Home Page Forums MAME MAME TMS-09xx/1xxx thread (was New Dumps)

Yup, a lot of these VFD games have color overlays (Pachinko though, nope).
Take Coleco Pacman for example, where they turned cyan pacman into yellow.

Actually, yeah, the colors are off. The yellow parts should be green, and the red parts should be very red, and the balls and score should be more blue.
There's old pictures of the display I took years ago here:
https://www.handheldmuseum.com/Tsukuda/GamePachinko.htm

But I've had 5 or 6 of these over the years, and they've all been green. I think it's due to an overlay that darkens the screen (the overlay mostly just appears to be 'dark', not really colored, but it definitely affects the color of the VFD.
The first pic is one I just took of the game, the second one is opened up with the overly only covering half of it. Depending on camera exposure, I can see how an uncovered VFD would come out more yellow than green... But the lower half of the second picture is definitely what it should look like.

Alright, I'll change it to green.

I remember the Basketball LED game have that tan over.

I think the reason why these games have that, so the bright colors won't hurt kids eyes.

Always great to see new VFD games emulated, these look pretty nice even though the idea alone of a VFD pachinko game is kind of surreal lol

Life has kept me away for quite some time so I haven't been following much, but I think there's still no artwork done for that last batch of games that kevtris dumped right? I mean the ones sent by rick.
Speaking of which I couldn't see a dump of Coleco's zaxxon (tabletop) wasn't that one sent to kevtris or couldn't it be dumped for some reason?

About redoing all the artwork I don't think it should be a big deal for anyone, just get the new romset as you would for each new MAME release and you're done. Any improvement in the artwork department is always more than welcone.

Yeah, there are missing SVGs:
https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/handheld/hh_hmcs40.cpp#L120
http://blog.kevtris.org/blogfiles/Handhelds/VFD%20Games/

It is a lot of work.

Some guidelines:
- make source photo perfectly perpendicular before you start tracing
- no fancy stuff like glow effects or beehive pattern (see other SVGs)
- keep colors consistent for all vfds
- put segment ID in title tag as y.x where y=grid, x=plate (the ones by Kevtris need to be descrambled to match actual MCU write values but that can be done easily afterwards)

I don't remember if Coleco Zaxxon's MCU was identified.

I'll dig my Zaxxon out of storage and check it out. I can also send it to Kevin for dumping if needed.
It's a dual VFD game, have we encountered another one like that? I think it's the only game that truly has two VFDs in it (vs stuff like the Bandai Zaxxon that has one VFD split by a mirror, or Paint Roller where you can see the VFD from both sides)...

I'll let you know what I find out...

Ah that explains it, I thought you already included it in the last batch you sent. Yeah would be great if you send it his way, If I'm not mistaken it's the only coleco tabletop yet to be preserved. Hopefully it will be dumpable.

I don't recall of any dual screen vfd, but hap might know for sure.

@hap: do you have any sample file with the actual scan/photo and then the segments tracing on top of it that you could share? I think that would be a great help to anyone that might want to help with the process, learn by example.
Also what tools do you use? Is something like inkscape good enough or for instance Illustrator would be preferred?

Inkscape is what we used in the past (I did several of the final SVGs in that- Entex Pac-Man, Coleco Pac-Man, Bandai Machine Man...)
Somewhere in this thread is a brief tutorial on getting started with it, it's just been a while since I've touched it I'm afraid I forgot it all.

Does Mattel Champ Football count? It has a 7seg VFD and a game VFD.

The last SVGs I did, I asked a friend to draw the more complex shapes in monochrome. I used potrace for those.
The 7segs, I copy-pasted from another SVG and edited them. The rest, I drew in Inkscape with rectangles and spheres.
No I don't have any WIP files.

For LCD games, it's pretty easy to automatically trace the whole thing once you have a good photo, only a few cleanups needed. It's not really doable with VFDs. You end up with the mess that is bbtime.svg.