the top box's lamp picker and watch the dots during a top-box spin and you will see the three groups stepping.

Chasers: done for the next build. A lamp can now sit on a chaser board instead of being wired to the machine. Place your bulbs round the border in the order you want the chase to run, select them, and use Arrange > Make Chaser. Each bulb is dealt its count in the order it was placed, 1, 2, 3, 4 and round again, so a border of twelve is three boards' worth running in step. A selected chaser bulb shows the count it lights on, how many counts make a cycle (four by default) and the milliseconds per count (150 by default, which is about what a real four-way board does). Everything with the same cycle and speed runs on one clock, so the whole border keeps step, and it runs whenever the cabinet is powered. The bulbs are ordinary lamps otherwise: photographed or plain, round or square, halo or not. Stop Chasing takes them off again.

Thank you for the update I did a copy a lamp from tool box and labelled them accordingly for the top balloons but they are still non lit? Am I doing something wrong as you say these don't appear on the lamp matrixes. Cheersd again for the update the next build is sounding amazing!

See attached photo I also did these in with artwork still wasn't lamping annoyingly this is using latest build too cheers in advancee

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 17, 2026, 12:08 PMThank you for the update I did a copy a lamp from tool box and labelled them accordingly for the top balloons but they are still non lit?

Copying a lamp from the toolbox and giving it the name L400 draws a bulb that is wired to nothing; the name on a lamp is just a caption. The bulb has to be bound through the lamp picker, and it has to be placed on the top box board, not on the station board. If you are on a station board when you open the picker, it offers you that station's lamps, and L400 on a station is not a lamp at all, so nothing you pick there will ever reach the balloons. Select the top box board, place the bulb there, and pick L400 from that board's picker. The tooltip on each of the fourteen top box lamps says "output line N", and the dot beside it goes live when the machine lights it, which is the quickest way to prove you have the right one.

@BarXQueen, good afternoon.

First of all massive thanks ref the Winwall screen the other day - this has been sorted out perfectly! A massive huge thanks there.

Secondly, I had already done the steps you have suggested regarding Divas top balloons, and same with the reels, for some reason it doesn't seem to be detecting them. I have ensured not on any subdued or bingo modes too before I added in the lamps. I did this via the top box, insert lamp then went into here and selected the lamp in this case 400 - but also 401 and 402 etc and still completely dead. Can you tell me if the setting I have shown a photo of is the correct way I have done it? If I haven't I am very sorry, I am still learning and you are my teacher at the moment until I get the hang of this new PFME :-)

Best Wishes

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 18, 2026, 05:50 PM@BarXQueen, good afternoon.

First of all massive thanks ref the Winwall screen the other day - this has been sorted out perfectly! A massive huge thanks there.

Secondly, I had already done the steps you have suggested regarding Divas top balloons, and same with the reels, for some reason it doesn't seem to be detecting them. I have ensured not on any subdued or bingo modes too before I added in the lamps. I did this via the top box, insert lamp then went into here and selected the lamp in this case 400 - but also 401 and 402 etc and still completely dead. Can you tell me if the setting I have shown a photo of is the correct way I have done it? If I haven't I am very sorry, I am still learning and you are my teacher at the moment until I get the hang of this new PFME :-)

Best Wishes

Thanks for the photo. Your settings are right: top box board, lamp bound through the picker as L400. I checked this morning on a clean install of 0.3.5 and the balloons on the shipped Divas layout do light, so the problem is on your machine, not in your layout.

My earlier advice was wrong on one point. An old copy of the Divas program file still lists L400 in the picker, so you will not see "not on this machine". What it lacks is the table that says which output line the lamp is on, so the bulb never lights.

Quick check: hover over the l400 row in the picker. If the tooltip says "output line 0" the file is fine. If it gives a row and "column 0", it is the old copy.

Fix: close PFME, open %LOCALAPPDATA%\PFME\programs in File Explorer, move F9B1E841DCF2F738.json to your desktop, and open the layout again. Hover over l400 once more and it should now say output line 0, with the balloon lit. The top reel lamps L408 to L416 are cured by the same move.

