The story so far:
I have made a little proof of concept model for my upcoming rotating LCD project. It is based on the Pololu simple motor driver connected to the PC via USB. 2 limit switches and a Pololu geared motor from them complete the system. It's the same equipment as DNA Dan ended up with in his Plain Old Arcade build. Everything works great, I can run the motor via Pololu's Simple Motor Controller windows software, as well as by their SMCCMD command line setup. I can even use AHK to control the motor via keyboard commands. Right now the motor runs to the reverse limit when the left bracket key is pressed, and vice versa on right bracket key.
What I want to do:
I want to auto rotate on mala start of a game in the opposite orientation, same as everybody.
I want to auto rotate back to horizontal on mala exit (i.e. keep the state by always starting from horizontal.
It would be nice to be able to switch on a key combination or something to recover if something gets messed up.
What I have tried to do:
Under Mala 174, I downloaded and installed Startcom from the mala-fe.net site. I compiled an AHK script to exe and named it rotate both ways. It works under windows, rotating each way per the bracket keys as noted above. I put this exe in the top "rotating program" slot in the plugin configuration. In the boxes for the rotation calls, I put the brackets. Tried it out, no dice. I realize startcom was intended for Mrotate, which I don't have installed, since I am not doing the parallel port. I tried other stuff, like leaving the script running, entering mala, deleting the rotate program path from startcom, leaving the bracket calls. No dice, obviously I'm barking up the wrong tree.
Is there an easy way to do what I'm looking at? Either send command line arguments prior to game launch or keystrokes that get to AHK? If so, how do I get the information about whether the game is horizontal/vertical?
I have reviewed other build threads to see if someone has resolved this:
- Ond: going to write a VB program to rotate controlled via Serial. (I can do virtual serial port per the Pololu manual)
- DNA Dan: going to rotate via switch until HS 2.0 comes out.
- Da Old Man, weisshaupt, cornchip, dannygalaga, others - variations of the parallel port system well described by DaOldMan.
Thank you.