Retiring From Vpm Sam Builds

[arngrim]

Hi Guys,

 

As you know I'm involved in a lot of VP developments, i'm adding force feedback to all tables and help authors to have their tables adapted to it, i have the responsibility of the configtool since Deegor retired from it, and I took and officialized Sam builds after Snotz had no time to deliver new versions.

 

For that part, I'm lacking a lot of knowledge and i never had a desire to grow there, lack of time compared to the rest of my tasks in VP and considering my real life, having a wife and 2 little kids

 

In short, the latest build 2.23 that has been published recently is the last one you will see from me, but i'm sharing the sam.c that contains all the roms that the 2.23 contains.

 

sam.rar

 

Here also the driver.c, that contains the references to all the roms, required for the list of roms visible in test from setup.exe, and also that is what VP uses to make the roms working

 

driver.rar

 

if you want to compile vpm with these, you need to bind these files to the official vpm available in the repository here

 

http://sourceforge.net/p/pinmame/code/HEAD/tree/

 

in some places you have to make sure to remove the restrictions to allow sam.c to be recognized, i don't want to cover that as normally you can't do it, but it is explicit enough in the code, the it's not that difficult

 

If someone wants to continue after me, please do so, i also hope that vpm team will start to support SAM, I'm sure they will do a perfect job just like they achieved with the rest of the pinball emulation

 

I'll continue to DOF tables, and support configtool, when i have enough time, I also will enjoy more vp as a player, i didn't play that much these past months actually, it's time to break some high scores

[CarnyPriest]

Thanks for keeping up with the builds all of this time. I guess I'll need to figure out how to compile VPM. It has been a task on my to-do list for a while. Do you have a particular version of Visual Studio that you have been using?

[arngrim]

i used vs 2013, i thikn toxie use vs 2012, vs 2015 is also supported , there are bat files to convert from older version to the version that you want up to 2015, it's up to you

 

you can use a free version, that's what i had

[Rascal]

Thanks arngrim for all the things you do for the scene! What you going to do with all this free time now? Maybe you'll find a nice chat site somewhere where you can let your mind go to mush.

 

Have fun with the kids and your wife, maybe go to the park. Again thanks for everything.

[mpad]

Thanks arngrim for all the time.

Hopefully someone will take over and upload here for people like me who just can't do it on their own. Also it is kind of nice to have a reliable source, given all that can go wrong with a VP setup.

[arngrim]

free time?  my vpm activity was the one with the less workload compared to the others, i'm not a vpm developer so the fact that i almost don't understand what i was doing there helped me to take that decision, and i don't think Stern will put release another Sam rom so i think we are safe for a long time, in a rom perspective

 

this gives me more time to train the authors so they can adapt their tables to use the controller.vbs and make them DOF compliant, the list of SS tables to DOF review is decreasing every week

[eispic]

Thank you, arngrim for all

[tttttwii]

Denis, thank you for all your efforts. Your contribution is really awesome. 

 

But your post ... this is really bad news.

 

If nobody continues to compile SAM builds this would mean

- SAM tables will never show up in VPX

- The VP9.9 and PM5 SAM tables are not playable anymore

 

or in case of keepings the latest version of angrim (without any update).

 

Unfortunately I have really NO skills in compiling anything.

 

But my question: Is anyone capable of taking over this task of compiling VPM SAM builds from angrim?

[arngrim]

thanks Torsten, really this is not that difficult, i managed to get it compiled it in one day without help, i got help and afterwards from different people for optimizing

but if you take vs2012

vpm official source from sourceforge

my files, add sam.c to the solution explorer, remove the restrictions of sam in the code

install nasm compiler and dx7 libs and add them to deliverable path

build pinmame from solution

and that should be it,

or push vpm team to support sam, it can be greatly optimized compared to what you know

[eispic]

Hi Guys,

 

As you know I'm involved in a lot of VP developments, i'm adding force feedback to all tables and help authors to have their tables adapted to it, i have the responsibility of the configtool since Deegor retired from it, and I took and officialized Sam builds after Snotz had no time to deliver new versions.

 

For that part, I'm lacking a lot of knowledge and i never had a desire to grow there, lack of time compared to the rest of my tasks in VP and considering my real life, having a wife and 2 little kids

 

In short, the latest build 2.23 that has been published recently is the last one you will see from me, but i'm sharing the sam.c that contains all the roms that the 2.23 contains.

