MAME and physical (reel) display

[Rens]

Hi All,

I have a collection of old Australian slots which are very poorly (at best supported) one of these has no real sign of life. So bad that even trying to look at repairing is hard as it gives no real starting point.

Now I was wondering whether I could replace the game board with a raspberry pi and came across MAME on google. Now this machine still has physical reels. Two questions, Can MAME be used to run without a display (visible to player) and drive the reels to reflect a game.

Or does anyone else know of Frankenstein-ing a reel machine to work again using an other emulator and has some helpful guidance.
Note this will be for man-cave hobby display, I am not looking into commercial exploit.

High level thinking a pi with an adurino should be able to run the reels,

The machine I would like to experiment this on if possible is a 5 reel 5 line "Dollar Express" From IGT Australia

[Heihachi_73]

MAME does emulate non-video reel slots, but no American (or Australian) reel slots have been emulated yet due to a lack of ROM dumps so it's pretty much limited to fruit machines from the UK.

In most cases, electronic (CPU-based) reel slots are basically identical hardware to an early arcade machine except for the lack of a screen e.g. an 8-bit CPU and a few KB of RAM. The most important part of emulation is preserving the software - without ROM dumps it is impossible to emulate anything. Additionally, the reel strips would also need to be scanned and turned into vector images (SVG) for it to actually look presentable in MAME, and finally, documenting the hardware with high-resolution photos of the circuit boards, chips and other devices.

As for using MAME to emulate the game while outputting data to an Arduino etc. to drive the physical reels of the machine itself, it is possible with MAME but it simply hasn't been done for slots due to lack of emulation and having one developer in the entire world look at the code since forever.

What year/hardware is Dollar Express? If it's the equivalent of an S+ it's already partially emulated in MAME but needs someone interested enough to take a look at the driver, something which hasn't been done in close to twenty years (the one and only only mechanical reel slot which has been dumped is an S+ Coral Reef but IIRC the reels were never digitized, so if it ever became playable in MAME it would be limited to text-based labels for reel strips e.g. "7", "BAR", "CHERRY" etc.) - of course, this would not affect the ability to drive the reels of a physical machine, it would just look like crap inside MAME itself.

You will be much better off getting in touch with a MAME developer e.g. via mamedev.org or bannister.org - maybe it just might get the ball rolling, or at least the ROMs preserved to be emulated in the future - whether that be 2025 or 2055. Unfortunately the MAME section of NLG has been gathering dust for years, not helped by the almost complete lack of slot machine emulation. Most people on NLG are slot collectors with little interest in emulating the machines on their PC when they have the real thing.