I'm curious if anybody has made the music for Williams F-14 Tomcat available in a format that can be played on the computer, such as .WAV or .MP3.

I've been looking for an F-14 for at least ten years and haven't seen a one, but the last time I saw one around 1990 or 1991 I was struck by the music emitted by that particular game. I've found a couple of other Williams pins that have been ported to emulators and included a .MP3 music pack to go along with the game, but I haven't found one for this pin.

Thanks in advance for any help on this.

Try reading the pinmame.txt file. I know it's long and messy, but if you read it there's a reward waiting for you.

> I'm curious if anybody has made the music for Williams F-14 Tomcat available in
> a format that can be played on the computer, such as .WAV or .MP3.
>
> I've been looking for an F-14 for at least ten years and haven't seen a one, but
> the last time I saw one around 1990 or 1991 I was struck by the music emitted by
> that particular game. I've found a couple of other Williams pins that have been
> ported to emulators and included a .MP3 music pack to go along with the game,
> but I haven't found one for this pin.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help on this.
>

> Try reading the pinmame.txt file. I know it's long and messy, but if you read it
> there's a reward waiting for you.

Thanks for the tip. :)

I installed Visual PinMAME 1.10 (Dec 23 2001), then got the ROM set from the Williams website, then ran the test from the installation menu. The alphanumeric display for that pin came up, but the "Now You Die!" attract mode voice plays *REALLY SLOWLY*, there doesn't seem to be any music, the AND (alphanumeric display) refreshes much slower than the real thing, and I have yet to figre out which key combination is the game's "start" button. (I already figured out how to coin up the board).
So that's where I sit now.

I also noticed the only executable in my VPinMAME folder is SETUP.EXE. Is this correct, or should there be another executable in that folder someplace?
I saw a reference to a VPinMameTest.exe and its associated icon on one of the screens in the setup manual, but there was no such critter in my installation.

Sorry about all the questions... I might be an arcade veteran, but I'm new to emulators. :)

My comp. is an AMD-K6/II at 500MHz if that's any help for figuring this mess out.

(EDIT): I did get the music to play in test mode, but it's still very, very, very slow; even with the display setting to "compact", the sampling rate reduced to 11025Hz, and antialiasing set to "0". I guess a 500MHz CPU just doesn't cut it?

(ANOTHER EDIT:) I tried the DOS version of PinMame, and it doesn't even load the ROM images before it goes tits up.
It gives the following message before putting all four legs in the air:
Exception at EIP=005F49EB: INTEGER DIVIDE BY ZERO

(And yet another edit): After blowing up a floppy drive and finally getting VisualPinMAME transferred to another computer, I have met with at least acceptable results. Apparently, it doesn't like AMD processors too much; it does considerably better on a PII 350MHz MMX.
If I set the sample rate to 7168, it plays about 80-90% of the time without getting scratchy.
So I can put this subject to bed.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction and getting F-14 Tomcat in my hands. :)

Wow, sorry to hear you're having so much trouble. :(

Yes we removed the need for the vpinmametest.exe. The testing can now all be done from the setup.exe program. You are correct, there's no other .exe in there. VPinmame is a windows COM object in .DLL form.

As for performance, are you running vpinmame by itself, or running the table along with it?

By itself, aka from setup.exe testmode, it should be clean @ 500Mhz. Dunno about playing the actual visual pinball/pinmame table.. That could slow it down alot.


> > Try reading the pinmame.txt file. I know it's long and messy, but if you read
> it
> > there's a reward waiting for you.
>
> Thanks for the tip. :)
>
> I installed Visual PinMAME 1.10 (Dec 23 2001), then got the ROM set from the
> Williams website, then ran the test from the installation menu. The
> alphanumeric display for that pin came up, but the "Now You Die!" attract mode
> voice plays *REALLY SLOWLY*, there doesn't seem to be any music, the AND
> (alphanumeric display) refreshes much slower than the real thing, and I have yet
> to figre out which key combination is the game's "start" button. (I already
> figured out how to coin up the board).
> So that's where I sit now.
>
> I also noticed the only executable in my VPinMAME folder is SETUP.EXE. Is this
> correct, or should there be another executable in that folder someplace?
> I saw a reference to a VPinMameTest.exe and its associated icon on one of the
> screens in the setup manual, but there was no such critter in my installation.
>
> Sorry about all the questions... I might be an arcade veteran, but I'm new to
> emulators. :)
>
> My comp. is an AMD-K6/II at 500MHz if that's any help for figuring this mess
> out.
>
> (EDIT): I did get the music to play in test mode, but it's still very, very,
> very slow; even with the display setting to "compact", the sampling rate reduced
> to 11025Hz, and antialiasing set to "0". I guess a 500MHz CPU just doesn't cut
> it?
>
> (ANOTHER EDIT:) I tried the DOS version of PinMame, and it doesn't even load the
> ROM images before it goes tits up.
> It gives the following message before putting all four legs in the air:
> Exception at EIP=005F49EB: INTEGER DIVIDE BY ZERO
>
> (And yet another edit): After blowing up a floppy drive and finally getting
> VisualPinMAME transferred to another computer, I have met with at least
> acceptable results. Apparently, it doesn't like AMD processors too much; it
> does considerably better on a PII 350MHz MMX.
> If I set the sample rate to 7168, it plays about 80-90% of the time without
> getting scratchy.
> So I can put this subject to bed.
>
> Thanks for pointing me in the right direction and getting F-14 Tomcat in my
> hands. :)
>

> As for performance, are you running vpinmame by itself, or running the table
> along with it?

