I'm interested! I was planning to do something like that at some point when I was not able to repair my Firepower sound board. However I gave up when I found out sounds where "layered", and successive calls to the same sound address were not producing the same results (it tunes the sound differently, for repetitive background sound as an example, to change the pace).

Thanks for sharing this shaker controller design, looks great! Can you directly connect the circuit to an existing switch matrix, to detect switch status without "disturbing" the behavior of the switch matrix ? If yes, I'm super interested! I'm working on implementing in my WCS94 an Arduino to control a shaker and I would like to connect it to its switch matrix... I thought I needed some kind of optocoupler to make sure I wasn't disturbing the pinball logic, but maybe not?

my thread: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/a-shaker-in-world-cup-soccer-1994

I'm going to order some BSS123 and give it a try on my WCS94 machine's switch matrix.

Hi Frank, could you suggest a through hole equivalent to the BSS123 ? I don't think I'm good enough to solder tiny surface mount components

Impressive prototype board! Nice!

FYI I'm part of the group purchase organized by ThatOneDude and my plans are to use APC for a System 6 (Firepower), which I guess was never done/tested... I hope it's going to be possible!

I guess you can also just use lisy to get the pinmame emulation of Firepower, and not code any line...

Soon I will also experiment APC in my Firepower... I'll keep you posted.

Oh sorry I thought it was... I think I found a "game number" for it in the doc so I concluded (a bit quickly) that it was there
No rush, I will let you know when I get there. Thanks!

Mat

My turn...
I have a Firepower for which I'm planning to use the APC.
At first, just with custom code for fun... but I guess ultimately with Lisy/pinMame.

Mat

You're fast! Thanks! Will definitely test and give feedback..... but I'm far from being ready here!

Saturday night soldering.............
Coming along nicely.

PXL_20210207_052619748 (resized).jpg

Working on it!

Maybe it could be cool to have this info as a key post of this thread (or maybe in the first post)... a summary little table with pinsider names / APC project details.

good catch! in fact the "error" was made on my Due... on which I soldered sockets instead of pins... at the end it does not matter much...

PXL_20210210_021819113 (resized).jpg

On my side, I'm in the middle of installing the APC in my Firepower... I'm improvising some supports for the board and have to cut some zip ties to reorganize the connectors to reach their locations on the board... But it's going well so far! I'll have an update shortly.

Quick feedback (minor), on the connector layout drawing (APC_Connectors.png), a red cross is missing to indicate the pin to cut on sys7_2J5

The Arduino is programmed and the APC board is finally installed in my Firepower, yes! I have at this point only the minimum harnesses (switches, displays, power), and no Pi.

I'm trying to set up the display by following the instructions in "/DOC/Settings.md". The doc says to go through the options by pressing start until "a single 6 is shown on the player 4 display" (Firepower being a system 6 game, with 6 digit displays). Unfortunately I never get this "6" showing up in the 4th display...

The 4th player display cycles through these values:
"-0939-"
"-306--"
"-01066"
"0-4---"
"-00170"
"-30093"
"------"
"------"
and then back to "-0939-" but never "-----6" or "-----7".

I suspect the issue is related to the 2 blank options ("------"), they might be where the "6" and the "7" should have showed up. Maybe the system tries to display the "6" or the "7" on the missing 7th digit... which results into an empty display...

Awesome, thanks! Unfortunately I won't be able to test much right now... As you may have seen in the news, Texas is a mess right now. I lost power/heat/water so cannot really play with pinballs... But I'm ok! I will let you know when I can get back to it.

Thanks! Power and internet are back since yesterday night. I'll resume the tests soon! (I still have no water, but who needs water to play pinball )

Ok so I installed 0.22 and now I can see the "6" when browsing the display options... yes!

