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SeverdHed's 4-Player Showcase cabinet - keywiz frustrations
BurgerKingDiamond:
It'
--- Quote from: Rick on November 25, 2010, 02:00:32 pm ---Looking good! Good progress! I did have a quick question, and it looks like you're the man to ask!
--- Quote from: severdhed on August 29, 2010, 11:13:08 pm ---
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When you partially decased your 27" TV, what is your rough estimation of the plastic surrounding the tube at the front? From this pic, I would say it looks to be about 2"-3" on each side. I'm asking, as I've yet to decase the 27" TV for my build, and I'm hoping it has as much 'wasted space' in between the tube and walls.
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It's gonna vary for individual TV's. The one I just decased didn't have much wasted space. maybe and inch and a half.
severdhed:
I'll have to look, probably 3 inches on each side, but that is because my tv had speakers mounted on either side of the screen.
severdhed:
well, i ran into some problems with the keywiz. this thing is clearly designed for a 2 player setup, and since i am trying to run a 4 player panel off of it, i was bound to run into a few problems. i wanted to stick with the standard keywiz config, since it does not have a way to store a custom profile on the device. the keywiz has 40 inputs, 32 of which have shifted inputs (all of them except the ones designated for the two joysticks). i needed 45 inputs to handle all of my buttons and joysticks. I did not want to use shifted button presses to add coins or exit, so i used the shazaam adapters for my exit and coin buttons, so that pressing a single button would send the shifted command instead of the standard one.
this is where i started running into problems. first of all, the default keywiz profile sucks for a 4 player setup. it apparently is set up with the default mame config for two players. i though that isn't a big deal since i can reprogram mame to however i want it. the problems i ran into though are this:
some of the inputs are mapped to shift,alt,ctrl keys, which can cause weird problems when combined with other inputs.
also, 14 of the shifted inputs are keys that are already mapped to the standard inputs, which is just stupid...most of the rest of them are the "f" keys (f2, f7, etc)
anyway i tried to make the best of it, but after playing games for a few hours with my two sons (almost 2 years old, and almost 4 years old) we had quite a few problems. for instance, if player 4 hit down and left on the joystick while player 1 hit button 2, it would open task manager (ctrl, shift, esc)
also, there were some problems if you pressed a coin button at the same time as some of the other buttons, weird things would happen. (the coin buttons are wired to both the shazaam and one other input, so while it was held down, if you pressed another button, it would send the shifted fuction instead. so sometimes it would pause, or exit the game, or somehow make all of the controls stop responding properly. (my coin buttons were mapped to f1,f2,f7 and f11.)
so tonight i finally decided that if i want to keep this working, i was going to have to reprogram the keywiz...or buy another encoder. Well, i'm cheap, so reprogram it was!!! i had to do some reading to see how to load the profiles, and even though it was a little confusing at first, it wasnt that bad to get working.. you save your config as a profile, and then load it into the keywiz. you can then launch the program with command line parameters to load a specific profile. you can also associate an application with a profile, so that after it loads, it will launch the application. so i made a profile, and associated it with mala.exe then set my windows shell to the keywiz loader, with the switches to load my profile. windows boots up, my keywiz is flashed, and then mala is launched and everything is good.
i decided to take a more cautious approach with my profile. i wanted to avoid using the ctrl,shift and alt keys for obvious reasons. so i mapped out my 40 inputs using the letters A-Z, numbers 0-9, and the four arrow keys. (26 letters + 10 numbers + 4 arrows = 40). i then mapped the shifted inputs to various other keys, esc,enter, number pad keys, and various symbol keys.
this seems to be working so much better. i went through and reprogrammed mame to match may key setup and so far so good. i didn't get to do this until after the kids went to bed, so i'll have to test it with them tomorrow evening when i get home from work. but from the little bit of testing i managed to do by myself, and by just knowing that there arent any stupid keys assigned, i think it will work out much better this way.
i just wish this wasn't necessary, i understand that Randy wants the keywiz to be a plug n play solution so no mame config needs done...but i just don't see that as being that important. i would think that anyone dedicated enough to buy a keywiz and build their own arcade controls, won't be afraid to reconfigure mame. i think it would be better to have a key layout that avoids problem keys (ctrl,alt,shift,fkeys, etc) and doesnt' have any overlapping shifted commands. they could always have a downloadable cfg file for mame like x-arcade uses.
anyway, i'll post again once i get to thoroughly test this config. (if it can survive two small children randomly pushing all kinds of stupid buttons for an hour or so, without it doing stupid stuff, it should be good). i just wanted to post this so if any of you are considering trying to do a 4 player setup with only a keywiz, you wouldn't have to go through the problems that i did.