So far, I've only run just the the test program by itself.



> By itself, aka from setup.exe testmode, it should be clean @ 500Mhz. Dunno about
> playing the actual visual pinball/pinmame table.. That could slow it down alot.

It's totally "unplayable" on my 500MHz machine, and no table was used. Just the vpinmame test program all by itself. (My goal was only to hear the music play; a viewable table would have only been a bonus).

I did everything I could reasonably do to free up processor time. The screen mode was set to 640x480 at 256 colors, screensavers & wallpaper were removed, and I ran vpinmame.exe by itself straight off a fresh boot with no other applications open or even on the task bar. In vpinmame itself, I set the display to "compact", set antialiasing to 0%, and tried all kinds of rediculously low numbers for the sampling rate; from 4096 on up.
The music & SFX play at about half-speed, and they're all chopped up and distorted.

On my other 350MHz machine, it works better - that is, the music plays at normal speed and even sounds OK - but every 8 or 10 seconds it becomes garbled for 2-3 seconds and then returns to normal. This goes on for as long as the music is allowed to play; and happens both in attract mode and diagnostics mode. The backboard display looks fine; though Tomcat uses a fairly simple alphnumeric display (compared to newer pins) with very limited number of lit pixels in the vpinmame window, so it should't be chewing up that much more CPU time. I might try a couple of the newer Williams pins and see how they do in comparison.
I actually had the best results on my 350MHz PII MMX by setting the sampling rate to 11025. Otherwise I tried the same setup as the 500MHz AMD K6/2 machine - minimal Windows settings, 256 color screen, no pinball table, and the most CPU-conservative settings I could achieve within vpinmame itself.

I also attempted to run it from Safe mode on both machines, but vpinmame reports some sound driver (DirectAudio or something similar) is missing or couldn't be initialised, and crashes. (No programs that need to access the sound card run from Safe mode, so it wasn't a shock to see that vpinmame didn't like that mode either). :)

I guess that's it for now.
If you need specific information on either or both computers, I'll provide you with everything I know about them. Thank you very much for your help.

> but every 8 or 10 seconds it becomes garbled for 2-3
> seconds and then returns to normal.

goto directx diagnostics and change sound acceleration to basic acceleration , that should fix it.

>
> > but every 8 or 10 seconds it becomes garbled for 2-3
> > seconds and then returns to normal.
>
> goto directx diagnostics and change sound acceleration to basic acceleration ,
> that should fix it.

Thanks for the pointer.
It still crackles a bit every now and then, but it's NOT GARBLED anymore. And this I *can* live with until I come across a better computer.

An odd 1/8 byte of info... if you let the machine sit in attract mode for a couple of hours, sound 10 (the main song) will come on and play for at least 5-7 minutes, get ended by one of the ball drain sounds (sound 12), then restart and play for about another 5 minutes or so. It'll do this every two or three hours or so (sorry I haven't actually *timed* it) if the game is left unattended. :)

I'm not 100% sure if the real machine did this, but I have the distinct impression it did. I guess Williams wanted you to put a quarter in there just to shut it up. :D

Another thing is if you run the music test in diagnostics, then exit diagnostics with a song playing, it will continue to play in attract mode until a higher priority sound effect squashes it.
Try it: hit 8, 7, 8 (brings up music/sound test) and wait until sound 10 comes up, then quickly press 9.
Try it with sound 13 or 14 too. :)

If anyone has a real F-14 Tomcat I wonder if that will work.
Run the music test and then slam switch it at the right moment.


(EDIT... later today)
After setting the DirectX thing to basic acceleration, it still made scratchy sounds and hiccupted every now and again.. but when I increased the sampling rate back up to 11025, all that stopped, and it plays almost PERFECTLY now.

All I need to do now is figure out which key combination emulates the pin's "Start" button. :-)

> >
> > > but every 8 or 10 seconds it becomes garbled for 2-3
> > > seconds and then returns to normal.
> >
> > goto directx diagnostics and change sound acceleration to basic acceleration ,
> > that should fix it.
>
> Thanks for the pointer.
> It still crackles a bit every now and then, but it's NOT GARBLED anymore. And
> this I *can* live with until I come across a better computer.
>
> An odd 1/8 byte of info... if you let the machine sit in attract mode for a
> couple of hours, sound 10 (the main song) will come on and play for at least 5-7
> minutes, get ended by one of the ball drain sounds (sound 12), then restart and
> play for about another 5 minutes or so. It'll do this every two or three hours
> or so (sorry I haven't actually *timed* it) if the game is left unattended. :)
>
> I'm not 100% sure if the real machine did this, but I have the distinct
> impression it did. I guess Williams wanted you to put a quarter in there just
Attract Sounds
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