However the "credit" display is still messed up when i try to go through all the options, it does not show the option index correctly. The "player 4" display seems to work and shows the selected setting value... I managed to blindly go to "save settings" by counting my steps, and it worked (I successfully got a setting file created on the sd card)

yes, the credit display is showing some numbers... here is what i get when going through "system" options:

credit / player #4
----19 / -----6 display type
----65 / -----3 active game
-3--6- / -----3 nb of balls
----5- / -----1 free game
----34 / -----2 connect type
-43--- / -----0 dim inserts
--5-52 / ----00 speaker volume
-3---- / ----00 led lamps
-4--80 / -----0 sol ext board
----7- / -----0 debug mode
--4-25 / ------ restore default
-73-4- / ------ exit settings

but i guess the most important is that now i can clearly see the selected values, so i'm no longer blocked (i just have to count my steps when going into the options)... thanks for the very quick fix!

Yep it's working, I now see the option numbers! Thanks again for a quick fix!

I managed to go further into my tests... and have some issues, but they might be on my side.
Display test works... Lamp test works but does not turn on all lamps... Solenoids are not triggered... Sound works but super loud...
I need a bit of time to figure all this out!

Continuing my System 6 adventures:
- I'm now using the digital volume control and it's working well... I'll debug later what was wrong with the pot.
- The lamps are working well in "single lamp test", turning one by one. However, the lamp index on the display seems wrong (not incrementing well and many lamps are showing the same index)
- For the solenoids... well I need to troubleshoot a bit more: the F2 fuse blew, I guess the board triggered a locked solenoid.

wow you're fast
yep that fixed it... the lamp index is now incrementing nicely. thanks!

little remark about lamp test, not blocking: in test mode 4, all the lamps turn on, one by one, no problem. in test mode 5, all the lamps turn on except the 8 first (first column of the lamp matrix).

i will test the solenoids tomorrow... right now everybody sleeps in the house, I cannot make noise!

And it's confirmed working, all lights are now blinking!

Ok now for the solenoids... I did not want to risk to blow the solenoid fuse again, so I decided to test with some LEDs... I built myself a little board with an old 9 pin connector:
PXL_20210225_042701758 (resized).jpg

Then I went to "test mode 3" with my board plugged in successively in 2J9, 2J11 and 2J12

My results using this test mode:
- no LED is staying locked on... good!
- solenoids 1 to 16 are pulsed correctly (they turn on the matching LED)... good!
- the special solenoids 17 to 22 (2J12) were not pulsed during the test mode (led stayed off)... maybe normal ?
- every time solenoids 1 to 8 are pulsed, they're followed by solenoid 12 being pulsed as well... I tried to put "BC_ACselectRelay = 0;" in BaseCode.ino but it did not change anything

Ok I found my mistake! I went to the game settings option and changed the ac relay option to zero and now the test behaves well (no more unwanted pulses on 12). So my only solenoid test issue left is about solenoid 17 and above not being pulsed.

We're 8000km apart and you just located a cold solder joint on my board impressive!
I fixed the joint arduino/p2 and now my leds are flashing!

Ok, now that I know the APC works thanks to all the tests... Let's go for LISY!

I installed my PI zero on the APC board, with the latest LISY image.
I did the APC settings (remote mode etc...) and selected my game (Firepower = 16)
Then... it did not work... I saw the countdown on the display, but no attract mode.
I turned the machine off and back on, no change... Lisy boots, but no attract mode.
I turned off, took the LISY sd card to my computer to check if I could find any debug info... I could not find anything, so I decided to add a jumper on the APC at the "lisy debug" position. I also updated the "wpa_supplicant.conf" file to get wifi enabled.
Then I started the pinball again... and it worked... I could reach the attract mode of Firepower! Yeah!
(not sure which action above fixed it... or if it just needed to be rebooted one more time)

I inserted a credit and started a game... successfully! (no sound at this point, but that's normal, I did not set any sound file yet)
However... the displays are not working very well.
In attract mode the player displays show "003300" "007333" "006-10" "001--6" (see picture below). They should all show "----00". However, every 2 seconds, display #1 shows the high score correctly "550000".
When I play I get what I think is the correct score in display #1... But when I touch a target or score something, display #1 becomes again "003300" for a short time, before displaying the score again.
PXL_20210227_045123229 (resized).jpg

