PFME - Updates and New Releases

[BarXQueen]

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

[BarXQueen]

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.

[MultiRetroMan]

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?

[BarXQueen]

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?

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

[vectra666]

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

[cliffc]

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

[lotechking89]

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?

[BarXQueen]

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?

Which ROM are you seeing this on?

[lotechking89]

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?

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!

[BarXQueen]

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.

[lotechking89]

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

[lotechking89]

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. :-)

[fruitsnappa]

Many thanks for this update.

[Amusements]

Thanks for the update:)

[BarXQueen]

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