Ok I've been promising a new release for a few months now but things kept coming up and people kept mentioning things that they want to do which I had to have because, unfortunately for those waiting, they were good ideas and they greatly increased functionality.
So here is the current status:
The dials, text boxes and bar meters have all been added... they are complete and done.
One user wanted to send a bunch of hex data through the serial port. I've added that. It's untested atm, but I haven't found any bugs yet.
People keep asking about how to strobe a value for lightguns and such and while you can do it now it is far from optimized. That's what I've been working on this week... namely I've added manual command breaks for mamehooker scripts. Let me explain. Currently, mamehooker scripts, regardless of if they loop or not, have a set delay you can adjust and each line of the script is executed with that delay in between each line read. that's great if you only want to do one thing at a time, but sometimes you want to do a few... like if you are strobing machine gun recoil.... You don't want a 10ms delay between when P1's gun is set and P2's. With the manual com break set, All lines are executed immediately, unless the line has the "manbreak" flag, which adds in a delay. I did a little demo script for the new car dash display file example and it seems to have tripled the responsiveness if you do multiple things at once.... obviously the more things you do at once, the slower things will be using the old method.
I will post a demo video on my youtube channel soon (gotta hook up the el-gato).
I want to say the release will be soon, but I've said that so many times in the last few months I'm not going to... It'll just drop without warning and hopefully things will work right and all will be well.
After that release Boomslang (and a few others) brought to my attention that mamehooker doesn't seem to play nice with his plugin, or any other mame interop programs. I'm not sure if it's the dll Headkaze made for me or something else, but regardless, I'm going to work on it and it shouldn't be too terribly hard to find a solution one way or another.
So yeah no sexy new features to report, but certainly some useful ones.