Not sure if it helps, but in the LISY debug log, regarding displays, I see:

[141.952817][0.000341] LISY_Mini: Client supports 5 displays
[141.953330][0.000513] Display no: 0 has type: 1 (BCD7, BCD Code for 7 Segment Displays without comma) with 4 segments
[141.953835][0.000505] Display no: 1 has type: 1 (BCD7, BCD Code for 7 Segment Displays without comma) with 6 segments
[141.954339][0.000504] Display no: 2 has type: 1 (BCD7, BCD Code for 7 Segment Displays without comma) with 6 segments
[141.954855][0.000516] Display no: 3 has type: 1 (BCD7, BCD Code for 7 Segment Displays without comma) with 6 segments
[141.955369][0.000514] Display no: 4 has type: 1 (BCD7, BCD Code for 7 Segment Displays without comma) with 6 segments

Is it normal to see this reference to "BCD Code for 7 segment displays" if my displays have only 6 ?

Here's a display log during attract mode:
https://pastebin.com/Y7YH4L8c

during attract mode my actual displays alternatively show:
Player1: 003300
Player2: 007333
Player3: 006-10
Player4: 001--6
Credits: 00
Balls: 00
and (briefly)
Player1: 550000
Player2: 000000
Player3: ----00
Player4: 00000
Credits: 02
Balls: 00

Thanks for the LISY update! Unfortunately not better for the displays on my side... see new log here: https://pastebin.com/BVCeDZnR

My displays still show "003300", "007333" etc...

Yeah! That was it, thanks!!!!
I did even better, "debug:off" and "sound:board", this way no error message at all. And all 5 displays work well!
Now I need to work on my sounds!

If (one day) I move to alpha display, I guess I'll lose compatibility with my old MPU board ?

Yes I have the sound board.
Here is a quick gameplay log, for you to get an idea:
https://pastebin.com/Sk54nQBV

In the meantime, I'll start working on the APC sounds, as I want to be able to customize things...

Thanks Jeff, yes I'm using it! For the conversion I wrote a script calling the perl AudioSave.pl multiple times, so not really tedious. The longest part is to match the sound files from the archive with their pinmame address. I matched half of them so far.

to convert a folder full of wav files into snd files on a Windows computer:
- install ActivePerl, needed to run "AudioSave.pl" on Windows (https://www.activestate.com/products/perl/downloads/)
- copy in your wav folder "AudioSave.pl"
- create a new text file you name "wav2snd.bat" in the same folder, containing the code found here: https://pastebin.com/yu7HFTwp

double click your new batch script "wav2snd.bat"
it will:
- delete any "Data.wav" or "Data.bin" you might have in the folder
- create a subfolder "snd_files"
- convert each wav file into a snd file and put it in the subfolder

So this feature was not working for me...
I found a little bug in the "USB_GenerateFilename" function which was preventing it from detecting I had a 6 digit display.
I also found out it was not displaying correctly sounds with index >99 and Firepower has plenty.
Now it's working well, and it's going to help a lot finding my missing sounds!
I also created a Firepower pinmame exception to ignore the useless "sound commands" (7f, ff) following the tutorial.

"USB_GenerateFilename" code fix:
https://pastebin.com/ApxPtuwz

Sure I could! I let Frank decide how he wants to handle this type of contribution...

Agreed... and if I'm the only one working on System 6, no rush anyway.

I made progress on the EX_Firepower (ignoring sounds and handling sound series), but I'm not done yet. I'm still trying to figure out some of the sound commands... there seem to be some rules I don't completely get yet (like one command triggering more than one sound being played)

AmokSolderer few questions for you (I guess others can reply to!):
- when I'm in pinmame mode, is there a way to reach the regular game adjustments (the adjustments described in the pinball machine manual, not the APC options)
- can the Arduino be plugged to the programming computer all the time ? no issues when the pinball is powered up, restarting etc..? is the only precaution needed to press "reset high score" before launching a code upload ?

