VFD display techniques #19
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I did a workaround like James's above, but that doesn't require an SVG for the 'off image' - if this is acceptable, this is how it's already coded in the new MFME2MAME that's under development for the second more comprehensive pass at building all fruit machine layouts - example grabbed from one of the new WIP test layouts:
However if not, I guess it'll just need the internal component itself redoing in some way in MAME source, to draw 2 quads/custom shader using the individual alpha channel as the duty channel to blend/some other way that's appropriate to how you guys want to achieve this in the MAME codebase style. From my side, with the workaround above already implemented, they all render correctly at present, so if nothing changed it'd look good... though I appreciate it may be worth rewriting the component internally to something that is a better fit for MAME's internal artwork system style :) |
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Just put a few of these in different techs, they look OK to me |
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Ah cool :) I think I tried it only on MPU4 to be honest, but if you think
it's an acceptable workaround then that is good to hear - I don't need to
change anything here as it's already set up to do that - though later I'll
need to set which platforms support vfd duty for brightness effects.
…On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 8:26 PM James Wallace ***@***.***> wrote:
Just put a few of these in different techs, they look OK to me
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Good to know, so I'll just set it at platform level, and it sounds like
most platforms will want their layouts to have the vfdduty support in. I
just checked Rat Race (an MPU3) and that has fade effects during attract
too...
…On Wed, Dec 21, 2022 at 7:37 PM James Wallace ***@***.***> wrote:
As far as I can tell, everything other than Global Games' "Stealth"
platform that uses the same hardware can do this fade. Maygay M1, MPU4,
JPM's Alphas and (I think) some early BFMs. Basically anything that MFME
labels as having the 1937 chip can support it. Games that don't use it will
still set it to something, as the reset behaviour is to set it to 0.
In fact, I turned it off for Stealth because, although it uses the same
charset (or looks like it does), the duty is never set to anything other
than 0, so it's clearly slightly different hardware.
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I've been back and forth with @cuavas over this, but I'd love to thrash it out once and for all, since I think that MFME2MAME is probably going to need a decent template for this.
Basically, the Bellfruit dotmatrix VFDs, and pretty much anything using the 1937 MCUs for VFD control (so that's pretty much every 14 and 16seg that isn't Bellfruit) have a modifiable duty control.
In the past, I used to use the 'animate' feature in the artwork, fiddling with the alpha values, but that doesn't really work.
This is my current approach, so 0 is the colour of the standard off element, and 31 is fully on, so you get an effect to change the colour. The problem is the component has a built in 'off' colour - an artifact from me and Haze forking it from the LED code I think, but obviously the off segments are there.
I could take the off colour out, but that feels wrong too, so I don't know what the best action is. There are other tricks you can do to not have an off colour, just have a blank (j6sonic does that, where I made an SVG pattern out of the real VFD glass to show instead of the inbuilt graphics). I'd use that all the time if it wasn't that embedding a full on SVG in every layout will be a pest.
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