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Has anyone considered making a homebrew of or hacking an existing game into a port of the old arcade game Fonz? I remember thinking the cabinet looked cool when I was a kid but the game really had nothing to do with Happy Days, just a motorcycle racing game as best I remember. Would be cool to see this one on the VCS :)

Edited by sandmountainslim
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I've never seen this game before, so I looked it up on KLOV.com.  At first I wasn't even sure it was related to Happy Days, but that does appear to be the Fonz on the side of the cabinet.  :)  Will have to see if I have this in MAME and try it out.

 

..Al

835243[/snapback]

 

Unfortunately that's one of the games with no CPU so it is much more difficult to emulate. Hopefully within the next few years we'll start to see some emulation of these games. It's probably more likely that we'll see some hardware emulation on a jamma board first as cpu speed is going to be a problem for a while. 10 gig is a number that's been suggested but that seems a little pessimistic to me.

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Unfortunately that's one of the games with no CPU so it is much more difficult to emulate.  Hopefully within the next few years we'll start to see some emulation of these games.  It's probably more likely that we'll see some hardware emulation on a jamma  board first as cpu speed is going to be a problem for a while.  10 gig is a number that's been suggested but that seems a little pessimistic to me.

835622[/snapback]

Difficult is an understatement, because it's actually impossible to emulate. When you're talking about discrete circuitry, you aren't talking about emulation anymore but instead simulation.

 

You can still write a program that captures the essense of the game, and MAME could probably do it if someone wrote a simulation environment based on the properties (and in some cases, the device physics) of the individual components just as existing simulators do. But I am one of those on the pessimistic side, since I have used these simulators on 2.6 Ghz machines and even relatively simple circuits cannot be simulated in real time.

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Unfortunately that's one of the games with no CPU so it is much more difficult to emulate.  Hopefully within the next few years we'll start to see some emulation of these games.  It's probably more likely that we'll see some hardware emulation on a jamma  board first as cpu speed is going to be a problem for a while.  10 gig is a number that's been suggested but that seems a little pessimistic to me.

835622[/snapback]

Difficult is an understatement, because it's actually impossible to emulate. When you're talking about discrete circuitry, you aren't talking about emulation anymore but instead simulation.

 

You can still write a program that captures the essense of the game, and MAME could probably do it if someone wrote a simulation environment based on the properties (and in some cases, the device physics) of the individual components just as existing simulators do. But I am one of those on the pessimistic side, since I have used these simulators on 2.6 Ghz machines and even relatively simple circuits cannot be simulated in real time.

836815[/snapback]

Hey that sounds cool SIMULATING classic games, maybe the next big thing.
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Difficult is an understatement, because it's actually impossible to emulate.

 

impossible?

 

You can still write a program that captures the essense of the game,

 

As in emulate? :twisted:

 

Would it make any sense that the prototype Atari 2600, which was built from discrete components, on large wire-wrap boards, could not be emulated?

 

Many existing emulators capture the essence of custom hardware, just because a system is built from discrete components does not mean it cannot be emulated.

 

If you don't have a CPU it's just a little harder to reverse engineer because you don't have code to look at and you can't ammortize the engineering over a bunch of games. Nevertheless some very complex and custom hardware has already been emulated.

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Difficult is an understatement, because it's actually impossible to emulate.

 

impossible?

 

You can still write a program that captures the essense of the game,

 

As in emulate? :twisted:

no, see below. Emulation and simulation are similar terms but are not the same thing.

Would it make any sense that the prototype Atari 2600, which was built from discrete components, on large wire-wrap boards, could not be emulated?

the 6507 is not built from discrete components, nor is the ROM that runs on the 6507.

Many existing emulators capture the essence of custom hardware, just because a system is built from discrete components does not mean it cannot be emulated.

 

If you don't have a CPU it's just a little harder to reverse engineer because you don't have code to look at and you can't ammortize the engineering over a bunch of games. Nevertheless some very complex and custom hardware has already been emulated.

838971[/snapback]

Emulation vs. simulation is just a matter of semantics.