So I confirm it does not seem to work... And you are right, I checked VPinMame and the diagnostic keys are a bit different than the physical ones. bontango do you think I can generate a nvram file on my PC using Visual Pinball, and then copy this file onto the LISY sd card? (I would need to set Firepower as free play and would like as well the possibility to deactivate the background sound, to help with my sound debugging)

I'm using a legit Arduino, so I hope it holds. But I was a bit worried when I saw that, when the pinball is off, the raspberry tries to start up using the 5V supplied to the Arduino.

Quick Firepower status... I sorted all the sounds and wrote the exceptions (sound series, background sound and random sounds). The result is pretty good!

But it's not perfect... I still have some issues with some commands sent in a row, where the APC interpretation is not like the real thing.

Example when the 1st ball of multiball is released, 3 sounds are played:
[209.124840][0.074352] LISY_W sound_handler: board:0 0x67 (103) -> speech "Fire one"
[209.138148][0.002133] LISY_W sound_handler: board:0 0x68 (104) -> explosion sound
[209.768849][0.608636] LISY_W sound_handler: board:0 0x6b (107) -> launch sound

But the sounds are sent too fast after each other and the launch sound is covering everything, you cannot here the "Fire one". I'm wondering if some of the commands sent before these (weird addresses not related to a sound) contain some sort of special timing information for the sound board. Maybe I should try to play with the "priority" parameter when playing some of these sounds ?

working! thanks!
(I had to put lisy in rw mode for the settings to save)

Little Firepower update...

After a non-pinball week, I spent a bit of time today playing with the APC in pinmame mode. I'm still not able to figure out the multiball startup... The initial countdown is a lot quicker than it is on the real game and the timing of the ball release sounds is off... so it does not feel right at all. I verified with Visual Pinball and here it's working well, so I guess it's not a pinmame issue.

I narrowed it down to only one code (0x3f) for which I could not find a meaning, and it is called few times during the multiball startup... maybe some kind of delay. Not sure. (no apparent effect when played in pinmame sound command mode)

So if a command is received to play a sound "B" with priority 50 when a sound "A" is already playing with a priority of 60, the song "B" will be ignored and never played ?

It's quite easy to check using the "ball control" mode, allowing you to move the ball around manually with the mouse. I can get to my multiball sequence in few seconds

Could it be due to linux pinmame being outdated compared to windows pinmame ? All my "verifications" with Visual Pinball are using latest versions of the windows version... when I look at the change log, there was quite some work done on the sound topic in the past year.

No, this 0x3f is specifically sent few times during this sequence (and at other times as well, but not constantly). On system 6, 0x7f is also used to reset the data lines after each command.

Yes that could work, great idea. I'll try it out!

the problem would be to base an APC workaround on some commands that may not be sent in a future "fixed" version of pinmame...

Hey AmokSolderer ! I've been away from my Firepower for almost 2 months... Some life stuff got in the way
I'll get back to it soon. And yes, I have some exceptions but I'm not fully ready yet... I was still working on this multiball thing which was not triggered well.

Maybe you can at least include in the release the little bug I found in a previous post:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/arduino-pinball-controller/page/13#post-6165101

So...... finally I got some time this week-end to play with my Firepower.
I got to a point where it's "kind of" ok

You'll find below my "PinMameExceptions.ino" containing special rules to manage the sounds of Firepower.
https://pastebin.com/JsumwNPa

The part I could not make sound perfectly is the multiball starting sequence (the big achievement on this game!). The countdown is too fast and the "fire 1", "2", "3" sounds, supposed to be synchronized with the ball releases, is not great. As you suggested I created one sound containing the sequence, but the timing is a bit off. All this may be due to an issue with pinmame... I guess I should try pinmame + the real sound board to confirm.

The other little issue I have (not related to sound) is the "lane change" feature. When pressing the right flipper, the highlighted lanes don't always change, and this can be very frustrating. The lane change works something like 80% of the time.

I used your latest 0.22 github code and things work fine! Thanks!

