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vpinball / pinmame

PinMAME - Pinball Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
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Possible to map NBA Fastbreak serial link to Windows COM port #289

Open tomlogic opened 1 week ago

tomlogic commented 1 week ago

I'd like to explore the NBA Fastbreak communications protocol, and it would be helpful if I can use PinMAME as one side of that communications.

What sort of work would I need to do in order to make that happen? Did the WPC-95 hardware use that serial port for other purposes? Is it already emulated, or would I need to hook in emulation of the 16C450 UART at the correct address? And potentially implement an emulator for the features of the 16C450 that WPC-95 used?

I've done some work in PinMAME before. I improved the P-ROC integration, and I brought the Demolition Man simulator from "prelim" to "full" status, so I'm comfortable digging into the codebase. I'd probably work to get Fastbreak's simulator into "full" status as well, at least so I can use the keyboard to simulate activity while I log the communications with a physical machine.

toxieainc commented 6 days ago

I don't know the answer to any of these questions, but i think it would be awesome to have something like that. Maybe a bit more abstractly packaged, so that the COM port would only be one possible implementation? (sounds more future proof ;))

So please go ahead, we'll be happy to take the changes..