 

Emulation is running of software on a platform that the software was not intended for, accepting the same input and producing the same results. Emulation of a CPU can be 100% accurate.

 

Simulation is reproducing the effects of some real process by mathematical modeling it with a program. Simulation can never be 100% accurate.

 

Therefore the 650x core is the emulation, and the translation of those results to the interfaced devices (TIA, RIOT, etc) is simulation.

 

On games like Fonz there is no program to run and no processor to run it on, so it's a simulation.

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Maybe I should be more precise. I implied that a system made up solely of discrete components cannot be emulated. Strictly speaking, one COULD build a CPU and also build a ROM to contain the program to be run on the CPU, completely out of discrete components.

 

But this basically never happens, so it's almost always safe to say that a circuit cannot be emulated.

 

Similarly, one can put a circuit onto an IC. The fact that you make an IC doesn't make it emulatable.

 

In short, if there's no program or no CPU, there's no emulation, regardless of how the program or CPU are made.

 

I should also note that the distinction between the two terms is slight. For example, a 2600 emulator as a whole is called an emulator even though parts of the system are emulated and some simulated.

 

I should shut up now, again because this is all still a question of semantics.

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I've never seen this game before, so I looked it up on KLOV.com.  At first I wasn't even sure it was related to Happy Days, but that does appear to be the Fonz on the side of the cabinet.  :)  Will have to see if I have this in MAME and try it out.

 

..Al

835243[/snapback]

 

Unfortunately that's one of the games with no CPU so it is much more difficult to emulate. Hopefully within the next few years we'll start to see some emulation of these games. It's probably more likely that we'll see some hardware emulation on a jamma board first as cpu speed is going to be a problem for a while. 10 gig is a number that's been suggested but that seems a little pessimistic to me.

835622[/snapback]

Interesting, do you know about how many games of this nature "simulations" of which have yet to be created?

 

..Al

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Interesting, do you know about how many games of this nature "simulations" of which have yet to be created?

 

..Al

839093[/snapback]

There are a lot. All that are known are talked about here:

 

http://www.mameworld.net/discrete/

 

It also explains why MAME doesn't support these, and a little bit about emulation vs. simulation (if anyone cares about this subject)

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A CHALLENGE TO ALL

I challenge anyone to make either a homebrew of or hack an existing game (River Raid, Dukes of Hazzard?) into Fonz.

The reward for pulling off this, the grandest of all arcade ports will be 2 packs of Camel cigarettes 2 Pac Man cartridges and 1 Hohner harmonica sent personally to you via mail from Sandmountainslim :)

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A CHALLENGE TO ALL

I challenge anyone to make either a homebrew of or hack an existing game (River Raid, Dukes of Hazzard?)  into Fonz.

The reward for pulling off this, the grandest of all arcade ports will be 2 packs of Camel cigarettes 2 Pac Man cartridges and 1 Hohner harmonica sent personally to you via mail from Sandmountainslim :)

842714[/snapback]

 

The problem is I don't think anybody has actually played it before. I was around back then and I had never heard of it until you mentioned it. Hard to hack/homebrew a game if you don't know what it looks like or plays like. I just tried to hack Stunt Cycle to make it look more like the arcade game and had a really hard time since it's been 20+ years since I played it and you can't just fire it up in MAME to get a memory refresh. Same deal with this one. :(

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Difficult is an understatement, because it's actually impossible to emulate.

 

impossible?

 

You can still write a program that captures the essense of the game,

 

As in emulate? :twisted:

no, see below. Emulation and simulation are similar terms but are not the same thing.

Would it make any sense that the prototype Atari 2600, which was built from discrete components, on large wire-wrap boards, could not be emulated?

the 6507 is not built from discrete components, nor is the ROM that runs on the 6507.

Many existing emulators capture the essence of custom hardware, just because a system is built from discrete components does not mean it cannot be emulated.

 

If you don't have a CPU it's just a little harder to reverse engineer because you don't have code to look at and you can't ammortize the engineering over a bunch of games. Nevertheless some very complex and custom hardware has already been emulated.

