MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Space Race (non-) progress

> I would think Kicad would be a great jumping-off point for this - it's GPL and is
> multiplatform to boot.
> http://www.lis.inpg.fr/realise_au_lis/kicad/

Nice. I've also seen gEDA as well.
http://www.gpleda.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_EDA_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Free_EDA_software

Undoubtedly there's one that could meet Juergen's needs, but he seems more inclined to get the implementation done right now.

With the free, open-source projects, we may even be able to persuade them to add "netlist" exporting support in Juergen's format of preference, once the emulator's file format is finalized.

> Too bad my coding skills suck, as I'd love to be of help.

Mine do as well, or at least I have no faith in them, which is why I'm concentrating on organizing and collating information, support - and eventually, creation of a "Discrete Project" (which already exists informally, more or less). It seems there's been no definitive complete list of discrete CPU-less video arcade games since Al Kossow was heavily involved in arcade collecting. Discrete Logistics was a good start but stopped being maintained. So this is something like Discrete Logistics 2.0. Of course, I'm the kind of guy with big talk and big plans, who starts many projects but finishes few.

> I'm no electronics wiz, but I do simple electronic repairs and can follow schematics.
> I wonder if it would be welcomed in this project for others to pick a game schematic
> and rebuild it electronically? While that wouldn't help with the logic of the
> individual components, perhaps it will get some of the more tedious stuff done.

That's the point I'm hoping to get to, but I don't want to put pressure on Juergen. I'd love to see the bar of "netlist" creation lowered to the point that anyone who can read schematics and understands basic TTL can contribute. Converting print schematics to computerized schematics is one thing, but many games have NO schematics available (or at least, commonly available schematics) and their circuits will need to be traced by hand based off of digital PCB photos/scans or the actual PCBs - tedious work indeed, and something an emulator developer doesn't _need_ to be doing. Needless to say, this will require some cat herding, but I can help manage the workflow.

I love that nearly all these games date from before I was born (same year as Space Invaders). I don't understand my own interest.

- Stiletto