Home Page Forums MAME MAME The newer for 2022 WIP thread

The Falco 5220e is a newer terminal from Falco. It's part of the Falco 500 series of terminals, released after their TS and FAME series. I previously looked at the driver, but this time I got alot further, figuring out many of the ASIC functions powering it. Here's the setup screen:



RS232 fully works, so we can connect our Linux system:



It supports a few different video modes, so here's it's maximum resolution of 132x50 lines (showing htop):



It also has multiple window as well multiple host support. Thanks to MAME we can support this too:



Here is mc on Linux at the top connected to Port A and the pfsense firewall on FreeBSD connected to Port B at the bottom at the same time. You can switch between the two using the keyboard.

The terminal supports a mouse too, and this works as well (by connecting a serial mouse to one of its ports).

And as bonus, showcasing smooth scrolling support: https://redump.net/files/scroll.mp4

I've added support for the "Falco Business Graphics" aka Tektronix 4014 support (images slightly aspect corrected):


dodekagon.plt


08_isco36.plt


mona.plt

Images show are from example files from this emulator: https://github.com/rricharz/Tek4010

All the PLT files will work in MAME.

To test this yourself, the following steps are needed:

- Start MAME with the "null_modem" device attached to "porta"
- Enter terminal SetUp, then Window settings
- Create a new temporary window (settings don't matter)
- Delete Window 1
- Create a new Window 1 with type FBG. The followings settings worked for me: 1 / 24 / 2 / 24 / 1
- Leave SetUp
- You can now load PLT files with the MAME file manager. To clear the screen use the "Next Screen" key (default mapped to Page Up). If the status shows "HS" press Scroll Lock to continue.

It's fun to watch it draw. Even animations will work - I might create a video later to show this.

The upcoming 0.240 has a fix for nespal DPCM sample playback. Sounds were being played lower than their intended frequency due to a missing table for PAL (really the APU is missing all PAL-specific details). Here's a particularly glaring example in the bass line of a Sunsoft game that I've uploaded to illustrate the fix. I guess nobody ever tests the PAL versions of games?

Another funky machine from Bitsavers:



Current status:



Selftest passen, moves to the setup screen then:



Next step: Keyboard.

Fixed a PPU bug. Grayscale mode wasn't being universally applied to palette values. I'm not sure if I would have ever noticed this but I was playing around and hard-coded the grayscale flag for fun. Only thing is if you do that you immediately notice all sorts of background colors are still in color:

Anyway, here's an example of something that is actually fixed by this from SMB3. After you defeat a castle boss and return to the map the game code uses 4 frames of grayscale mode on and off to flash the screen. Here are before and after stills of one of the "flash" frames:

And (mock) flashing gifs:

Really! Nobody plays the PAL version of NES games?! This one isn't as cool as the brutally-off bass of Sunsoft, but the APU's noise channel was also missing a table to compensate for the PAL NES's lower CPU clock. Here's an old favorite from Quick Man's stage:

Why won't he blink? Blink already Mega Man!

I submitted a PR for fixing the zapper on NES and relatives. If it gets pulled check out this cool little test program: https://github.com/mamedev/mame/files/8022389/ruder.zip. It let's you use the zapper as a pointing device à la the Wii Remote—no trigger necessary. You can even play a game of pong with two people, two zappers, just by waving them up and down. Should work in MAME in the near future. Or if you're a more traditional type, kill a few ducks and gangsters on the Vs System without them being mysteriously immune to your bullets at random moments.

More NES and friends audio fun. cam900 added an implementation of the non-linear APU mixer which means the sound balance between the 5 audio channels should be different and have all the weird quirks of real hardware—triangle, noise, and DPCM can affect one another as can the two square channels. Unfortunately this change highlighted just how off our triangle channel is. It's a clicky bastard. I've added a small fix which improves most cases (knock on wood). Hopefully, the remaining popping can be debugged. For your listening pleasure here are three versions of just the triangle channel from the title (only briefly) and start screens of Mega Man 2 (US version).

First is how MAME sounded before: https://imgur.com/0PcPDFu.mp4
Second is post cam900's mixer addition: https://imgur.com/AHmXUGR.mp4
Last is post-pop: https://imgur.com/tvzp4Vw.mp4

Seems like I've given these forums short shrift, but have a look at what I've been investigating over the past couple weeks while gradually chipping away at the stuff necessary to put together a belated 25th-Anniversary video:



For those who aren't familiar with the overall backstory, a bunch of really crazy, and really brilliant, people decided to go and come up with a way of preserving Laserdiscs in exactly the way that I envisioned happening like 15 years ago: Tap the laser pickup, capture a raw stream of the data, and then post-process it in software.

As a result, via the "Domesday Duplicator" hardware platform, there's now the ld-decode project: https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

The initial point that I was blocked on was worrying about the fact that the chroma decoder would only handle active video lines, and the existing LD captures in MAME require raising the upper "bar" of decoded lines to include VBI data. Except about a week ago, after 5 minutes of investigation, it turned out that doing so is as easy as adjusting a few variables that define the active starting lines for both fields and frames.

Currently, the main blockers are that there are some audio decoding issues. Time Traveler in particular is hit pretty hard, as there's mysterious distortion that can't be ascribed to waveform clipping, and also doesn't seem to involve CX companding. So for now, things are at a standstill until the resident audio genius on the ld-decode project can nail down what's going on. After that, though, it's pretty turnkey to bring these captures into MAME.

ld-decode is a project that stands to have as much of an impact for A/V as the people working on magnetic-flux captures have had for disk media, yet it's always seemed to have a very small but hard core of developers. I'm hoping that by promoting it a bit more, there might be a few more folks who come on board to lend their skills.

But suffice it to say that what already exists is killer: There's even support for "disc stacking": It's known that at this point, it's pretty common for Laserdiscs to suffer from disc rot. But if you can stack multiple captures from multiple discs of the same production run, the toolchain supports a best-case voting process in order to completely eliminate dropouts that only occur in a minority of discs, since the dropout locations are fairly random.

This doesn't just benefit MAME, it benefits the Daphne and Singe projects as well. This rising tide raises all boats, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

This has fascinated me since I first heard of the domesday project.

Glad to see it finally being realized!

One of the things I heard was that the storage required for these files was going to be a fair bit larger than just storing an encoded video, "CUE/BIN" or an "ISO" style file.

Is this true?

What size files will this archival project be projected to be?