No, the global timing is good... This is just an issue with the multiball countdown effect (where score displays are used to show a count down, which was pretty innovative at the time). Maybe this part is not emulated well in this pinmame version.

I will check... but for sure it's not a mechanical switch issue. I verified and the switch is responding well 100% of the time.

Oh yes I see... That could be quite powerful!

But in fact I decided to start writing my own code from scratch! I'm going to try to implement the Firepower rules into a new Firepower.ino and then add extra. There is a "deluxe rom" version of Firepower floating around with extra rulesets... It could be interesting to implement those with APC.

Depending on my other activities, it will take me something between 2 weeks and 2 years

Quick question, not sure if it was discussed here yet or no... Which IDE are you using to code ? The Arduino IDE works ok but I wanted to try to use vscode and I have difficulties to build the APC code with it... Any advice ?

Of course! I got started with the base code... Quite some progress already today! Fun!

Quick question... About bumpers and slingshots... are they handled like everything else (some main loop in my code should detected the relevant switch and trigger the matching solenoid) or is there some kind of interrupt to set up for these ?

Thanks, I'll try it out.

Oh yes thanks... I was using the scoring switches of the bumpers instead of the special switches (with indexes > 64)... now it works better!

Still working on my Firepower code for APC... And I enjoy it At this point I'm creating classes to make my ruleset-code cleaner and easier to manage. I love the boot duration when using native Arduino code............. 2 seconds

Quick questions for you AmokSolderer, about blinking lamps in APC...........
- If I don't know the status of a lamp (on, off or blinking) and i want to turn it off.. do i have to call RemoveBlinkLamp() AND TurnOffLamp() ? or is TurnOffLamp() enough ?

awesome!

On my side I'm starting to work on the attract mode for Firepower... I would need the capability to address lamps 1 to 8 in the patterns... (they are playfield inserts). Could you please help with this ? (it's not urgent at all!)

Yes I confirm, you are right!

Making good progress on Firepower... I believe rules are 100% implemented now... I still have to add attract mode, sound, multiball display animation.
But..... the pinball power supply board just died... I guess I have to pause the project a little bit to fix it. Maybe the 40 year old electronic did not like the many power on/off cycles due to debugging.

sweet, thanks! I'll test that as soon as my power supply is fixed.

I have parts on order to fix my power supply.
Thanks ThatOneDude , you're right I'll make sure to have a spare (the one you linked is missing the big capacitor though)

@amoksolderer, in the meantime, do you think I can use a 5VDC power supply to power the APC board (it seems only the 5VDC side of my power supply is down)

I fixed my system 6 power supply... now back in business! yeah!

I just tried this and.... unfortunately putting the settings to "1" is messing up the lamp assignments... both in pinmame mode and in native mode, the game lamp indexes are shifted... and so it's not the right lamps that are turned on and off on the playfield (during both attract mode and gameplay). Or maybe i'm doing something wrong ?

Thanks, I'll try tonight... And as I said earlier, this is for my Firepower attract mode, not critical at all! Enjoy the weather!

Looks good now! Thanks!

Hi all! After a 2 month break, I'm back to my Firepower custom coding!

I'm struggling with a bug right now, maybe AmokSolderer you can help me... In certain conditions, some lamps don't blink after a call to AddBlinkLamp()... I'm not sure why. Any idea what could cause this ? Or any idea how to troubleshoot what is going wrong ?

Replying to myself as I finally fixed it At the end of a game, I was going into attract mode when some lights were still blinking, and I guess it was messing up some timers. Now at the end of a game, before going to attract mode, I have a loop doing a RemoveBlinkLamp() on all 64 lamps, and it fixed my issue.

Thanks! Yes, I'm using the debug mode extensively to "serial print" troubleshooting messages... especially because my displays are numerical only, so I cannot really use them to pass information. However, I have not paid attention to the timer counter in the credit display... Maybe it does not work because my code overrides the number which is displayed here... not sure, but I'll have a look and let you know.

I confirm it's working for my system 6.... and very helpful, thanks!