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FREEWPC

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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:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on August 31, 2011, 02:10:37 pm ---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?

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


--- Quote ---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. 

--- End quote ---
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:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on August 31, 2011, 03:09:33 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
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.


--- Quote ---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. 

--- End quote ---
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:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on August 31, 2011, 03:38:40 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
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 :-)


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

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

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