New Life Games LLC
Homebrew Player Tracking and EFT Systems => NLG Homebrew Player Tracking and EFT Systems => Topic started by: bogan on January 18, 2020, 07:22:17 PM
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Very interesting :agreepost:
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Totally awesome work man. This is really cool.
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Cash Express down here in Vic does the same thing through QCOM, after the jackpot is won you get the cashless transfer with the credit inserted sound. I saw one at a local (1c/200cr Indian Dreaming Cash Express) where the transfer failed and the game locked up just like in the emulator, they ended up hand paying the person the mini they won and then put the machine out of order. The machines at Crown Melbourne (the last half a dozen MK6s that are left) are a bit different and don't do the transfer like that, it's just added automatically (IIRC they use ASP protocol - the "Malaysia" sets preserved in MAME might actually be the same casino versions but it's currently unknown).
BTW, would you be interested in helping MAME get the QLD MK5 games doing the same thing through emulation? They're currently stuck at "Play Disabled DGC" due to having no QCOM emulation at this point. One of the games has the older VLC protocol though, don't know if it's a bad dump (in the graphics or sound section as the program code check passes and then it reboots) or whether it simply doesn't boot due to the lack of comms emulation. Aside from the Queensland games, the rest which aren't bad dumps are all playable. The older games like Chicken seem to have the setup options (denom etc.) in the game itself unlike the later ones which need to set setup via the site controller.
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With the "Malaysia" games, when they were added around ten years ago we assumed that ASP actually meant Asia/South Pacific since the ASP string was where the region string normally is e.g. "NSW/ACT", "Local" or "QLD Club & Hotel" etc. (we had no idea at the time that ASP was a comms protocol!), and after finding another string for RM denomination (and assuming it was Malaysian ringgit) we put 2+2 together and came up with 22. :)
As far as MK6 emulation goes though, there was only very preliminary work done so the games won't boot up yet (and it's extremely slow since there is no recompiler/code translator/HLE that would get them running at a useful speed, and the PowerVR 250 video chip isn't emulated yet despite being somewhat similar to the Sega Dreamcast/NAOMI), although the games do go through the self test and pass checksums before hanging (this is usually where the screen would clear and show "Found 1 video chip / loading resources...")
For QCOM you would be better off with the handful of MK5 games, at least they boot and can be set up (at least as far as they can without help from the site controller), even if they do run at ludicrous speed due to the incomplete emulation state. Speaking of MK5, there are also about 20 hyperlink games, but I don't think they can do anything without the Paltronics link system or whatever they need (Queen of the Nile Fast Lane is QLD though, so that one might just be able to work - the others are NSW and USA however).
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Usually there are a bunch of pokie guys as well as the main devs on the Bannister MAME forum (some of which also post here, but there's also a live chat box as part of the forum, which is otherwise fairly quiet). Note that some of the MAME devs can't stand slots but others are open to it if they're not busy doing something else.
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I assume you've already got a LAB board and mech meters, you'll need them if converting a QLD board to NSW.
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As far as I know, in VIC there is 2 different types of QCOM. They vary slightly in terms of manual payments IIRC. The jackpot payment method is exactly the same, and occasionally it does fail from time to time, but a good programmer can deal with that issue (I dont in my code at this point! )
Would this be due to the two rival operators at the time? The Tatts and Tabaret (Tabcorp) contracts expired around 2012 and the gaming machines went to Intralot (which didn't last long before going bankrupt here so the machines subsequently went to the VGCLR and now back to Tabcorp, albeit without the Tabaret branding this time), now the two former rivals' machines can be seen mixed and matched in the same venue...
All except one type - Cash Express. While both rivals had MK6 Cash Express games (and only ever MK6, not MK5 or MK7 unlike Crown which had all types), Tabaret got them around 2004 whereas Tatts got them around 2007; the former have noticeably older games and 7-segment LED displays in the topbox whereas the latter have a second screen. and newer games along with a few classics like Adonis thrown in. Not once did the two types of Cash Express games ever end up mixing in the same venue unlike every other game, so you still had to go to certain venues to play the unique Cash Express games of each type, as both venues somehow managed to not share one identical Cash Express game.
Wonder if they were actually that different to be incompatible with one another? The Tabaret versions didn't do the QCOM credit transfer like your photos (it was just silently added to the credits after the fanfare just like Crown), but the Tatts ones did (credit sound + showing how much was inserted below the reels).
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With Intralot, I heard of it years ago, maybe it was just that they weren't making a big enough profit in Victoria so they pulled out. It might have been around 2014/2015, not 2012.
I can't remember if there were any VLC MK6s at Tabaret (it's quite possible they had both just like Tatts, Tabaret definitely used VLC as well as QCOM as until Dec 2007 they had much older games that needed it like the actual VLC Winning Touch machines - can't remember if the old Jubilee MK4 machines (e.g. Black Rhino) needed it or whether they ran standalone, never saw one hooked up to a jackpot though). Unfortunately, while there is (or used to be) an Intralot doc online showing most of the games they had after replacing Tatts (including whether the games used VLC C/D or QCOM), there doesn't seem to be one which describes the former Tabaret machines.
One more thing I just remembered, if a VLC-based Tatts game hits a house jackpot, the screen goes blue like an old VCR, showing the jackpot won, complete with the "game disabled" alarm (which is just the normal "door open" noise). VLC games also had the jackpot amount superimposed on the screen along with an optional clock (mainly used on the 90s games which didn't have one on the screen e.g. MK5s, Konami Tasman, Pacific Horizon e.g. Red Hot Chilli, VLC Winning Touch e.g. Georges/Bonus Fives). Tabaret games of course had the Wild Cash banner on the screen when hooked up to the house jackpot and played the jackpot theme (a comically sped-up Wild West-themed Oh Susanna/yee hah!!!/whip cracking) when it was won, which could be heard throughout the venue as the same music also went over the PA system shortly after the machine itself had finished.
The merger might even be why Victoria got rid of most of the house jackpots (if not all of them these days, haven't seen one in a venue in ages), every venue had a larger jackpot (usually on 2c/5c machines and up, maxing out at $500 or $1000) and occasionally a much smaller one on the 1c games (usually $50 or $100 max) but they stopped doing the jackpots sometime after the merger and started buying up big on games with jackpots built in, which of course have crippled gameplay designed around the jackpots rather than being 87-92% plus the house jackpot on top of it.
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G’day Bogan,
Been following your posts on the qcom and hyperlink software writing for the orange Pi. Will you be making the software available to other users at all ??
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You have to remember, that in Victoria there is also VLC protocol machines as well, so there is a mixture of VLC, Tatts QCOM and Tabcorp QCOM, and no doubt no intralot are in there there is probably also standard QCOM machines as well.
The reason the QCOM types are different is simply because the legacy systems did not have the technology to operate the same way, ie one couldn't do manual payments one way, or the TITO process was different. AFAIK, the progressive stuff is exactly the same between the 2. Maybe one Cash Express is VLC, the other QCOM? Thats one I cant answer.
It seems that the South Australian version of Scatter Magic in MAME (with 03030708 base) uses the VLC protocol rather than QCOM, may or may not be interesting to test.
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Any luck with the protocol implementation? I'm dying of boredom down here, stuck inside 23/7 due to Melbourne's stage 4 coronavirus lockdown!
MAME recently implemented the BACTA protocol for some of the British gambling/amusement games (the games themselves aren't even close to slots/pokies though), some of the data-logging stuff looked remotely similar to QCOM, including being plain old RS232 serial.
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Yeah, the lack of people/interest thing can be annoying, especially with obscure systems like slots or non-PC-based 70s/80s computers, which all tend to get forgotten behind the thousands of arcade and console games. It gets worse when you're emulating an ultra-rare system and it needs a lot of work just so it will even display something at all (working with no screen output and having the game code crash within a tenth of a second of executing in isn't much fun, especially with obfuscated code and/or encrypted data and/or trying to sift through assembly code on a CPU type you're not familiar with), compared to adding a game to an already-working system which is literally copy, paste, replace a few things (hashes etc.) and compile and it works straight away (the Aristocrat MK2.5 and MK5 are this easy to add games to, but if a "proper" MK4 appeared out of the blue we'd need to implement the extra memory regions they use, as they use a lot more chips compared to a 2.5).
Going a bit off-topic, one of the low-hanging fruits in the slot emulation world would be the Konami Endeavour/ES500, where basically everything it needs already exists in MAME and just needs hooking up in the driver. Konami simply raided their arcade parts bin with this platform but the end result is *just* different enough that it isn't a simple copy, paste and run the code, but with 0 people interested it's left for dead. The fact that the resource (graphics/sound) data is stored on a tiny board (FMU2) with SMD flash chips is also a factor (presumably no-one wants to accidentally brick their machine desoldering everything or trying to read it out via the connector pins, and I don't blame them), only one game has had the FMU2 dumped so there is only that game to work with. There are only about half a dozen things left to hook up (notably, coin input!) and the game would probably coin up and start playing - note however that the sound hasn't been hooked up yet so it's in complete silence for now.
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Hi all,
Just been reading through a few threads and hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. My friend has a Konami ES500 which recently decided it needed a RAM reset. It's an ex-NZ machine so it now needs polling from a QCOM site controller to get going. From what I've found, I think I just need to poll the machine with a maintenance poll with a certain bit set as below.
"New control flag. EGM General Maintenance Poll (function code 0x1B). Refer to the QCOM Protocol, any version, EGM General Maintenance Poll, SIZ field - bit 7. If this bit is set in any General Maintenance Poll and provided no games have been played on the EGM and no credit has been added, then the EGM will disable the QCOM protocol in the following manner:- •The EGM will disable the logging of all QCOM events to its event queues.•The EGM must also no longer disable upon detection of a 10-second communications timeout condition so it can remain in play without a Site Controller present."I don't need to do anything fancy, just want to get the machine going again but I don't know enough about the software side of things to get it talking. Is anyone able to point me in the right direction? I'm happy to help your projects if my friend's machine can offer anything.
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<deleted>
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Thanks for the quick reply.
Had a look on the file system but couldn't find it unfortunately. Do you have any idea where I should look next?
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Ive also got a QCOM game here that Im trying to get to work, I have got my Aristocrat game going but not the Stargames machine.
I see in an much earlier post a "Little Black Box" that seems to help, are these available anywhere?
Cheers,
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Excellent, and thanks very much for getting back to me!!
Your a legend...
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Hmmm post was deleted????
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Just about every single post has been voluntarily deleted, doesn't sound good at all. Hope he wasn't C&D'd despite QCOM being an open format.
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Yes I was thinking the same thing!! :banghead:
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Just about every single post has been voluntarily deleted, doesn't sound good at all. Hope he wasn't C&D'd despite QCOM being an open format.
Got outed on another forum, not worth the risk to my career so I pulled everything.
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Sounds fair,bummer for me, but probably a good move for you ;-)