Guide: easily setup MA with LedBlinky + auto 4/8way stick in mame & other emus

[keropi]

Hiya!

Decided to make this simple guide since Arzoo released LedBlinky v6.4.0.0 that now supports further customization for the "OTHER FE" option. Hope it helps someone 

The point of all this is to have LB work with MA without the annoying errors MA produces because of it's bugs that won't get fixed in the foreseeable future. With the following you are setting up LB to switch to 8WAY joystick in every FE/EMU except MAME where it switches to 4WAY in games that need it.
Before LB v6.4.0.0 that was not possible since 4WAY sticks setting was hardcoded and used as a default setting in every situation where a FrontEnd did not directly work with LB (something we are forced to do in order to avoid MA's error windows). Furthermore using Ultimarc's switching app disabled LB's switching - at least on my setup 

I have no idea how well this works with people that have LEDs in their cabs but I assume if you are going for eye candy you are using something like HyperSpin that is doing great at that while working correctly with LB 
Another option is to use ZoOl007's Maximus Arcade Broker

My setup is 2x Servosticks, a pc running GroovyMame64 , MAME and a bunch of 8/16/32bit sega/nintendo/nec emulators all running with the help of Maximus Arcade.

So here are the steps needed to make this work, this assumes you have both MA and LB installed in your system.

1.
Do not check any of the LedBlinky options in Maximus Arcade emulator configuration options, they are not needed. All you need to do is go to the OPTIONS->STARTUP tab and make MA load LedBlinky on startup with "1" as a command line parameter. Make it look like this - obviously with the correct paths to your system:



Just hit close and exit MA.


2.

Run LEDBlinkyConfig.exe and check/fill the following required fields - once again use your own system's paths, the following are just an example:



- chose OTHER FE from the drop down menu and select the "Misc Options" tab
- select your Joystick Digital Restriction options
- check "No LEDs mode" option if you are like me without a LED board




- select the "MAME Config" tab and browse/insert your MAME CFG folder
- check "Preload MAME Data Files on StartUp" option
- Fill the MAME.XML and CONTROLS.INI fields (click on links for info/help on them)
- check "Use MAME to trigger ..." option
- hit SAVE and exit the program


3.

Run LEDBlinkyControlsEditor.exe and make the following changes:



- press the "FE" button and once the options on the lower part of the window appear press the "New"button




- in the new window select "CONTROL_JOY8WAY" from the list and check the "Primary Control" option
- press OK to close the window




- you should now have this item on the list, press SAVE and exit the program


4.

All that is left now is to edit an option in MAME.INI so that LB can monitor it.



- open MAME.INI and in the "OSD OUTPUT OPTIONS" change the "output" setting from "auto" to "windows" (if you don't have a mame.ini then use the -cc parameter in command line to create one, example: "mame64.exe -cc" )
- save and exit


And that's it! Now LB loads with MA and forces 8WAY sticks in everything except MAME games that need 4WAY sticks to work correctly.

I hope this helps someone out there, there must be others with the same problems I faced with their cabs and their stubborness to not abandon MA 
Thanks again to Azroo for his continuous support and patience to fix problems that exist because of other software's shortcomings