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Has anyone thought of this?
Carsten Carlos:
--- Quote ---GameLauncher would be ideal for this. Especially the latest release with the pre and post command options.
--- End quote ---
Yep, good idea. Especially the pre & post thing is really smart. That's my thought of how to implement automatic motor rotation, so I only would need to write a little program that deals with this.
I hope he'll be able to make a screensaver some day that starts some MAME-games randomly to see some attract-mode-screens.
Elkor:
as has been mentioned here before, ArcadeOS supports a serial LCD screen.
this being the case you can setup arcadeos to output your information and you could just construct a circuit that hooks up to the serial port and latches a couple of leads high based on whatever code you come up with
carsten could probably help with that ;D
Lilwolf:
I do love the idea. So hard to explain how to run each game to everyone who comes over.
I could add this to my frontend pretty easy. As long as I could execute the application with an argument that could describe it. Through Java, I can only seem to execute win32 applications in 98... 2000 I can run almost anything... kinda sucks....
The interface will be the hard thing. If you find a good solution I would love to hear it
mc-escher:
This could likely be done a lot easier than that.
First of all one can logically assume that Player 1 and Player 2 button usage would be the same (give me a counter example... I'm thinking perhaps that driving/flying game)
In any case, in most instances this number is 6.
The parallel port could be used to drive the LED's since it has 8-bit wide data output, you could even make a 1 to
1 mapping. This would use less external circuitry than multiplexing the outputs (which would give you more flexibility) or caching mutiple bytes to use as light state holders (more flexibility still)
It wouldn't be rocket science to add code to mame to add
up the buttons defined in the driver to come up with a
byte to outprt to the parallel port before starting the
game. (Could possibly even be done in the front end)
Button 1 = 0x1
Button 2 = 0x2
Button 3 = 0x4
Button 4 = 0x8..... etc
This idea has merit. not sure if the
Escher
escher@muppetclan.com
Scottzilla:
I've been kicking a similar idea around. I was thinking about using ArcadeOS or some other front end that outputs stuff through the parallel port to control lights for which buttons are used for a specific game, monitor rotation, as well as 4/8 way switching of joysticks (by modifying a J-Stik so it can be electrically switched). My plan was to use a PIC microcontroller to turn the parallel port output into controll signals for all the lights and motors.
I'm not sure how much of this I will actually do, but that was the plan anyway. We'll see how motivated I feel. So far I just have a monitor and a bunch of guts on my workbench...