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Thread: Laser Mame

  1. #21
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    Mar 2010
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    Quote Originally Posted by james1095 View Post
    Well this has become a bit stale it seems, and the project appears to have died.

    Is anyone working to resurrect Laser MAME? How about an output module to drive the cheap soundcard DACs people are making?

    I actually own most of the original Atari vector arcade machines, but it sure would be cool to play them on a giant screen with a laser projector

    When the project initially appeared I thought it was cool, but never thought I'd own the ($$$$) hardware necessary to do it. Now thanks to dramatic progress in diode lasers, as well as cheap commodity PC hardware outperforming the high end workstations of a few years go I'm getting close to finishing a <$300 RGB projector with ~1.5W output so this could be a reality.
    LaserMAME is not available but LazyMAME is. It doesn't sound like you realize that LazyMAME exists. Do a search for it. It plays all those games you want and is available and is free. Not sure if it supports your DAC or not, though.

  2. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by JohnYayas View Post
    LaserMAME is not available but LazyMAME is. It doesn't sound like you realize that LazyMAME exists. Do a search for it. It plays all those games you want and is available and is free. Not sure if it supports your DAC or not, though.

    Neat, no I hadn't heard of it. Anyone have a link? I've found some discussion and a bunch of videos, but no links to builds or an official page.

  3. #23
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    Dec 2009
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    Hi James, another user from Seattle! Welcome.

    You can find LazyMame on the PL ftp server.

    host: ftp.photonlexicon.com
    user : plftp
    password:ildaswap

    If you get it working, let me know. I've been meaning to dig into it.

    I met a guy at work who said his friend wrote LaserMame. I could try to find out more about what happened to it.

    Have fun,
    Mike

  4. #24
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    Jul 2007
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    west sussex uk
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    Default lazy mame

    who is the guy on pl that did lazy mame ?
    i forgot, i was wondering if it would work with the riya dac ?
    i used to use it with easylase ok and want to find out if it going to be made to work
    on riya

  5. #25
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    Sep 2007
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    Omaha, NE
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    Quote Originally Posted by badger1666 View Post
    who is the guy on pl that did lazy mame ?
    i forgot, i was wondering if it would work with the riya dac ?
    i used to use it with easylase ok and want to find out if it going to be made to work
    on riya
    That was my little project one winter. I made 2 versions- the first worked with EasyLase (this also means soundcards will work) and the second with QM2000. I believe that the zip file that was on the ftp had a copy of the vector.c file I used. The addition of code to the MAME program itself was very minimal. The rest of what made it work was another "middle-man" dll that received and processed the raw vector data, then sent it to a DAC. This was a separate stand alone project, somewhat disconnected from the actual MAME project. Being a c++ mingw newbie, getting all the linking and compiling to be happy was a real nightmare (for me anyway). I also did a lot of trimming to get the resultant exe size trimmed down, and to reduce the compile time by like 90%.
    I sent all the code to drLava a while back, I think he was considering an experiment with multiple DAC outputs, RIYA included. That would be cool.
    There are multiple variants of rom files out there, I usually tell people to send me a PM with their email address so I can give them a proven working set. I haven't messed with it in a while, it was one of those things where I just did it to see if I could make it work- I am sure everyone here knows how that goes.
    -Mike
    Last edited by mikkojay; 09-11-2010 at 17:13. Reason: don't forget soundcards


  6. #26
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    May 2008
    Location
    Westlake, OH
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    We did get to show it off at 6 Flags Darien Lake for 2 years, and take it to the Classic arcade game conference in San Jose one year.. We were supose to fly out Sept 12th 2001 but had to cancel it to the following year. I know Dale has shown in off at CA Extreme for several years afterwards and maybe still to this day.

    I had some great Ideas we wanted to do before it was released. Like World's record.. play it on the grand coulee dam. Atari had no interest in licensing the roms so there was no commercial redistribution. Just never came to be...

    LaserMAME was improved by Matt to play every Vector Game including Star Wars.. Will it ever be released, who knows.. the two owners of the code do not talk to each other anymore, so it would be more likely that Pink Floyd will reunite than LaserMAME getting released to the public.

    Things can change.. we can only hope. But again LazyMame is close enough. But I can tell you Tempest on the big screen is very impressive. as well as some of the other vector games that really really really work well in laser.