If the tooltip already says output line 0 and the bulb is still dark, send me a screenshot of that tooltip and the version from Help > About.

@BarXQueen  Mate it works! It works! moved the json file to desktop and they all light up now!
I shall forever bow to your amazing talents on how you know how to fix things so promptly! :-D

Legend thank you :-)

PFME v0.3.6
Fixed

• Opening a layout with a large picture in it could make PFME judder, pause mid-game or freeze in edit mode. Pictures are now loaded at the size your screen can show, so big layouts open and play smoothly. Settings has a new Artwork detail option if you want them sharper or at full size.
• On a layout whose backdrop is drawn at its own size, the recommended artwork setting could shift the backdrop so every lamp sat off its glass. Lamps and glass line up again on every setting.
• Clicking a station on a multi-player layout could select the wrong one, so the keyboard stayed stuck on station 1. The station you click is the one you play.
• Game Configuration changed only the station on screen, so one station could pay 94% while the others stayed on 84%. It now sets every station alike, with a tick box to turn that off.
• The Deluxe machines never raised their top awards during play. They do now, with their sweep and heartbeat sounds. A layout with a saved Game Configuration keeps its old switch settings, so change it there if yours still does not.
• Pure Gold Community layouts drew a top box the real bank never had. The controller now sits in the base of station 1, as it does on the real machine.
• Bound reel lamps made the reel artwork look washed out when lit. Reels with a lamp bound are dark until the machine lights them, then show the artwork as it is.
• Spinwall stations never joined their top box and it sat on COMMS INIT. The stations now play and link up.
• A board with two screens stacked them one above the other, so each was tiny. They now sit side by side.

New

• Round bulbs: a lamp set to Bulb shows its pictures through a circle, and its glow follows the circle.
• Merge Lamps (Ctrl+Shift+M) joins several lamps into one shaped lamp, and Split Merged Lamp takes them apart again.
• Key out a colour: pick a colour on a lamp or button picture and it becomes see-through.
• Chaser bulbs: Arrange > Make Chaser turns a set of lamps into a chaser border that runs one bulb at a time, like the separate 12 V chaser boards some cabinets had.
• The win line can be drawn as a single line across the reels instead of boxes, with a thickness you choose. With nothing selected in the editor, look under Layout.
• File > Save Artwork writes every picture in a layout back out to a folder, reel symbols included.
• A screen's Output can be chosen in the property panel, for boards that drive two screens.
• PacDrive lamp boards are supported. Turn it on and map the sixteen outputs in Settings > Emulation.
• The toolbar is in the same order as EFME's.

Known

• The Spinwall top box's round screen stays dark. No software for it has been found, so its lamps work and its screen does not.
• The chaser bulbs, round and merged lamps, keyed colours, the win line option and PacDrive have been checked by test, not on screen or with a real board. If one looks wrong, say so.
• On an upright (Casino) strap a sit-down layout's top-glass legend lamps stay dark or look stuck on. That is how the real board behaves; an upright layout needs upright glass.
• Export pictures at 8-bit. A 16-bit file only makes the layout bigger and slower to load.

Reported or asked for by re-emulated, lotechking89 and others on the forum.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

PFME v0.3.7
Fixed

• Some machines, Bee Rich among them, came up with 8.1 CCT COIN FAIL every time you reopened the layout, and a RAM clear did not stop it coming back. PFME was not saving part of the machine's link to its coin mech when you closed it. It does now. The first time you open each layout after updating, the machine starts up from its own memory instead of carrying on exactly where you left it, so give it a minute to come up.
• In edit mode, a large picture over the top of a layout (a glow, or a frame round the reels) caught every click, so nothing underneath it could be selected, and Send to Back did not help when there were several. Clicking a see-through part of a picture now selects whatever is under it. Click the visible part of a picture to select the picture itself.

Reported on the forum by the author of the Bee Rich DX layout.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

Many thanks for your continued hard work.

Hi @BarXQueen
The Reels look amazing since the update when lit - massive thank you.

I was looking to try use the merge lamps tool, for example sometimes 10 different lamps light a logo up, but the tool says only one lamp with same number can be used to merge?

