Main > Main Forum
Powered USB hub question
Green Giant:
I was paranoid about powered USB hubs so I bought many many USB extension cables from monoprice.com. They are super cheap and the computer never gets confused.
Dawgz Rule:
I work in IT. Powered hub shouldn't make a difference. Even with enough ports in the PC, a powered hub can sometimes be a better choice if you don't have a good power supply in the PC. Otherwise, you can have overload your power supply. The most important thing is to ensure that all the devices are plugged in when you boot. If not, your device ID's can change and cause issues for MAME.
Spacedueler:
--- Quote from: nick3092 on January 11, 2012, 07:06:25 pm ---My experience with my modular panel is that MAME/Windows assign the numbers based on the USB vendor/device ID. The lower the vendor ID, the lower number control it becomes. Doesn't matter what port or hub it's plugged into.
--- End quote ---
I wondered how the usb devices were "tagged" with an ID of some sort, and that it had to be numbered some how... sort like a MAC address?
--- Quote from: Dawgz Rule on January 11, 2012, 07:32:14 pm ---The most important thing is to ensure that all the devices are plugged in when you boot. If not, your device ID's can change and cause issues for MAME.
--- End quote ---
Exactly. That's why I made it so the devices are always connected - just the interfaces are swapped out:
drventure:
Just saw this. Yes, I've wrestled with USB issues and powered hub issues for a while.
The key with Powered hubs is to make sure the powersupply for the hub can actually supply enough current to fully power all the connected devices. MANY MANY hubs, esp 7 port or more, come with powersupplies that won't fully power all the ports, under the assumption that you won't really ever need to.
While that is USUALLY true, it's not necessarily always true.
Whether you put a powered hub in or not, I haven't noticed much of a diff regarding where you plug your devices in (ie a hub or directly into the mobo). In reality, those ports on the mobo effectively +look+ like they're connected to another hub, it's just internal, built onto the mobo.
If you can keep all the devices plugged at all times, you should be good, but if you use devices that will be unplugged (say, light guns, or handheld controllers, etc), you'll likely end up with mapping problems.
The devices do get "numbered" and I believe they are initially numbered based on the vendorid/deviceid, but if you hot plug devices, all that can go out the window pretty quick.
That's why I wrote the ControllerRemap utility, it allows you to setup a mame cfg file that maps directly to device IDs or names, not to device numbers. So no matter where a particular controller ends up mapped, it'll still "mean" the same thing to Mame.
Le Chuck:
Thanks for the input DRVENTURE. I'll be playing with it this weekend when I have a bit of time. Besides the lightguns being miss mapped I'm running into my spinner getting bumped if I run joytokey, which has my joy1 mapped as a mouse for the windows environment. When I reenter mame, it's messing things up. I think I have a fix for that but I'll probably PM you or start a please help me thread once I delve into your utility. Thanks for all the work man!