Popeye Saves the Earth

[karlandreasa]

Edit: From now on i will update the files in this post as i make progress.

 

This is my first post in this forum, ever! Yay!:)

I've started working on colours for my Popeye, but the thing is: I don't own a Pin2DMD. I hope to, one day (maybe soon, maybe years from now), and that's why i start now (less work then).

My dump is just some frames from the rom, If you have a recording you want to share to help me out, feel free!

I have not finished more than maybe 0,5% so far and i have no idea if the file will even work on the thing or if i have missed some settings but i will keep posting and updating as progress is made. I'm learning the program as i go along so expect all kinds of newbie-mistakes;)

Feel free to contribute to the file, as long as you send me a copy of all the files needed:) Hope this will help someone.

I am doing this on a small part my spare time (not much) and i may give up at any time if i get bored. This thread´s main purpouse is to (hopefully) help someone else so that the next person working on this game doesn't have to start from scratch.

And now for something boring but important (I know i'm new here but i have read som threads here and there and a problem people who work on theese things seems to have is how other people treat their files. Therefore i will try to be as clear as i can from the beginning:
The files i post here i post under GPL3 License. The point is: Use it, spread it, make it better (but please send me a copy or post it here if you do), DO NOT sell it! If you use my files and finish the rest 99% of the work you still have to release it, including all files needed to edit it, for free To make someone donate to get all the files needed is selling = not ok.

Moderators: Please tell me if i violate any rules or agreements by doing this:)

Happy painting!

//karlandreasa - GSS

140120_134225_wpcedit_dump.raw

[slydog43]

Please continue, more authors the better.  I'm sure people will help with any troubles you come across.  Good Luck!!!

[karlandreasa]

Thank you!

Forgot to mention: I own the real hardware (Christmas-present, how cool is that?) with ROM LX-5, so that's the firmware i aim to support:) Is there any difference in workflow when doing a colorisation for the real hardware compared to doing it for Virtual pins?

[slippifishi]

46 minutes ago, karlandreasa said:

Is there any difference in workflow when doing a colorisation for the real hardware compared to doing it for Virtual pins?

Not really; you can sometimes get more reliable triggering and avoid timing issues on real pins by splitting long sequences with one trigger into shorter ones with multiple triggers (is my experience, anyway), but you can worry about that later if need be.

[karlandreasa]

Thanks! I will keep that in mind:)

[NetzZwerg]

From my experience I had to spend 100+ extra hours for each table to make it work on a real pin the same as on vpin. Real pins in general don´t seem to like animations longer than 1 frame because of some kind of timing differences. For instance for the multiball animation from TOM I had to cut and trigger all 350 single frames to make it work on a real pin. You will also have to play with the delay times of the single frames and the hash layers at some points. This is my experience with bally/williams tables, I am working on my first data east and I have no real pin test results yet.

[karlandreasa]

Good to know.

Would it be more reliable if i record the animations from my own machine and either change each delay to the same as the recording or paste my finished animation frame by frame to the new scene with the timings from the game?

[NetzZwerg]

I have no experiences in dumping from real pins, but if you anyway work with single frames you can just give them a big delay since it will only stay as long as the next trigger will stop it. The best way to dump is to trigger the animations manually and let them run to the end, in gameplay you will disturb those animations with others so it will be harder to collect all needed frames. 

[karlandreasa]

Thanks for all the feedback!

Good point. I will do that as i don't have a display yet, thus can't dump:)

Edit: I sort them in scenes for now for convienience but the delay is massive since i converted the rom to recording by hammering the mousebutton using a program i found on this forum.

If i don't work with individual frames and make it work for my hardware, will it fail on virtual pins then?

Two more questions that popped up in my head: popeye uses a animation that starts as a cross, sort of, and rotates until the screen is filled, then rotates again revealing information that i would like to colorize like scores and game over. Is there a way to make this animation not pick up the colours of the masks "below"?

Is it possible to use 2 hashes together? Like so: IF both are present at the same time THEN goto scene X

Would that maybe be a way to mask animations and already know what is appearing?

 

[slippifishi]

Transitions like the cross you describe are very difficult; you can carefully manage the palette to keep the transition working in line with what you want (this probably limits the number of available colours for the leading scene, depending on how you plan to colour the scores).

Alternatively, you can use a replace scene and "black out" the reveal performed by the transition, hiding the partial scores that are shown during the transition frames. Once the replace is complete, the display will flash back to the scores underneath. It certainly isn't as nice as the transition, but it's a cheap way to avoid any bleeding effects on those types of transitions caused by using color mask.

Edit: And no, hashes/triggers must always be unique and only one hash. Hashes can appear on any plane, and any time the hash matches, your animation will trigger, regardless of which plane you set the trigger on, or which plane the hash occurs.

[karlandreasa]

So it seems i choose the right game to work on as a newbie-project?

If/when i buy a display i may try the hard route:) I prefer keeping the animation if i can.

[karlandreasa]

Small update:)

The dump-file is the same as above.

Popeye colors.xml

[malenko]

On 1/16/2020 at 1:28 PM, NetzZWerg said:

From my experience I had to spend 100+ extra hours for each table to make it work on a real pin the same as on vpin. Real pins in general don´t seem to like animations longer than 1 frame because of some kind of timing differences. For instance for the multiball animation from TOM I had to cut and trigger all 350 single frames to make it work on a real pin. You will also have to play with the delay times of the single frames and the hash layers at some points. This is my experience with bally/williams tables, I am working on my first data east and I have no real pin test results yet.

This is 100% accurate.  Data East seems to be more forgiving with real pins (Ive done Godzilla and Lethal Weapon 3 for real pins) and Bally is super harsh.

Feel free to look at the source files for any of the games Ive done and see if they help at all.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B9cWp45XToh2aVIxUWJZX0FwOUk

[karlandreasa]

Thanks! I will check them out:)

By the way, do i need the hardware to make recordings/dumps on gameplay if i just play on the emulator or is there any software that can fix that?

[malenko]

I believe you just use the correct DLL with external display on , then run the pin2dmd.exe to dump the file.

[karlandreasa]

Nice! Will try!

I was thinking some more and had some crazy ideas: if i record on a real pinball and use the timings and such, and it works, it would probably not work on the emulator, right? Is there concistensy in the timing-differences or is it any fluctuating? Something that could be patched in the emulator or made into a script thad we could use on the projectfile?

It would be interesting to compare cycle-speed between the real wcs-board and the emulator:)

 

Another thought: would it help any with the conversion-work if there was a button that cuts each and every frame into a scene and names them by the original scene-name plus a climbing number?

This could be a script that edited the xml project-file i think...

 

Not good at programming but pick up stuff from friends who is:)