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LED control from Mame--in over my head again?
1UP:
Aw crap it doesn't work in Win7. Have to try installing from XP later....
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: 1UP on March 16, 2010, 02:39:13 am ---How do those PS1 screens look? At least good enough for an instruction card/pinball DMD? Looks like you can get a couple for less than that USB screen. I would probably need 3 with my setup.
--- End quote ---
If you hack it for vga yes, if not it's a no on the instruction card. You can't get a couple for less than the usb screen though because you'll need to get video cards as well, and not only that but compatable video cards (the screens run at near arcade resolutions). The only card I could get to work is an ancient matrox video card. It doesn't have any acceleration either so unless used in the right situation it slows your machine to a crawl. So you can forget about linking three together. That's why I didn't reccomend them. ;)
1UP:
Well, I'll keep experimenting with the PDA screens then. They are low res (320x240 I think) but at least they're sharp, and small enough to fit in the space around my bezel. So I would only need one in that situation. Only question is whether they can be made to just boot up and enter the display app when I turn on the cab. If I can keep power connected I think this won't be a problem--it'll just stay in memory.
Howard_Casto:
Had another thought on on dual screen front..... Remember the old school webcam pages that were just a bit of javascript that kept updating the image every few secs? Well I can easily put a bit of code into mamehooker to save the display screen to a image (part of it is already there for when I make preview shots.) Since mamehooker already has a "state change" event I could have it save the image to file on the local machine. Then all you'd need is a http server setup on your pc.
The DS, PSP cell phones and most pda's all have web browsers, so for the display files and simple things like instruction cards at least, this may be the easiest solution. As for pinmame... it's so demanding you'd pretty much need a real monitor for that.
-edit-
I actually gave this a try at least on my local machine, and it works pretty well. I implemented a save image feature for mh and linked it to the state change event in some ini files. I then setup a html file with a little bit of java that automatically refreshes the image once every half second. I first tired seawolf with my webpage open and it was pretty much a 1:1 experience with zero drops in "frames" I also tried turbo, which if you look at it's display file is about as complex as it gets and while it wasn't 1:1 it was still very viewable and didn't stutter or anything. Of course I can adjust the refresh rate to just about anything, but the faster I make it, the more processing power it takes. I tried seawolf on every 1/10th of a second and it still did fine though.
There are ways around the process hog as well, like just hosting the image on the webserver and storing the actual webpage itself on the remote device.
Also keep in mind that the lower the resolution, the better the frame rate. If your pdf only displays 320x240 then you set mamehooker's display size to 320x240 and it'll speed up things dramatically.
But keep in mind I tired it on the same machine as mame, which obviously could load the image really fast. I have some laptops and netbooks to try it on and I'll do that once I setup a webserver on this machine and/or move the html file to a shared folder. I want to try it on my DS as it'd be an ideal viewer, but finding a working webbrowser on the ds is more difficult than the coding I just did!
I also think this method might have potential for pinmame as well, but only if the dmd display was set to original size and a REALLY fast form capture routine was used. Even then the host machine would have to be pretty beefy.
headkaze:
This reminds me of GameEx's Game Extender feature which displays game art to a server or localhost to a secondary screen. I have CPW display to a secondary monitor (video) but I think it would be cool to be able to view controls on a mobile too. Heh if I ever get time to update CPW.. too bad your not a C# programmer Howard I've been thinking of handing on some of my MAME projects to keep them alive. I write games now so don't really have the time.
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