 

sam.rar

 

Here also the driver.c, that contains the references to all the roms, required for the list of roms visible in test from setup.exe, and also that is what VP uses to make the roms working

 

driver.rar

 

if you want to compile vpm with these, you need to bind these files to the official vpm available in the repository here

 

http://sourceforge.net/p/pinmame/code/HEAD/tree/

 

in some places you have to make sure to remove the restrictions to allow sam.c to be recognized, i don't want to cover that as normally you can't do it, but it is explicit enough in the code, the it's not that difficult

 

If someone wants to continue after me, please do so, i also hope that vpm team will start to support SAM, I'm sure they will do a perfect job just like they achieved with the rest of the pinball emulation

 

I'll continue to DOF tables, and support configtool, when i have enough time, I also will enjoy more vp as a player, i didn't play that much these past months actually, it's time to break some high scores

 

Can someone from the sam.c and driver.c generate a .dat File to check Roms for ClearMamePro, please

[eispic]

Can someone from the sam.c and driver.c generate a dat file to check Roms for ClearMamePro, please

[Itchigo]

Thanks Argrim!

[arngrim]

thanks guys

any candidate to continue?

[CarnyPriest]

Well, sure. If no one steps up in the meantime. I figured I was going to have to roll my own sooner or later.

[CarnyPriest]

thanks guys

any candidate to continue?

 

In your driver.c, what is blkou_pc? It's not commented and the game is not in the official source or in 2.23. 

[CarnyPriest]

I've commented out blkou_pc for now. Here's a release candidate that is current up to r3802. Adds Sonic Hang-On, Wild Texas (Firepower II clone), meteor bonus count fix rom, and it looks like another version of Hyperball,

 

Compiled with VS2015 SP1. The output is a little larger than usual. UPX packer apparently does not work well compressing the dll that comes from VS2015. Documented here:

 

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=27063&page=12#entry318044

 

At any rate, I was getting the same error as posted a few months back when Toxie was making the code compatible with VS2015.

 

I've done some testing on Win 7 x64 and Win 10. Time to get it out for more testing. In the meantime, I will continue testing tonight on XP and with Pin2DMD. Let me know if anything is wrong although I'm not sure what I could do about it. If this goes well, I'll try to get a PinDMD1 version out for testing soon. I don't have one, so I won't be able to test this myself.

 

Have fun!

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/VPinMAME.dll

[lucky1]

Great !!!

 

The latest version also supports dump export for pin2dmd editor using F6 button to start the dump.

You have to change the key assignments in visual pinball to move the F6 dipswitch settings

to a different key and free up f6 for the dump out of visual pinball.

[tttttwii]

Carny, you are the man! Arngrin thank you for what you did for VPU!

[CarnyPriest]

Need to add Rambo (same as Raven but with different graphics) back in. There will be another version in the morning.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[arngrim]

thanks Carny

 

let me show you on pm the vcxproj that you use to see if it is optimized with the things i know

 

i can show you how to do a pindmd1 version

 

for upx, you can still compress after creation of the dll and outside vs, simply drag the dll to upx.exe

 

what about the 64 bits version? don't know if it's already feasible to have one

[Shortie]

What do you think about a git repository (e.g. hosted on github) for this?

 

The master branch could be a mirror of the official VPM source and the Sam additions could be done in a seperate branch. Most of the time a simple git command to merge the master changes to the Sam branch could be used to get the official development into the Sam branch.

 

Changes to to Sam code could be done by everyone and can be included with a pull request.

[CarnyPriest]

What do you think about a git repository (e.g. hosted on github) for this?

 

The master branch could be a mirror of the official VPM source and the Sam additions could be done in a seperate branch. Most of the time a simple git command to merge the master changes to the Sam branch could be used to get the official development into the Sam branch.

 

Changes to to Sam code could be done by everyone and can be included with a pull request.

 

The code is there if you want to put that together.

[arngrim]

this sam.c and sam emulation has always been a big subject to what can we do about it, share tables, roms, source code, dll, i just give it here so someone can take over this job, i think it's better that it is not more official, but that's my personal opinion, it's not mine anyway

[CarnyPriest]

I wasn't planning on putting together a repository myself, as I think that anyone doing real work on the sam driver is probably already on the dev team or closely connected to it. 

 

I've uploaded an update that brings back the optimizations that arngrim had been using. He was optimizing for speed and I was optimizing for size. The output again is larger than usual because it is uncompressed. The Rambo (Raven Mod) table is back in. Should be the same link.

[CarnyPriest]

Updated once again, added blkou_hf to support the DOF config for Hauntfreak's Pumpkin Carving re-theme of JP's Blackout. The rom is a copy of blkou_l1. Same link.