> > fires except crazed pokérom'rs and people who found it a technical
> achievement,...and
>
> I'm inclined to disagree with this.
>
> The score/bonus display you are referring to is known as DMD (Dot Matrix Display).
> Different Pinball games depending on what company created/released it have different
> looks to them, and probably different CPUs/hardware which makes these displays
> possible.
I had initially written DMD, but then thought about it and just generalized it since there are other forms of digital displays that they have had. Old-school segmented displays...and I think there have been pinball games with an LCD....haven't there?
>
> I don't care about MAMEs ability to play Visual table recreations from Authors that
> created them in a VP enviroment, but I do care about documentation of the hardware
> and low level emulation of the individual components/instructions if possible.
<...>
>
> Since this hardware was present in Arcades it should be preserved. However, since
> there is no way to dump a pinball tables flipper/bumper etc. I don't necessarily ever
> expect to run that part in MAME. Of course anything is indeed possible
I agree with all of this, hence why I have wondered (and hoped/desired) for it to fully merge into MAME at some point...I was just lumping that into "technical achievement". After all, without the gameplay elements (ie table simulation) the sounds and display features are, at best, something that you would be manually triggering via mapped switches and/or a test mode. as a "table-less" pinball table isn't going to do too much by itself. Except maybe fail self-tests and/or play an attract mode.
I would think for the majority of people that would just be a passing "hmm, cool." as they read the whatsnew.txt and they might download a few roms and fiddle with them a little, except for the people who go OMG! NEED 2 FIND MOAR NEW ROMZ! and those of us who would mess around with it more and perhaps peruse the source tree.
In other words, I think you're actually agreeing with me other than thinking that I was being too dismissive of people's interest, but I guess that's a matter of opinion. Either way it's neither here nor there until someone does the work needed to make it happen and that is going to involve interest and time from the right person/people since it sounds like there's a lot to it.
I would really love to be able to play Baby Pac-man (and try out that "Granny and the Gators" game which I had never seen or heard of before PinMAME) because that was actually a game I played a bit when I was young, but even the video+pinball games seem to be fairly tied into the table, and even if you did somehow divorce the two, it would be much less of a game (Baby pac relies on it for a few things, like power pellets iirc). Oh, and VPinMAME isn't even an option if you're on a mac, lol. (Although I did try downloading it on a PC for that reason years ago but gave up when I couldn't get things working correctly.)
Someday, perhaps.
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