And could I ask how do you create a reel overlay to place over the reel masks, as I cant get the reel mask to go transparent to place over the reels, like @DAD does with his layouts, would one of you be able to explain how to please? Many thanks again - loving the work!

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 23, 2026, 07:19 PMHi @BarXQueen
The Reels look amazing since the update when lit - massive thank you.

I was looking to try use the merge lamps tool, for example sometimes 10 different lamps light a logo up, but the tool says only one lamp with same number can be used to merge?

And could I ask how do you create a reel overlay to place over the reel masks, as I cant get the reel mask to go transparent to place over the reels, like @DAD does with his layouts, would one of you be able to explain how to please? Many thanks again - loving the work!

Merge Lamps: that message is deliberate. A merged lamp is one lamp of the machine made of several pieces of glass, like an L-shaped legend or a ring of segments that all sit behind the same bulb. Because it is one lamp, it can only light from one lamp number. If ten different lamp numbers light parts of a logo, the ROM is switching those parts on and off separately, so they need to stay as ten separate lamps. Cut each part of the logo that one bulb lights as its own lamp and bind it to its own number, and the logo will light up the way the real machine does it, zone by zone. If two or more pieces do share a number, those are the ones you can merge. Ctrl+G will group the ten so you can move them around together while you are editing, but the group isn't saved with the layout.

Reel overlay: PFME can't cut the reel windows out of a picture for you (the "Key out a colour" option is only on lamps and buttons), so the see-through part has to be made in a paint program first. Take your reel glass artwork into something like GIMP or Paint.NET, select the areas where the reels should show through, delete them so they go transparent (the chequered background), and save it as a PNG. A JPG can't hold transparency, so it must be PNG. Then in the editor add it as a Static image, put it over the reel windows, and use Arrange > Bring to Front so it is drawn on top of the reels. The reels will show through the holes and the rest of the glass sits over them. If you want a bit of glass shine across the reels as well, a Glass overlay does that, and it has its own opacity slider. It also never takes a click, so it won't block the buttons underneath.

Hope that helps, @DAD may be able to assist more. I will look at updating the app so you can add a transparent colour key to a static image in PFME.

Quote from: BarXQueen on Sep 24, 2026, 10:02 AM

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 23, 2026, 07:19 PMHi @BarXQueen
The Reels look amazing since the update when lit - massive thank you.

I was looking to try use the merge lamps tool, for example sometimes 10 different lamps light a logo up, but the tool says only one lamp with same number can be used to merge?

And could I ask how do you create a reel overlay to place over the reel masks, as I cant get the reel mask to go transparent to place over the reels, like @DAD does with his layouts, would one of you be able to explain how to please? Many thanks again - loving the work!

H

Quote from: BarXQueen on Sep 24, 2026, 10:02 AM

Quote from: lotechking89 on Sep 23, 2026, 07:19 PMHi @BarXQueen
The Reels look amazing since the update when lit - massive thank you.

I was looking to try use the merge lamps tool, for example sometimes 10 different lamps light a logo up, but the tool says only one lamp with same number can be used to merge?

And could I ask how do you create a reel overlay to place over the reel masks, as I cant get the reel mask to go transparent to place over the reels, like @DAD does with his layouts, would one of you be able to explain how to please? Many thanks again - loving the work!

Reel overlay: PFME can't cut the reel windows out of a picture for you (the "Key out a colour" option is only on lamps and buttons), so the see-through part has to be made in a paint program first. Take your reel glass artwork into something like GIMP or Paint.NET, select the areas where the reels should show through, delete them so they go transparent (the chequered background), and save it as a PNG. A JPG can't hold transparency, so it must be PNG. Then in the editor add it as a Static image, put it over the reel windows, and use Arrange > Bring to Front so it is drawn on top of the reels. The reels will show through the holes and the rest of the glass sits over them. If you want a bit of glass shine across the reels as well, a Glass overlay does that, and it has its own opacity slider. It also never takes a click, so it won't block the buttons underneath.

Hope that helps, @DAD may be able to assist more. I will look at updating the app so you can add a transparent colour key to a static image in PFME.

ope that helps, @DAD may be able to assist more. I will look at updating the app so you can add a transparent colour key to a static image in PFME.