    Rob.
    Rob Mudryk
    Retired old and Grumpy Laserist

  7. #27
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    Grand Rapids, Mi
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    Quote Originally Posted by mikkojay View Post
    That was my little project one winter. I made 2 versions- the first worked with EasyLase (this also means soundcards will work) and the second with QM2000. I believe that the zip file that was on the ftp had a copy of the vector.c file I used. The addition of code to the MAME program itself was very minimal. The rest of what made it work was another "middle-man" dll that received and processed the raw vector data, then sent it to a DAC. This was a separate stand alone project, somewhat disconnected from the actual MAME project. Being a c++ mingw newbie, getting all the linking and compiling to be happy was a real nightmare (for me anyway). I also did a lot of trimming to get the resultant exe size trimmed down, and to reduce the compile time by like 90%.
    I sent all the code to drLava a while back, I think he was considering an experiment with multiple DAC outputs, RIYA included. That would be cool.
    There are multiple variants of rom files out there, I usually tell people to send me a PM with their email address so I can give them a proven working set. I haven't messed with it in a while, it was one of those things where I just did it to see if I could make it work- I am sure everyone here knows how that goes.
    -Mike

    What is the base built version of needed roms?
    leading in trailing technology

  8. #28
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    Aug 2010
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    Seattle, WA USA
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    Quote Originally Posted by blowfly View Post
    Hi James, another user from Seattle! Welcome.

    You can find LazyMame on the PL ftp server.

    host: ftp.photonlexicon.com
    user : plftp
    password:ildaswap

    If you get it working, let me know. I've been meaning to dig into it.

    I met a guy at work who said his friend wrote LaserMame. I could try to find out more about what happened to it.

    Have fun,
    Mike


    Wow there's all kinds of interesting looking stuff on there, thanks! All that darn real life stuff has been getting in the way of goofing off and having fun so I haven't had a chance to mess with this yet. It does look like there's a driver out there that emulates the EasyLase DAC with a modified sound card so at least in theory it ought to be possible to make this work. Dunno if my current set of 20K scanners is adequate but I figured they were a cheap way to get my feet wet and they'll be good for beam effects if/when I get some faster ones.

  9. #29
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    Aug 2010
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    Quote Originally Posted by buffo View Post

    A few arcade cabinets could actually be made to play different games just by switching the rom chips and applying different graphics to the exterior of the cabinet. Other boards would play one game only. I believe Asteroids was a single-game board.

    Adam
    The Asteroids hardware is very similar to that of Lunar Lander, but it is still unique. IIRC, the only Atari vector games that utilized exactly the same board were Gravitar and Black Widow, the latter being a field conversion kit released after Gravitar flopped, and Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, which was another field conversion kit that came out later. ESB may have required more than a simple ROM swap but I don't remember for sure. The vast majority of games in the classic era were built around unique hardware. A few platforms supported multiple games, but usually 2 or 3 at most and in almost all cases there were different controls or other additional hardware unique to a specific game.

    Technically to be legal you have to own the actual ROM chips that would be plugged into the arcade board. As someone else mentioned, the console "ports" were not so much ports, as they were games written from scratch to run on a completely different (and vastly inferior) hardware platform and resemble the original as closely as possible. If you are doing this in your own home though it's not as if the police will bust down your door and haul you off for downloading some 30 year old ROM images. The only time you would be likely to have trouble is if you tried to distribute something incorporating them.

  10. #30
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    Seattle, WA USA
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    Quote Originally Posted by blowfly View Post
    Hi James, another user from Seattle! Welcome.

    You can find LazyMame on the PL ftp server.

    host: ftp.photonlexicon.com
    user : plftp
    password:ildaswap

    If you get it working, let me know. I've been meaning to dig into it.

    I met a guy at work who said his friend wrote LaserMame. I could try to find out more about what happened to it.

    Have fun,
    Mike

    Well I haven't tried MAME yet, but I did manage to get Laseroids running yesterday. I'm impressed, it works much better than I expected given my cheap hardware. I modded a USB sound card that was only $11 shipped, built a compensation amp based on the design that's been floating around, and wired that to a $100 set of 20kpps galvos. I'm still working on mirror/dichro mounts for my RGB setup so I tried so far using just a $10 ~200mW red DVD burner diode along with a driver I made similar to a circuit I found online.

    Unfortunately a wire came loose in my lashed up test setup and one of the amp ICs in the galvo driver was damaged. I at first feared I had damaged the galvo itself, but by swapping things around I confirmed it to be the IC. I ordered some replacement parts and should be back online around the time I finish my solid state RGB.

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