> > This looks very promising
> >
> > Ideally, shouldn't this be using a modern MAME build rather than PinMAME? I thought
> > MAME supported pin ROM sets nowadays.
> >
> > I assume current MAME can't emulate the dot matrix display yes?
>
> No, MAME can do that with some of them IIRC.
>
> However, MAME can't - and doesn't want to - imitate Visual PinMAME's COM-model DLL
> hackery.
>
> MAME would need to come up with some new way to be controlled by an external engine
> like Visual Pinball and the like, and Visual Pinball would need to add support for
> this method. This method of being controlled would also have to be cross-platform -
> so, not Visual PinMAME's Windows-only method. This has been discussed in the past.
>
> - Stiletto
Except that this just isn't true. Mame's output system isn't platform independent... it's pretty much windows only, so there is no reason that pinball interfacing can't be treated in a similar manner. Make an input system similar to the output system (technically you could use the exact same method) and you are done.
If mamehooker can accurately sync the gambling game lights and rapid fire outputs like in Terminator 2 properly with my bad coding practices then it should be able to handle the output stream of a pinball table pretty well in addition to an input stream and dmd matrix stream. Because windows event messages are native and built into any windows.."window" it is probably the fastest method you can possibly use short of compiling mame into the pinball simulation itself.
The real reason it hasn't been done, I hate to say, is probably politics. Similar to that whole "no gambling game" nonsense we had to deal with.
I will agree that the com dll nonsense isn't the best way to do it though... that pretty much requires a custom build of mame, which doesn't make any sense and would essentially be pinmame all over again.
But just for the record like 70% of the pinball games in mame are broken... I'm not sure why... they work in pinmame so it could be used as a guide to hook them up. Maybe pinmame's emulation drivers are all hacked up? Maybe it's just that nobody can be bothered to work on them?
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