Pacdrive LED to behave like a real cabinet?

[erwan]

I just finished my arcade cabinet, and I have a pacdrive for the coin button + start 1 and start 2. I know it works, I've tried it with a command line utility on Linux.

What I want to to have it behave like a real cabinet, e.g. light up start 1 when you put a coin, but only start 2 if you have enough credits to play 2 players. Is it even possible with MAME, do the ROMS have this kind of information?

I'm on Linux but I've seen on the pacdrive doc that you can control the LED with the Mala front-end. Is it only to do some animation pattern, lit up only used buttons, or is the behavior I described even possible?

[BadMouth]

You can do it on Windows using Howard Casto's MAMEhooker program, but it is limited to what each individual game originally did.
Also, the outputs that trigger this aren't "hooked up" in all the games.

I'm not aware of anything like that for Linux.

Sounds like the consistent behavior you want would need a custom program anyway.

[erwan]

Thanks, I'll take a look at mamehooker. I don't mind doing some programming myself, of I can confirm that (1) the info is in the Roms and (2) mame provides a way to hook to the events.

Since a windows program exists, it appears to be possible.

[erwan]

OK, searching for MAME Hooker info I found a post about communication with Mame, and I found this neat script in the source code that works great on Linux 

https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/osd/sdl/ledutil.sh

[matsadona]

It would be nice with a list of all games that has this functionality. I know most all old (70's) Atari games does, and so do some SEGA games (Outrun, After Burner etc).

For games that doesn't have this functionality it is probably doable with scripts, if you monitor the coin input. Assuming you have the same coin/credit settings for all games.