LEDBlinky + Mala + Ipac UIO LED animation issue

[dkersten]

I will post this here because I think it has something to do with Mala and LEDBlinky.  I don't think it has to do with the controller, but I will include that information as well.

In Mala, I have the FE animation running through the LEDBlinky plugin.  It is about 15 frames at about 25ms per frame that just runs some colors around in a circle around the buttons and trackball.  When you land on a game, after the appropriate delay, it should stop the animation and light up the buttons for that game with the appropriate colors.  If you launch a game, regardless of what the LED's are doing at the time, it should end the animation and revert to the game colors (and also trigger the servostik or U360 profile).

The problem is, when I first fire up Mala, the animation runs in a loop for about 2-3 minutes, and nothing will stop it.  If I go to launch a game in this time, it hangs on the starting screen for about 60 seconds, then if the animation still hasn't stopped, it goes ahead and starts the game, but the animation is still running.  After the 2-3 minutes has passed, the buttons finally change over to the game buttons and the servostick or u360 profile is switched. 

After this period has passed (either wait out the 2-3 minutes or start a game and wait), everything works as it should.  I can exit the game, switch between games in Mala and the animation stops and shows the controls for the game, and then resumes the animation.  If I launch a game it launches immediately and reverts to the game control colors.  It is only on the first launch of Mala that this happens.

If I make the animation only one frame, this isn't an issue and things seem to work fine.  This might be because the animation is so simple (just one frame) or it might be because there really isn't an animation, just a single frame, but either way it makes a huge difference. 

If this is a Mala issue, I am probably stuck with it since there doesn't seem to be any new development going on with it, but it might also be an LEDblinky issue, in which case I hope this thread gets seen and the problem resolved.  I have 2 cabinets where this is an issue. 

[arzoo]

Hi,
When the animation is running the first time (holding everything up), does it run at the correct speed or does it seem really slow? Also, how large is your mame.xml file?

If you turn on the Debug Log option, run Mala and let it get past the slow startup plus one or two other games (when everything runs smoothly), then email me the debug.zip and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on.

arzoo

[dkersten]

Animation runs normal, just doesn't stop. Mame.xml is the normal massive file size that Mala builds.  I'll get that debug running as soon as I can. Thanks!

[dkersten]

email sent.  Looks like it is exactly 60 seconds (seemed longer), at least on my main cabinet.

Thanks

[arzoo]

As the size of mame.xml has increased over the past few years, loading and parsing the file has become more noticeable (LEDBlinky queues up events while processing the file). If an animation is running, the load/parse time increases significantly. The next release of LEDBlinky will include an option to preload the mame files at startup. This may introduce a 5-10 second delay before any LEDs light up but that's much better than the 60 seconds it takes while running any LED animations. Either way, the files are only loaded once.