FreeWPC: Custom software for WPC based machines

[Sonny_Jim]

Hi there,

I am one of the developers of FreeWPC and I've just moved down to Melbourne from the UK  so I'm hoping I'll bump into you lot at some of the shows and meets you have down there.

In a nutshell, FreeWPC is a toolkit that allows you to write custom WPC ROM's from scratch, using C.  No extra equipment is needed apart from a bank EPROM or a copy of Visual Pinball.  This is not a ROM hack as such does not include anything from the WMS/Bally ROM's.

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

Videos:

An old video of the TZ build I am working on:
[ Invalid YouTube link ]

A video of a presentation about FreeWPC I gave at a UK show earlier on this year:

[ajlaird]

Wow, best first post ever!!

It is always exciting to see what highly motivated individuals can do and I applaud the project. Hopefully you will find some willing helpers down under.

Sounds like we need to organise a meet soon...

[Steevsee]

Hi and welcome to Aussie Pinball and Aussie Land.

[ktm450]

  I stumbled across your stuff about 6 months ago, and checked out the TZ rules you have designed. (I have put the correct link in for you as yours didn't work)
https://github.com/SonnyJim/freewpc/blob/v1.0-rc/machine/tz/rules.txt

Very interesting project, must consume mega hours   
I can understand you wanting to improve rules for some games, but what made you guys choose the games you are currently working on? 
Other than BOP and maybe T2, they would seem to me to be complete games with quite complex rulesets.

[Sonny_Jim]

That's for all the positive replies, friendly bunch of peeps over here.

The reason why TZ was chosen as one of the initial FreeWPC tables was due to the amount of toys and features it has (clock, miniplayfield, 4 flippers etc).  This means we can cover a lot of hardware in one box and all of the drivers can be ported very easily to different tables when we get to them.  

Another reason TZ was chosen was because it's a very popular table and once FreeWPC TZ is released I'd like as many people to try it as possible, hence why we haven't made extra hardware a requirement.  My personal opinion is that most people aren't going to drop $600+ to play some different rules, for that amount of money you could buy a whole new table!  As I said before, changing to FreeWPC is as easy as upgrading a ROM, all you need is a $5 eprom and 2 minutes to fit it.

The other reason why WCS, Corvette and TZ were chosen was because those are the tables we own, simple.

We actually have a BOP build that's playable to a certain extent, but after seeing the Dutch guys video I sort of lost interest in it.  BoP is such a good target for FreeWPC though.  The normal ruleset is pants, having a billion target randomly awarded when the next nearest score is 50M is a ridiculous score unbalancer.  Couple that with the fact that the only rule that gets you points is "Shoot the shuttle ramp" it quickly descends into a one shot game.  The ruleset I have in mind is more 'build the robot by doing different things'.

Another good reason to pick BoP is that it is wired and fitted with a 3 ball trough from the factory.  It's physically capable of locking 2 balls on the playfield, but they decided on a two ball multiball.  Doh!  As I've said before, with no hardware mods other than another pinball and an eprom with FreeWPC on it, you could be playing a 3 ball multiball.

Yet another reason why BoP would be a good table to FreeWPC is that it doesn't have a DMD.  It takes a lot of time and effort to draw and sequence DMD animations nicely (hence why Stern have such trouble with it), with an alphanumeric it's a case of just writing some text to a screen, no need to worry about what font, size, position on screen etc etc.

Whoops! I Didn't notice that the link was wrong.  To be honest I just copied and pasted a post that I had written on another forum and obviously it didn't copy properly.  I'll edit the first post now.

[Strangeways]

Looks like a very interesting project. Well done !

I can see potential with Corvette. A great theme but lacking in gameplay. It would be nice to tweak it a little.