PFME - Updates and New Releases

[re-emulated]

@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

[DAD]

@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

[re-emulated]

@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

[fruitsnappa]

Many thanks for this update.

[re-emulated]

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

[BarXQueen]

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

[lotechking89]

@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!!!

[re-emulated]

@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

[re-emulated]

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

[BarXQueen]

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

[lotechking89]

@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 :-)