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Anyonw know what happend to the LCD Marquee display project
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tetsujin:

--- Quote from: Trimoor on February 11, 2005, 07:11:21 pm ---The hardware is easy.  It's just plug and play.

The hard part is the software.  Has anyone found a way to interface it with MAME?  Have it take the game that's running, and display a single image on a second monitor?

--- End quote ---

Why interface with MAME at all?  Why not make that functionality part of the front-end?  When a game is launched, simultaneously post a new image to the monkey-computer.

I mean, it'd be great to have a greater ability to inspect the game state and use that information - like displaying Street Fighter moves for whichever character the player is actually using...  but that stuff, as far as I know, just hasn't been written.
Trimoor:
Any frontend writers wanna take this up?  Anyone at all?
I hate to see an idea like this die.
Lilwolf:
I talked about doing this ages ago.. .and nobody seemed to think it was a cool idea. 

The idea was to always have a game running.  And when you select a new game, it would kill the current process (or ask Howard if he could write a wrapper for mame to close mame on a socket call or something) and then launch the next game.

But I think the trouble was nobody wanted to hack another video to their cabinet...
Lilwolf:
btw, it wasn't for use with an epod (but a hacked gameboy advanced). 

Epods are discontinued and hard to find these days (only 2 on ebay).  So spending too much time on something that might never be usable...

BUT

how about this... a web based frontend?  You select everything through a webbrowser (or java application) and machine X that runs java... And it sends a socket link to your arcade machine that is running a headless frontend...

Now you could run them both on the same machine (and having a key to tab between them or something)

So you would have mame running 24/7.  Then when it gets a signal, it will kill the current game and launch the next...

This would be very doable... and would probably be pretty easy to setup.  Heck, the java application version would allow you to also load new roms throught then frontend / socket so you wouldn't even need to have a keyboard on the system. 

Anyway... then you could use it on an epods or any other hand held device... or just an old notebook you have laying around that you hack in somewhere on your cab.

tetsujin:
I'm not sure what problems that solves.  I'm not sure what the "mame running 24/7" thing is about either.

If I have two (cooperative) computers networked together, it's not at all a big deal to make one display something (static image, UI, whatever) on the other's screen.  That's what X is for.

Making it display something useful, I think that's a bit trickier.  I'd love for auxiliary displays to be able to display high-score tables, relevant hints about playing the game, etc. - not just a marquee displaying the game art, but something showing useful information about the state of the game.  But as far as I know there's nothing in Mame that can pull that kind of data out of a game.  It might not be hard to add it for certain games, but...
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