Adds FX3 colorization support

[GyroJoe]

Adds support for colorizing FX3 frames when using the memory grabber.

To achieve this, a new memory grabber has been added that can determine the name of the current game. (It appears to be the name for the UI skin the menu uses). These names are the same as the ones used for backglass images (e.g. WMS_Monster_Bash).

Once the game name is determined, the palette is loaded, and switched to dynamically. In this way, new colorizations can be loaded without tearing down the entire render graph.

The same altcolor folder location strategy is used as for VPinMame. It also now searches the COM location, using the same trick the installer does.

For now, I only added support for PAL/VNI, but Serum should be feasible - need a colorization for a supported game to test with. I know there has been some churn in the colorization space lately - I tried to avoid changing the logic as much as possible and only moved things to a new ColorizationLoader so the code could be shared. Hopefully this is not disruptive to any on-going refactor work.

[GyroJoe]

Quick screenshot of it in action:

[zesinger]

That's really amazing! Nice addition, thanks! I'd be happy to help for Serum,

[freezy]

Dude, you're killing it! Thanks!

I haven't started the coloring refactoring yet, so I'll review and merge this one first. Cheers!

[freezy]

Had a quick test. Nice!

I'll finish the review later today and push some minor changes. Would be awesome to have this integrated with the other sources as well (FP, PBA).

[freezy]

This is great. A few more things before we merge this:

• Fix the color hue when coloring is disabled, and enabled but no colorization available
• Add the same feature to Future Pinball and Pinball Arcade
• Document the feature in README.md
• Test Serum and PinMAME

I'll have a go at the second and last point.

[freezy]

Serum now working.

[zesinger]

Amazing! Thanks

[GyroJoe]

I'm wondering if we should move all the info on colorization to their own section, rather than having it under each game, since there is a fair amount of overlap.

[freezy]

Yes, that's a good idea. Also, add a table of contents :)

[freezy]

Pinball Arcade is somewhat working, but I had to change the frame format, so 4-bit games don't work right now. Will see if I find a fix and push tomorrow.

[freezy]

Oh, and I just created an IGameNameSource interface and made PBA implement it. @GyroJoe is there any reason you've created a completely new grabber for the name, instead of adding this to the existing one?

[GyroJoe]

I mainly didn't love the idea of that one grabber doing so many different things. It's also running at a different framerate (1 FPS, lol), since the game name is infrequently changing.

[GyroJoe]

Should fix #344, and at least the color part of #258

[freezy]

I mainly didn't love the idea of that one grabber doing so many different things. It's also running at a different framerate (1 FPS, lol), since the game name is infrequently changing.

Okay. I might move it into the original grabber, because a) it allows to abstract the name retrieval across sources and b) have less duplicated code. I'll measure the performance penalty, but my guess is that's it's negligible.

[freezy]

I've pushed the TPA update. @GyroJoe let me know what you think. I didn't touch FX3 yet, but basically you first set up the graphs, and at the end the switching converter, if the source supports it.

[GyroJoe]

I've pushed the TPA update. @GyroJoe let me know what you think. I didn't touch FX3 yet, but basically you first set up the graphs, and at the end the switching converter, if the source supports it.

Clean, and unifies the setup across sources. I implemented this for FX3 and added a new type IDmdColorSource.

One wrinkle with the unified grabber for FX3 is that the game name and the DMD aren't both available at the same point in time. I added a one-time second attempt to get the name if it fails the first time through. This was one advantage of the previous split system I guess, so I never noticed.

[freezy]

Awesome, thanks a lot! Looks much cleaner indeed.

Also thanks for updating .editorconfig, I might tweak it a little more.

[freezy]

So the remaining tasks are Future Pinball, although it's currently only emitting 4-bit frames, which I'd have to convert, and I don't know how accurate the animations and texts are so they'd be recognized by the coloring plugins (FP tables aren't ROM based, so authors re-create the DMD output manually). I'll also spend some time on reorganizing the documentation a little.

@GyroJoe you don't happen to be interested in working on a new pinball simulator based on Unity? ;)

[GyroJoe]

Also thanks for updating .editorconfig, I might tweak it a little more.

A word of warning, the editor in VS for this file is pretty broken. Just change it with a normal text editor.
dotnet/roslyn#54556

[freezy]

For me it's ready to merge now. @GyroJoe if you wanna have a last look, lemme know, otherwise I'll go ahead.

[GyroJoe]

Wow, you went the extra mile with the docs including all the game names.

🚢 it

[lucky01]

@GyroJoe Great new feature ! Thanks for that !
@frezzy I would appreciate instead of making a release with this new feature based on deprecated vni/pal support, to make the next release together with the refactored plugin interface and enable pac support that way. Otherwise it encourages the community to continue to illegally share vni/pal colorization against the will of the authors. We should not repeat history here.

[freezy]

@lucky01 That's an absurd suggestion. This feature was already announced on several Discords, how long do you think it'll take to spread on the forums anyway? It's an open source project, remember.

[lucky01]

@freezy O.K. no problem ! I thought I just ask before I pull the changes into my fork.