FREEWPC

[smartbomb2084]

Not sure how long this has been around but it might be a way for you haters to alter a game you don't like to make it play to your liking, that is, if liking something is what you really want. It may, however, not be for your 'average bear'.

http://www.oddchange.com/freewpc/

[Sonny_Jim]

Hi there, I'm one of the FreeWPC developers, I would of got back to you sooner but it took over a week for my registration to be confirmed.

Just to fill you in about the current state of the project we have three main developers:
Brian Dominy (creator of FreeWPC and working on the WCS build)
Hydra (who's working on the FreeWPC Corvette build)
Me (working on the FreeWPC TZ build).

We've also got a few people playtesting for us and we are always on the lookout for more people to help.

At the moment we have playable builds for WCS, TZ and Corvette and we are working on builds for BOP, AFM, T2 and FH. Theoretically any WPC game can be supported. If you want to add support for a machine the first step is filling out a 'Machine Definition' file, which lists all the features that table has. Once this is done, it means it makes it easier for us to start writing new rules and graphics.

The FreeWPC TZ build is fairly complete now and is nearing a public release. I've been running FreeWPC code in my table for ~2 years now (and it did 200+ games at a recent UK show) without any hardware damage and Brian has been running it in his WCS since 2006, so we are fairly confident that it's safe for use. For a list of the rules that we've written for TZ, see here:
https://github.com/SonnyJim/freewpc/blob/v1.0-rc/machine/tz/rules.txt

You do not need any hardware or even a pinball table if you are interested in playing FreeWPC, if you want to run it in Visual Pinball you simply replace the game rom in the zip with one from FreeWPC. If you want to run it in a real table all you need is a blank EPROM to write the software to, it's exactly the same way you would upgrade the original factory software.

FreeWPC is not a ROM hack and does not contain any proprietary code. It is a ground up implementation of a Pinball OS. This means that we are not able to fix bugs in the factory software. Also at present we do not have a finished OS for the WPC sound board (as it is a separate 'computer' to the CPU board), so you are currently limited to the factory sounds and music.

If you are interested in coding for the project, you will need to know a little C but in all honesty I could barely write a helloworld.c before I joined the project. Brian's code is very well documented and he's provided a lot of high level API's to make it easy for even spods like me to get results. The development environment takes about an hour or so to setup and we have HOWTO's for setting it up on both Windows and Linux available on our Googlecode page. You do not have to setup a dev environment if you are only interested in playtesting, we can send you a precompiled ROM to test.

If you are interested in contributing art, it would be very appreciated as we are mostly just coders at the moment. It is very challenging getting stuff to look good on 128x32 pixels but we have a few tools to make the job a bit easier. One thing to point out is that as it is a GPL project we can't include copyrighted images or rip graphics from the original factory ROMs.

If anyone is interested in helping out, have a look at our website and drop me a line,

http://freewpc.googlecode.com

Cheers

Sonny_Jim

[Sonny_Jim]

Does it work with all original factory hardware?
In other words, are we just going to be burning a ROM chip and shoving it in?

Yep, no modification is needed bar a single ROM swap.

World Cup Soccer, so far as I know, doesn't suffer any any particularly obnoxious rule flaws or dot/sound annoyances (or else I wouldn't own it) so it seems a strange title to reprogram to me. 

It's one of the tables Brian has at home, so it made sense to pick one he was familiar with.  TZ was chosen because it has a lot of different toys/features so we can support a lot of different hardware.  The code is very portable, so we can use it across different tables.  I know that Brian was working on a BoP build, which is *crying out* for a decent ruleset.  For one thing, it's possible to support a 3 ball multiball as it's got a 3 ball trough with all the switches wired!

[Sonny_Jim]

My point was that it would have been better to start with titles that are terrible rather than solid games as a proof of concept.

Trouble is with terrible titles is that they aren't that common, it's actually much easier to find a TZ than a Hurricane for example.  And the idea isn't to be 'better' than the original factory software, but to provide new challenges and things to do, which is especially important for home tables.

I don't think $1,000 is that much of an investment for a multi-year project, particularly when the end result is a better game. 

I'm not sure what you mean by this?  FreeWPC is licensed under the GPL, so anyone is free to download and modify the project.

[Sonny_Jim]

I would have done another title and I don't think that paying $1,000 to get a bad title on hand is that expensive.

Ah I see what you mean.  I'm fully expecting the price of BoP to go up once we have the build finish for it :-)

Anyway, I'll believe it when I see it.  Good luck to your team.

Well, here it is:
http://code.google.com/p/freewpc/wiki/Video

[Sonny_Jim]

I see a three year old video of an unplayable tech demo.  No progress since?

Scroll down the page a bit

FreeWPC TZ Gameplay:



FreeWPC TZ Attract mode:


I can assure you that we have fully playable builds of WCS, TZ and Corvette.  At the moment we are looking for play testers, so if you are interested I can send you some ROM's to try or you can download them from the googlecode site.

[Sonny_Jim]

You'll have to find someone to burn a ROM for you unfortunately or you can fire up Visual Pinball and test it that way.  You can grab the ROM from here:
http://code.google.com/p/freewpc/downloads/detail?name=ftz_dev.zip

One of the reasons why we are taking our time with it is to ensure that when we do finally have a public release, it will be absolutely rock solid, so bear in mind that is a development ROM and it might reset from time to time due to bugs. 

This is down to the hardware watchdog protecting the hardware from harm when it spots a bit of code misbehaving.  As I said before I've been using it in my table for quite a while now with no adverse effects but you understand that I have to say that you fit it AT YOUR OWN RISK. 

If you want to try it out in Visual Pinball, we have to trick Pinmame into loading it,  some quick instructions:

1. Download FreeWPC ROM
2. Unpack tz_94.zip in your $PINMAME/roms to a subdirectory called 'tz_94h'
3. Backup $PINMAME/roms/tz_94h/tz_94h.rom to somewhere
4. rename ftz1_0.rom to tz_94h.rom and copy to $PINMAME/roms/tz_94h/
5. When starting a table in VP,make sure that 9.4H software is selected, some tables give you the option, some don't

Also it's a good idea to join the FreeWPC mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/FreeWPC

[Sonny_Jim]

I finally got around to uploading the FreeWPC presentation we did at the UK Pinball Party: