FreeWPC News

FreeWPC has undergone numerous changes in the last couple of months. Let me give you a brief update.

The bulk of the activity comes from the fact that two other developers began to test and contribute substantial changes. In the course of their work, I fixed many core bugs that they reported, added many new features, and redesigned several key modules. What was a stable, slow-moving branch approaching a 1.0 release quickly became an active, fast-moving branch with no clear end in sight.

Because of this, the 1.0 release will be delayed for longer than I would like, but that's OK. All of the progress is amazing and 1.0 will be a far better release than it would have otherwise.

I've not had a chance to do much testing on real hardware lately, although the two other devs have. I want to do some verification in a real game again before claiming 1.0. At the moment, I am a bit burned out by all of the recent activity, so I may be taking a break before continuing that.

Until then, the github repository continues to accumulate minor changes here and there, and is also available as a source for the latest code.

In other news, I've started a new branch of the code that tracks the development of all the non-WPC platforms. This is very much a work in progress, but there is already ground work there for building the FreeWPC system to run on Sega Whitestar, Pinball 2000, and the P-ROC driver board.

Lastly, I've found that just running the native build of FreeWPC on my meek little Linux box, I am able to reschedule at latencies of 2-3ms without much trouble at all. Although this is not quite good enough, it is encouraging to know that FreeWPC running under Linux on dedicated PC-type hardware is very close to being possible.

I've tagged version 0.99 and uploaded new binaries for all currently supported games. There are no major rules changes in any changes; this is just a maintenance release to clean up some minor issues in the operating system. A more detailed description of the changes will be posted later.

We'll have one more round of cleanup before tagging 1.0, a major milestone, but far from the end of the road. There are many other changes in the works that won't be part of 1.0. It should be a fun year.

2009 is almost over, and as the holidays approach, I won't have as much time to devote to FreeWPC as usual. But there are several activities going on which I can share.

Many changes have already been posted to the online repository since version 0.97 was released. Among them: some DMD optimizations, an "animated" FreeWPC logo, faster compile time, an improved high score/initials entry effect, and a smarter image linker that can do as-needed compression. As always, code cleanup and documentation updates continue to occur as I find them.

Most of my time lately has been spent on an experimental new feature that allows FreeWPC to be wrapped within a Python-based GUI; this will allow for several possibilities, such as automated testing and an improved user interface for the native mode build.

Version 0.99 will have these and other minor changes; it will not be a major release. The intent is to clean up as much as possible before officially declaring version 1.0, sometime early next year.

Version 0.97 has been tagged and released online. This is mostly a bugfix release, which includes some testing on real hardware.

This time, it's not me doing the testing: a fellow in the UK, named Ewan Meadows, has gotten involved and has put the code into his Twilight Zone machine. He's been doing a great job testing, reporting issues, and keeping me on the ball to fix things. He's also getting into the code himself and will hopefully be contributing some nifty features really soon now. Thanks Ewan!

Meanwhile, I've been jumping about the code fixing little things here and there. Another formal release will probably happen sometime later this month. Most of the changes are in native mode enhancements; the major common code change so far is a much better ball search algorithm.