Laser Mame

[mixedgas]

For the Record:

Laser Mame was the invention of Rob Mudryck and Matt Polack
I was setting in Rob's old office in Bay Village one day and he asked me what kind of systems used vector graphics besides laser shows. I mentioned Arcade, Military, Radar, Scientific and Medical CRTS. His next line was like "Have you ever seen the mame emulator?" I explained about the simple core vector graphics engine used on older arcade systems and the next time I was up for a visit, he had some preliminary code. Matt helped out later on parts of it.

Rodney made a similar product when Rob didnt put it in the public domain.
While I respect Rodney for putting a public version of Laser Mame up, I feel a bit of clarification is in order.

Steve Roberts

[carmangary]

Well, to clarify, MAME was around long before that as a public project for emulating arcade games. The vector arcade games had been emulated long before any Laser MAME work had been done. The hard part was MAME. Speaking as a software developer, adding support to pipe the graphics to a laser controller seem pretty trivial to me. So, I find the whole LaserMAME thing a bit of a joke when people argue about who did what.

[mixedgas]

Well, to clarify, MAME was around long before that as a public project for emulating arcade games. The vector arcade games had been emulated long before any Laser MAME work had been done. The hard part was MAME. Speaking as a software developer, adding support to pipe the graphics to a laser controller seem pretty trivial to me. So, I find the whole LaserMAME thing a bit of a joke when people argue about who did what.

I'm gonna respectfully disagree on that one.

I will admit the MAME code is critical to the project, however....

Its far more then a data pipe, there is/was a buffering program to convert the raw crt vectors to a laser format, CRT comes out way too fast, on the order of 1000X faster then scanners, and there are no blanking, anchor, etc points etc. Also the mame engine, like the little 8 bit processor on the arcade systems, generated a center referenced vector in stroke writing, with no intermediate points, so Rob and Matts code had to take the MAME data, slow it down, add anchor and corner points, make a frame of it, pass it to pangolin, and do it without significant latency in real time, plus add some handshaking to Mame. It was also one of the first uses of the Pango SDK. Rob also did a winamp plugin that took the FFT from Winamp and put it up.

Mame only sends x1,y1 and x2,y2 for a given vector, not enough information for the galvos to respond to. So some real time signal processing was involved, and that is NOT trivial. Nor is calculating the difference from frame to frame to avoid flicker, to beat the flicker you need to have a constant number of frames up, with half of them blanked waiting to go.

Steve

[carmangary]

I suppose... but that sort of stuff is my bread and butter so it doesn't seem like much to me.

[Pangolin]

Weird! Two threads about the same topic, and with the same name?

[allthatwhichis]

That's what I meant with the twitch comment... Where is spec and his clue bat?