Is Final Lap working good in MAME with 270 wheel?

[flash951]

Is Final Lap working good in MAME with 270 wheel? Also it seems to have some problems with the sound output, screaming noises in the speakers?

[geecab]

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how good the Final Lap series works with a 270 wheel (I use a 360 wheel).
At the time I built my cab (a year or so ago) I really wanted the Final Lap series to work well. I've not tested Final Lap 1, 2 and 3 in the latest version of MAME, but certainly on version 0.147 (The version I am running) these were the problems I observed at the time:-

Problem 1: Final Lap, Final Lap 2 and Final Lap 3 all have the same continuous 'buzzing' noise as soon as you enter a credit. Its really annoying and makes them rather unplayable (IMO). I can't seem to do/select anything to make it go away.

Problem 2:  Final Lap,  Final Lap 2 and Final Lap 3 all have the same weird graphics glitch which when you go past certain signs at the side of the road they flash momentarily enlarged on the center of the screen. Pretty distracting, but no where near as annoying as Problem 1.

Problem 3: Final Lap R immediately after you choose your circuit, the screen momentarily gets filled with rubbish (for about half a second), then is seems to sort itself out and you get to see you car on the starting grid.

Problem 4: Final Lap R while playing the game there is a thin green/white bar at the bottom of the screen which scrolls left or right when you turn a corner.

I ended up hacking mame to improve problems 1 & 2. To get rid of Problem 1, I managed to work out the addresses of the sound ROMs that were causing the buzzing, so I stopped mame from loading those addresses. To get rid of Problem 2, I worked out how mame was enlarging the scenery bitmaps, and stopped mame from printing stuff that went beyond a certain zoom factor. It all sounds pretty hacky I know , but it made things much more playable. If you are experiencing the same problems and would like me to go into detail how I hacked mame let me know (or if you'd rather not tamper with the mame source, I could alway upload my older version of mame for you to try)?

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah 1 - 3 are pretty borked.... 

R runs fine though.  That green bar is actually in the original game (it should be cropped out of the viewable area, which you can do with an artwork file) and the garbling of the sprites isn't present anymore. 

[flash951]

Impressive what you managed to fix. Final Lap 1, I've sat it to Free Play, so hopefully the screaming sound will not be a problem next time, the gas pedal starts the game, so no need to touch the coin button at all. 270 steering wheel is original, it worked today, I guess the game needed a restart when I tested it last time. The wheel is really sensitive, but I think that is pretty original. A cool feature of this game I think, is the ability to link up to 8 players.

[Howard_Casto]

How in the world did you set it to freeplay?  When I get in the service menu I can't even navigate and the dips in the menu aren't exactly labeled right.

[flash951]

Use Gas + Gear shift to navigate. Maybe free play is not an option, haven't tested jet.

[Howard_Casto]

It's not and even with that knowledge navigating the service menu is next to impossible. 

I think a cheat file might be a better option... surely adding an insaine number of credits like 100 at startup shouldn't be too hard.

[Howard_Casto]

I looked into it and don't see an easy solution other than the hack you already did.  The game doesn't have the bookkeeping info hooked up, meaning if you put in 1000 coins and press the reset key or exit the game, they are all gone.  Since any attempt to add a coin mid-game would trigger the sound, I don't see it happening.

[geecab]

R runs fine though.  That green bar is actually in the original game (it should be cropped out of the viewable area, which you can do with an artwork file) and the garbling of the sprites isn't present anymore.

Cool! Good to know Final Lap R sprite glitch has been sorted Also also good to know the green bar is in the original game (I think I may have used mame's display options to enlarge & position the display output so that the green bar was off-screen).

Impressive what you managed to fix. Final Lap 1, I've sat it to Free Play, so hopefully the screaming sound will not be a problem next time

Well I'm not sure you can call them fixes, these were dirty hacks  Shame the free play idea is not an option. That sounded like a nice work around to me.

If I get a chance this weekend, I'll try to test the latest version of mame with the Final Lap 1,2 & 3, see if the situation is the same as it was back in v0147. I'll then add my hacks/fix to the new source and I'll post how I did it.

[Howard_Casto]

Well from what I've read, it's due to sound effects not having a proper dump.  The game tries to play the coin drop sound it craps out.  Likewise this is why the background music doesn't play.  So we need a mame dev that knows how to add samples to a game.  Even without the properly dumped sounds, re-directing the engine to play a sample would kill the buzzing and it'd be an acceptable fix. 

[geecab]

Well from what I've read, it's due to sound effects not having a proper dump.  The game tries to play the coin drop sound and it craps out.  Likewise this is why the background music doesn't play.

That makes sense. Also I forgot to mention, after I 'fixed' the coin sample buzzing, I noticed the buzzing might start in the game when the car crashed into something. So I also needed locate and stop the crash sample from being loaded from ROM (So you never hear the car crash on my 'fixed' version). Hm, my 'fix' just sounds better and better the more I talk about it 

So we need a mame dev that knows how to add samples to a game.  Even without the properly dumped sounds, re-directing the engine to play a sample would kill the buzzing and it'd be an acceptable fix. 

That would be really cool. But I'm sort of thinking a mame dev's answer would be to recommend we get better ROM dumps (If indeed the ROMs are the problem, maybe mame is interpreting them wrongly (although this is doubtful)). You've got me thinking now though, I might be able to do what you suggest, identifying the point at which mame's sound engine tries to trigger a bad sample (AKA. tries to play something in the ROM address range that I avoided loading), and instead use it to trigger a sample from the 'samples' directory. I'll try and have a hack this weekend :O)

[comicalman]

did anyone every get a version of MAME working to solve the coin-in and other sound issues?