838971[/snapback]

Emulation vs. simulation is just a matter of semantics.

 

Emulation is running of software on a platform that the software was not intended for, accepting the same input and producing the same results. Emulation of a CPU can be 100% accurate.

 

Simulation is reproducing the effects of some real process by mathematical modeling it with a program. Simulation can never be 100% accurate.

 

Therefore the 650x core is the emulation, and the translation of those results to the interfaced devices (TIA, RIOT, etc) is simulation.

 

On games like Fonz there is no program to run and no processor to run it on, so it's a simulation.

839053[/snapback]

 

 

You're making this a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Sure it's impossible to simulate some random circuit in real time. But these games are clocked like any other game. So we only care about what happens on the clock changes, the majority of the time we don't care. Most of the chips can be reduced to simple logic statements. For example drawing the mines in tank breaks down into a line of code using values from the sync chain for input. There's some additional code to limit the minefield to the center of the screen but nothing complex.

 

Mines = (Not (V4 Xor V2) Xor (H4 Xor H2) And (V8 And H8) )

 

(A while back I wrote a simulator for tank, just doing the mine circuit. Mostly it was just so I could understand how Atari's double resolution worked, once I saw the pixels being drawn on the screen it made sense.)

 

There's no reason it wouldn't be as accurate as anything else in mame which as you mentioned is half simulation anyway. If you look at the original 6 simple games mame emulated 7 years ago most of them still aren't perfect.

 

A cpu is a collection of logic gates just like a tank board. The difference is I can see the gates on my board so it should be easier to emulate correctly than the gates packaged inside a z80.

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You're making this a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Sure it's impossible to simulate some random circuit in real time.  But these games are clocked like any other game.

 

I'll buy that, but I would be surprised if ALL of them are synchronous. Amazingly, the schematic for Fonz is online. I looked very briefly at it, and I can't tell if it's totally synchronous, but it does appear that there are numerous analog components on the board to adjust the gameplay characteristics, which would also require simulation.

 

A cpu is a collection of logic gates just like a tank board.  The difference is I can see the gates on my board so it should be easier to emulate correctly  than the gates packaged inside a z80.

843146[/snapback]

True, but Z80 machine language is a specification, not a collection of logic gates. Emulators emulate the machine language specification, not the gates in the CPU. Simulators simulate a collection of logic gates, among other things.

 

But I digress. While I don't believe that it is semantically correct to call the simulation of these old games emulation, I will concede that people are going to continue to call it whatever they want, correct or not. If enough people call simulation emulation, the lexicon will change and it *will* be correct to call it emulation. This is all getting too philosophical... :ponder:

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You're making this a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Sure it's impossible to simulate some random circuit in real time.  But these games are clocked like any other game.

 

I'll buy that, but I would be surprised if ALL of them are synchronous. Amazingly, the schematic for Fonz is online. I looked very briefly at it, and I can't tell if it's totally synchronous, but it does appear that there are numerous analog components on the board to adjust the gameplay characteristics, which would also require simulation.

 

A cpu is a collection of logic gates just like a tank board.  The difference is I can see the gates on my board so it should be easier to emulate correctly  than the gates packaged inside a z80.

843146[/snapback]

True, but Z80 machine language is a specification, not a collection of logic gates. Emulators emulate the machine language specification, not the gates in the CPU. Simulators simulate a collection of logic gates, among other things.

 

But I digress. While I don't believe that it is semantically correct to call the simulation of these old games emulation, I will concede that people are going to continue to call it whatever they want, correct or not. If enough people call simulation emulation, the lexicon will change and it *will* be correct to call it emulation. This is all getting too philosophical... :ponder:

843436[/snapback]

 

The sound obviously is analog, but that's no different than a lot of cpu games that are in mame, and that can be handled with little overhead using samples and produce an accurate result. Doing it correctly will obviously be more of a hit as people are finding out in mame now with the recent migrations from samples to circuit simulation.

 

A lot of the cirrcuits in these games are common to other games, I would argue that's a sort of specification, granted you don't know what it is :) But there's a lot of undocumented z80 opcodes too. The other day I noticed some Mame Devs arguing over what exactly a z80 opcode does and in what order, after 7 years you'd think they'd have that nailed down.

 

 

I don't want to argue semantics either. I'm just saying death race on your PC is coming, It just needs someone who really knows their stuff, PC programming and EE both. My native PC language is VB so my little tank program is a little slow even with just the sync and mine cirucits. but if it was in C, and on a fast computer it could work. Especially if they picked a standared res game instead of 450x900 or whatever tank was.

 

Personally I don't care that much about emulation, but I would like to see them done in cpld's on a jamma board.

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  • 2 weeks later...
A CHALLENGE TO ALL

I challenge anyone to make either a homebrew of or hack an existing game (River Raid, Dukes of Hazzard?)  into Fonz.

The reward for pulling off this, the grandest of all arcade ports will be 2 packs of Camel cigarettes 2 Pac Man cartridges and 1 Hohner harmonica sent personally to you via mail from Sandmountainslim :)

842714[/snapback]

Ok , looks like I am gonna have to "sweeten the deal" a bit :) I am willing to throw in an unopened 8track tape titled "Fonzie Favorites" with a big picture of the Fonz on front to the brave soul who can pull this off ;)

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A CHALLENGE TO ALL

I challenge anyone to make either a homebrew of or hack an existing game (River Raid, Dukes of Hazzard?)  into Fonz.

The reward for pulling off this, the grandest of all arcade ports will be 2 packs of Camel cigarettes 2 Pac Man cartridges and 1 Hohner harmonica sent personally to you via mail from Sandmountainslim :)

842714[/snapback]

Ok , looks like I am gonna have to "sweeten the deal" a bit :) I am willing to throw in an unopened 8track tape titled "Fonzie Favorites" with a big picture of the Fonz on front to the brave soul who can pull this off ;)

851264[/snapback]

 

I think you're less looking for a "brave soul" and more rather, someone who knows this game... or even better, has it. Neither of which is very likely at the moment. :P And even if they could.. how would you know if it's accurate or not. Have you played it? I'm a child of the 70's EM arcade and I've never seen this thing (or the game it's based on) either :P

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A CHALLENGE TO ALL

I challenge anyone to make either a homebrew of or hack an existing game (River Raid, Dukes of Hazzard?)  into Fonz.

The reward for pulling off this, the grandest of all arcade ports will be 2 packs of Camel cigarettes 2 Pac Man cartridges and 1 Hohner harmonica sent personally to you via mail from Sandmountainslim :)

842714[/snapback]

Ok , looks like I am gonna have to "sweeten the deal" a bit :) I am willing to throw in an unopened 8track tape titled "Fonzie Favorites" with a big picture of the Fonz on front to the brave soul who can pull this off ;)

851264[/snapback]

 

I think you're less looking for a "brave soul" and more rather, someone who knows this game... or even better, has it. Neither of which is very likely at the moment. :P And even if they could.. how would you know if it's accurate or not. Have you played it? I'm a child of the 70's EM arcade and I've never seen this thing (or the game it's based on) either :P

852148[/snapback]

 

I have saw it , it was at the skating rink when I was around 6 or 7 years old but I havent saw/played it since :( I was just a motorcycle racing game in black and white so Im sure it wouldnt be hard to pass almost any race game off as Fonz as long as the sprites were changed to bikes. I can sweeten the deal no more the above prizes are better than what is awarded in most contests :) especially the unopened Fonzie Favorites 8 track :) Find THAT at Wal Mart :D

Edited by sandmountainslim
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Since the screenshot doesn't show anything besides the player character (overlay?), such a homebrew or hack could be anything. Like hacking Enduro (tho really, it should be reverse-engineered to remove Enduro aspects like weather conditions/night transitions, and the counter changed to be a timer up to 100 seconds).

Fonz.zip

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