Rochester, NY
Would it be possible to load DMD data onto the SD card and just have the serial bus call it up by reference?
(Topic ID: 180269)
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Aerosmith (LE)
Stern, 2017-
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Stern, 2017
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Stern, 2017
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Avengers The Pin
Stern, 2012
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Batman 66 (LE)
Stern, 2016
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Stern, 2016
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Stern, 2016
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Quoted from BrianMadden:Oh now there's an interesting idea. Certainly that would be possible. However to really be useful, you'd have to be able to not just trigger frames and animations but also dynamic text and stuff. So that would require some kind of code component running on the CPU node that was more than just the bridge.
What's really interesting about this is this is already the exact architecture of MPF. MPF is two parts: the game engine which is like the MPF core which controls the hw and runs the game logic and everything, and then the media controller (MC) which handles all the graphics, displays, and sounds. (The two are connected via a simple socket protocol.)
The catch here is that MPF's MC requires OpenGL and a GPU which doesn't exist on the SPIKE CPU node, so running it there (at least with our current architecture is out). However I would guess that SPIKE 2 has a GPU, so maybe this is an option?
Actually what we first thought about for MPF was to just install and run MPF itself on the CPU node, but the SPIKE CPU node is not powerful enough. It's basically like a Raspberry Pi Model 1 but with less memory. (Which is fine for Stern of course since they built their code around the SPIKE hardware.)
Again SPIKE 2 might be different? Maybe we can just run MPF on the SPIKE 2 CPU node itself? Though for SPIKE 2 it wouldn't matter as much since we don't need the DMD and we can just use the HDMI port of the computer running MPF for the display.
Anyway, lots to think about and play with over the next few months.
Wolfmarsh suggested that we should build up some example configs for the SPIKE machines that are out there so you could just download a working base game and have at it. That would certainly be cool and make it easy for people to try out MPF!
I guess really I'd rather just have a guide to running custom code directly on the CPU myself. I'm more used to coding games on <100MHz processors with 2KB-2MB of RAM than on an rPi, and it seems that in this case the serial bridge is a bit of a hack to wrap MPF into a situation it's not completely suitable for. But they must have custom code running on the SPIKE, so why not just publish that interface too?
Quoted from BrianMadden:I'm excited to see what you come up with!
Just as soon as I buy a SPIKE game! 
Quoted from BrianMadden:The homebrew community has taken the approach of separating the pinball control hardware from the game logic / game code hardware. This is why the P-ROC, FAST, and Open Pinball Project controllers don't include game processing elements on them.
Personally, I think this is a horrible idea, hence why I don't use those boards at all. Being able to throw more horsepower at stuff is cool and all, but even the earliest pinball MPUs still have plenty of room to squeeze in some good code, you're limited more by how much the machine (just via inserts in this case) can communicate with the player (too complicated rules and they won't know what's going on). If I'm going to go to all the effort of writing a whole new game, I'd rather it be able to be played by more than the five people who happen to have a P-ROC lying around
Quoted from J85M:Guys can you speak in laymans terms for a minute because I've read your last few posts and my brains melting
Just a quick question but from what I gather and maybe I am wrong but does this mean I could take my BM66 and add assests that aren't in the factory code?
Thanks
J
You'd need to rewrite the entire game and redo all the art and sound.
...granted with the current state of the code that wouldn't take too long 
Quoted from BrianMadden:Agreed.
That's what's cool about this thing, that if you do go to all the trouble to rewrite a SPIKE game, you can give it to someone else and they can run it in their machine without needing a P-ROC. They could run it off their laptop just to try it out.
Or even better, just give them a file for the SD card 
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