Just one comment to that magic method we ripped off or implemented directly using your patents: pin2dmd just applies a bit mask to a frame (or plane) and calculates a hash over the result. This is very obvious and straight forward and nothing innovative. I'm quite sure you will never get patent protection for such an easy thing outside the US. To further enlighten the interested reader, you may quote that part of your parents that describes exactly that simple principle.

Br Steve

I assume this is pulled out of this patent US20120190440, just to give the complete context. Not sure what exactly to read out of this figure even if I add the description from the text. But I did not even read the document, until Randy starts complaining. And I'm not sure whether if would have been helpful or confusing.

The only thing pin2dmd does is masking and hashing. so maybe we use this part.

We do not have a lookup table, nor do we have an address buffer or doing anything in parallel. And honestly: what's innovative about masking (or normalizing) a piece of data and then creating a hash or a message digest? This is so commonly used in various applications like digital signatures and many more

US20120190440_-_Google-Suche (resized).png

What I read from that is simply: you what to use (or abuse) patents to protect your business. If one follows your argumentation you couldn't build frame detection / tagging at all. Also linking whatever information to such a frame tag should be protected by your patent? So no one could implement a hash map or binary search?

My understanding is that putting such simple operations like masking, hashing, looking up some information together should not be protectable by patents at all. The US patents laws are more like an exception here, where everything like "one-click-order" can be protected by patents. This is more an innovation killer than anything else.

But you are right: in the end anybody should form an opinion and decide for one solution or the other: either buy colorDMD as a ready to use professional product with nice colorizations or give the community project a try (or even contribute) which still has lots of DIY.

I thought we were talking about colorDMD and your patents? Yes we do something similar as colorDMD does, because we are going for the same goal: colorizing pinball dmd frames. But the way we do it is different in various aspects from colorDMD: different hardware, different firmware, also different algorithms (just guessing: I never looked at a colorDMD device, I don't own one).

What you are trying to do is to suppress the use of basic building blocks like hashing or masking, just because you have a vague description in you patent.

I never claimed that go DMD isn't kind of a copy of a Run DMD. It was clearly inspired by the work of Torbjörn, which is explicitly mentioned on the goDMD site. But no one has a problem with that (except you maybe). Neither Torbjörn nor the distributor guy (don't remember the name) ever approached me. It's just an alternative project. Each has its pro's and con's, so just let the user decide, which he likes more.

Of course technically everything is different / nothing is copied: hardware is different, firmware as well and "content" anyway. So what's your point here?

There are various sources for alternative sounds, in the post I was mentioning two of them. And the pinsound creators did not create the sounds, most of them are modifications / rips from roms or created by the community. Are you really saying just because someone build a replacement soundcard for pinball machines, no one else should try something similar with a small controller or SOC like Raspi?

Again everybody can choose: buy a pinsound as a ready to use product with support for a lot of machine types and professional support or play around with some DIY project.

BTW: there's many sound card replacements out there for pinball machines with different features.

Steve

The only sentence I could agree is: "Now let each one decide and choose". As some of you may know I'm one of the two bad german guys Luis is referring to. I've never talked to him personally, so I'm not exactly sure what makes him so upset. In the beginning Lucky (Joerg) even talked about collaboration, but he started to use older versions of our open source software with his product and so we finally didn't get to an agreement.

In the meantime he develops hardware and software himself, published all kind of information in this thread, so everybody can see what he's doing. I curious to see the magic editor in action, if a first version is available. And then: let the people decide.

- Steve

I just want to mention that the pin2dmd editor is open source and there is also some documentation to the file formats itself. So if somebody volunteers to create kind of a converter or export plugin, it should be possible to get some kind of "cross compatibility". But it also heavily depends what features are supported by the controllers firmware.

Yes an editor, some (or at least one) colorized game and a firmware able to display such a colored game on a real machine would be nice.

Maybe it help to provide some numbers: these displays use 2 led panels each with 64*32 pixels. Power consumption of the LEDs is controlled by switching them on and off at a high frequency so basically the duty cycle. For single rows there is normally no limiting of current which makes the panel rows LEDs burn easily if the driver fails.
Max duty cycle of all RGB LED (white) leads to an average of 4 mA per led at 5v. In a 4096 pixel display this is 16A!! And you can drive them higher I've tested this.

But never the less this is only theory. These panels are so bright that in pinball machines or those pinball clocks the power consumption is around 4-5 Amps depending on brightness settings, what is actually shown and pallettes used.

Obviously all white pixels requires most, but this is only rarely shown on a pinball.

Maybe one thing to add: I use these panels in four of my machines and I always add an extra switching power supply with 5v and 7A just to be safe.

I can't help but wonder if it really was a good idea to rebuild everything from scratch on your own. It is a pity that we didn't manage to agree on a common approach ... at least make the file formats interchangeable (for colorization).
So sad ...

Pin2dmd isn't a product. It's still a DIY project for people that like to build their own display replacement. You only need an acrylic mounting frame, two led panels, a shield, a Nucleo Dev board and some cheap electronic parts. Easy to assemble. I run three of these self build in my machines, never have had any problems.

It's true that customer of GGS had reported serveral problems with GGS, but there is no business relationship between Dom (GGS) and pin2dmd. Dom was offering ready to use kits that can be used with pin2dmd firmware. Just like pinballsp does (or did).

Br Steve

http://vpuniverse.com/forums/topic/3702-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/

I would have loved to see an open format for game colorizations, so that people doing game colorizations could do it for more than just one hardware and everybody could use it.

Maybe there is one editor or two, one display hardware or more color codings should be interchangeable.

Regarding editors or display hardware let people choose what they like best. Be it dmdmk66 or pin2dmd or something else.

/Steve

Hey Luis, very nice that you finally also have an editor. I've tried it today, but was not able to load a dump?!? Working on win7 64bit, create new 128x32 project, then "add dump" loading e.g. from your examples "lw3-2.08-dump.txt.gz" -> "Error importing, make sure the dump ..."

What do I wrong? Missed something?

Br Steve

for swd you only need swdio and swdclk (and common ground of course). I would power the board otherwise not with the 3v3. for the mk66 maybe reset is necessary to stop the mcu, stm works without reset.
my "Luis" board picture attachedIMG_20210202_205847_1 (resized).jpg