03919: salamand & clones, other Konami sets with VLM5030: VLM5030 sound is unfiltered

ID	Category [?]	Severity [?]	Reproducibility	Date Submitted	Last Update
03919	Sound	Minor	Always	Jul 3, 2010, 18:38	Jan 3, 2022, 14:50

Tester	Ace	View Status	Public	Platform	MAMEUI
Assigned To		Resolution	Open	OS
Status [?]	Confirmed			Driver	konami/nemesis.cpp
Version	0.138u2	Fixed in Version		Build
		Fixed in Git Commit		Github Pull Request #

Summary	03919: salamand & clones, other Konami sets with VLM5030: VLM5030 sound is unfiltered
Description	There appears to be a filter of some kind applied to sound coming out of the VLM5030 in Konami games that is missing in MAME. A particular example is Salamander and Life Force's speech. I've attached 2 sound clips each containing 2 voice samples, one from MAME and one from GameStone's recording of his Salamander arcade board.
Steps To Reproduce
Additional Information
Github Commit

Flags	Verified with Original
Regression Version
Affected Sets / Systems	salamand & clones, other Konami sets with VLM5030

Attached Files	Salamander_voice_samples_MAME.ogg (32,707 bytes) Jul 3, 2010, 18:38
Attached Files	Salamander_voice_samples_original_PCB.ogg (26,392 bytes) Jul 3, 2010, 18:38

No.06329 Tafoid Administrator Jul 3, 2010, 21:27	I'm pretty sure the fact that audio isn't perfect in these Konami games has been made abundantly clear with your reports over the last few months. When will it be fixed.. god only knows. I hate to sound snippy or upset, but I don't see the point in completely nitpicking stuff which is already known to need work.
No.06331 Ace Tester Jul 4, 2010, 02:42	Sorry. I just can't stand inaccuracies in emulators and feel the need to nitpick every little flaw I find. Although I can propose some fixes for some of the Konami games that have sound issues(not this particular one, sadly), but I don't know how accurate my fixes are to the original sound chips and sound processors(and the original arcade board, for that matter). Since anything that's not 100% exactly like the original hardware appears to be frowned upon on MAME Testers, I doubt these fixes will be applied in future MAME releases, but I don't think it would hurt to give it a shot.
No.06332 Tafoid Administrator Jul 4, 2010, 03:03	I can understand the devotion. Apologizes again if it came across too harshly - I don't want to discourage anyone from posting legitimate bugs related to emulation. 'Filtering' is a thing that most of the games in MAME are missing and are most commonly discrete components which simply haven't been implemented. It's just that if we file bugs for every single game which does not have his hooked up, we'd double our bug total overnight. That is where my irritation was coming from. It's my problem, I'll deal with it.
No.06333 Fujix Administrator Jul 4, 2010, 08:02 edited on: Jul 4, 2010, 08:06	Probably it is not a simple problem whether it is filtered or not. According to the chip driver author, the current VLM5030 was made by brute force I/O signal comparison of the real chip, although, it is still a guess work and imperfect largely. Regarding VLM5030, ultimately we have to dump the internal chip program for perfect emulation. Maybe we need to add an imperfect flag to VLM5030.
No.06335 Stiletto Developer Jul 6, 2010, 04:08	Documentation on it was horrible: http://www.semiconductor-sanyo.jp/ds_j/2240A_d.pdf
No.14014 Fujix Administrator Jul 23, 2017, 16:10
No.19616 MetalGod Senior Tester Jan 3, 2022, 14:50	quote from Ace: " Bugs 03738 and 03919 deal with emulation issues pertaining to the VLM5030 and are completely unrelated to the Yamaha FM timers. 03919, in particular, is due to emulation inaccuracies with the VLM5030 in general, which I would suggest to rebuild based on this gate-level VHDL model made by Arnim Laeuger of FPGAArcade: https://github.com/FPGAArcade/replay_common/tree/master/lib/sound/vlm5030 "