That explains it pretty much but on Hot to Drop I didn't make a reel overlay as separate image.  This time I cut out the reel windows from the main background and made it transparent then sent the reels to the back, so not only could I have the tube effect I had the reels showing through the transparency too and saved myself the job of making an overlay image for the reels at the same time.

See pic! - This is what it looks like in Photoshop before saving as a PNG.

Hot to drop reels are still wrong for me

Quote from: martinjpeters1985 on Sep 24, 2026, 10:57 AMHot to drop reels are still wrong for me

OK we're working on a fix for this one - hold tight!

PFME v0.3.8
Fixed

• Hot to Drop's reels now sit on the win line. The top box was two symbols out and the bottom reels sat a little low. If you lined them up yourself using the forum guide, there is nothing to do.
• If you moved Hot to Drop's bottom reel windows on the layout to line them up, move them back after updating.
• Lining up a reel or renaming a symbol yourself no longer stops later fixes to that machine from reaching you.

New

• When PFME corrects a layout as it opens, the notice at the top offers Keep in file, which saves the correction into your copy of the layout. It is also on the File menu.
• Each reel in Edit > Reel Symbol Artwork has a Reset button that puts it back on PFME's own settings.
• Single community machines can now start the community game.
• Editor: Cut out the reel windows makes a picture or glass overlay see-through over the reels, and Key out a colour now works on pictures and glass overlays too.
• Editor: groups are saved with the layout.

Known

• The Hot to Drop 1-05.00 DATA program stops with EDC TIMEOUT. It expects a data-capture unit PFME does not have; use the Std Slave or Community Deluxe program instead.

Reported on the forum by players of the Hot to Drop DX layout.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

PFME v0.3.9
Fixed

• Community machines no longer show NO COMMS TO MASTER after you close and reopen them. The first time you open each layout after updating, the machine starts up from its own memory instead of carrying on where you left it, so give it a minute to come up.
• Hot to Drop DX's top box reels now sit on the win line. The fix in 0.3.8 did not reach the layout when PFME opened it.

Reported on the forum by players of the Hot to Drop DX layout.
Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip

Dear @BarXQueen
When I am creating a 3 player, editing shortcuts via key capture doesn't want to capture per slave cabinet? For example if I want to capture T for Transfer on player 1, then do the same for player 2, and 3 it won't allow me to do this as its already used on player 1 as an example. Can this be edited so each machine can have the same key per player for the same function?

I usually do Cancel ` - Collect C, Auto Play A, Coin in 0, Transfer T - usual ones work 1 2 3 for holds, space for Start etc etc

Could you advise if this could be corrected or if there's a way for me to do this I am trying to do this via Cabinet - Key Mapping :-)

PS In fact no keys want to Capture when in Key Mapping under a three player layout here - just re tried. Thanks

Many thanks

Hi @lotechking89

You have found a bug, and it is the same bug behind both halves of your post. Thanks for the clear write-up.

The key capture checked the whole layout for a clash, so once player 1 had T for Transfer, players 2 and 3 were told T was already taken. And a three player cabinet built with Create Linked Cabinet or Add Station is a clone of one seat, so every key was already on all three stations before you touched anything. That is why nothing would capture at all: every key you tried was "already used" somewhere.

The playing side was always fine with the same key on every station. The keyboard plays whichever station is selected, Tab and Shift+Tab move it along the row, and clicking a station selects it too. So T presses Transfer on whichever machine you are sat at. Only the editor was refusing it.

Fixed for the next update. A key now only clashes with another button on the same station, and the Key Mapping list says which station each row belongs to (Station 1: TRANSFER, Station 2: TRANSFER and so on) so you can tell the three apart. Your usual set, ` for Cancel, C for Collect, A for Auto Play, 0 for coin, T for Transfer, 1 2 3 for the holds and Space for Start, will go on all three.

In the meantime, if the cabinet was built by cloning, have a look at the Key Mapping list before changing anything: the keys you set on the single machine will already be on every station.

@BarXQueen many thanks for your reply - I will look forward to the next release.

Quick question. I have been using AI to upscale machine stock photos I have and the fills my computer screen in very high definition, when I go to put the artwork onto any 3 player machine it becomes tiny and very distorted/pixelated, I split the artwork into four saved into both formats either PNG or JPEG, and I have tried inserting it as an image and I have also tried it as a cabinet surface to and still doesn't seem to work. I do this at the stage when a 3player is assembled - am I doing something wrong?

When I do a single player layout again a dome cabinet fills my screen in very high resolution I insert it using same methods as above and it goes like a postage stamp! LOL

Any help would be appreciated :-) I managed to do Diva ok (not perfect) but that seemed to be a fluke - I am learning but I am very old skool when it comes to the old paint studio - slowly mastering the new AI and photo tools that I am not familiar with LOL 

Cheers :-)

@lotechking89 You're not doing anything wrong. I've looked into it, and it's PFME's layout editor getting the size wrong, not your pictures. Upscaling them was the right thing to do.

There are two things going on. When you put a picture on the cabinet surface (the background), PFME stretches it to fill the space that's already there, whatever shape the picture is. A single-player layout is roughly square and your picture is the shape of your screen, so it gets squashed from the sides. That's the distortion.

The second one is the postage stamp. When you then insert another picture, PFME works out its size from how much it had to shrink the background picture. That's meant for pieces cut out of the background photo, so they drop back exactly where they came from. With a very high resolution background the shrink is big, so every picture you add afterwards gets shrunk by the same amount and squashed the same way. On a three-player cabinet it's worse, because a picture on the top box ends up setting the size for the player stations as well.

I'm fixing this for the next release. A picture you insert will keep its own shape and fit the machine you put it on.

Until then, this should get you going:

1. Click the cabinet surface. In the panel on the right, change Fit from Fill to Uniform. Your picture keeps its proper shape instead of being stretched (you may get a strip down the sides where the shapes don't match).

2. For each picture you insert, type the Width and Height you want into the same panel instead of trusting the size it arrives at. Keep the two numbers in the same proportion as the picture itself, or it will squash again.

3. If you'd rather it filled the space exactly, crop your pictures to the shape of the space before you import them. A single-player machine is close to square, each station on a three-player is a bit wider than it is tall (about 6 wide to 5 high), and the top box is a long strip about 6 times wider than it is high.

PFME v0.3.10 New

• Hi-Tech machines now get much further. They pair with their coin mech, hopper and note reader and take coins, they play sound, and their buttons and lamps show the names the game itself gives them. Hi-Lo Hi-Lo now takes credits and plays. For Hi-Lo Hi-Lo, point your layout at `hilohilo_nondata.s19`: the other build stops on DPACK ERR because it wants a Datapak, which PFME does not have.
• If you line up a machine's reels or rename its symbols and then save the layout, those settings now go with the layout. Anyone you share it with sees the reels where you put them, not where they sit on your own PC.

Fixed

• On a cabinet with more than one player, each station can now use the same keys. Before, a key taken by one station was refused on the others, and a cabinet built by copying a station would not accept any keys at all. The Key Mapping window now groups its rows by station.
• A picture you insert or change no longer comes out squashed or stretched. On a cabinet with several stations, it now fits the station you are working on instead of the whole cabinet.
• If you swap a stretched background picture for one of a different shape, PFME now fits it without distorting it, and tells you how to stretch it again if you want to.
• The hopper now pays out at about 5 coins a second instead of 2, so a full bank no longer takes two minutes to empty.
• Hi-Tech reels no longer stop with a REEL ERROR during play or in the machine's own reel test.
• A Hi-Tech coin mech no longer stops answering after the machine restarts, which used to leave it showing NOT SET TO DES OR UNPLUGGED.
• A machine whose layout lists fewer reels than the board has now starts. Before, it sat at 0 MHz and never ran.

Worth knowing The first time you open each layout after updating, the machine starts up from its own memory instead of carrying on where you left it. Give it a minute to come up; after that it resumes as normal. Reported on the forum by players of the Hi-Tech and multi-player layouts. Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip