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LED-Wiz USB LED and Output Control Device now available. *Blinky lights*
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Silver:

--- Quote from: Ahigh on September 19, 2005, 06:05:47 pm ---Mame devs should jump on this.  I've already set up my mame development environment so I can do blinking LED's when Pac-man ghosts turn blue and then blink.  But it only takes one person to add support, and I'm sure that someone will go in there and set up an interface to support more than 3 LED's.

I should point out that you can't and don't want it to have anything to do with the keyboard led's since you only have 3 of those.  What Randy has done is way better than what the keyboard LED's can do.

--- End quote ---

Well technically mame devs should only really be interested in it - imho - for games that actually flashed led's - I'm thinking flashing start buttons when you coin-up, or when the weapons van light blinks during spy hunter. The flashy frontendstuff so you can figure out which buttons to use on your panel is not really something that falls under mame. (Although it sounds like a rather perfect use for Controls.dat and various frontends).

As for in-game stuff - well mame already uses keyboard leds which is just as far from the the original as external leds so ideally, incorporating the LSE engine sounds like a good move which would hopefully be accepted as it provides more freedom for authentic emulation than just the keyboard leds. Any flash stuff would probably have to stored seperately like the cheat info (as this seems to rely on memory location....
Havok:
I just mean I would like support for what MAME does now - blink those three lights. Also, have the cool flashy stuff for my own config. And, perhaps even add the detect an event in the game and flash however, and light up just the controls for that game, and..

... Must stop... The possibilities are endless. Randy - you are doing great things!
Glaine:
Sweet peat! If this comes with a easy-to-use compiler package, this may be a great alternative for making LED light Marquees or even the most holy Dragon's Lair scoreboard ? That would require programming on our part to make the leds line up with all the port requirements and must be on parrallel port for the Daphne emulator I think. If it could do that..... o wow.
Buddabing:

--- Quote from: Glaine on September 21, 2005, 10:14:38 pm ---Sweet peat! If this comes with a easy-to-use compiler package, this may be a great alternative for making LED light Marquees or even the most holy Dragon's Lair scoreboard ? That would require programming on our part to make the leds line up with all the port requirements and must be on parrallel port for the Daphne emulator I think. If it could do that..... o wow.

--- End quote ---

There was a repro DL scoreboard made at one time, I don't think they are made anymore though.

Daphne supports parallel port output for the scoreboard. In fact, I thieved the Daphne code for my own controller.


Here's a page with schematics on how to build your own.

RandyT:
I just want to communicate something about the way the LED-Wiz will work, so there are no misunderstandings.

Each LED will need to have its own current limiting resistor, or have one built into the LED.  The wiring scheme will be "common anode"

While this isn't as convenient as having software controlled current limiting (ie. no resistor required) there is a real advantage to this approach.  That advantage is the ability to power just about anything up to 500ma per output (with the possible exception of inductive loads.)  So theoretically, you could hang about 25 LEDS, with their appropriate resistors,  off of each output.  This can come in handy if you have duplicate controls and want to save outputs by making each set the same, or for creating simple chase light sequences using only 3 or 4 outputs for a large string of LEDs.

There will be a lot of possibilities.  But it's important to understand that a device like this one will manipulate low-voltage power, but with enough current to damage your motherboard or power supply, or even cause a fire if used improperly!   While it's unlikely for the latter to occur, I have seen a thin piece of copper wire glow brightly and vaporize when accidentally connected across +5 and ground on a USB device.  If that were sitting in a pile of shredded newspaper or sawdust, it could have ignited it. 

This shouldn't scare anyone off of using these types of devices, just to make sure everyone understands that the rules that applied to keyboard encoders don't apply here, outside of the application of good wiring practices.  And, I'd expect the (replacable) driver chip to pop before anything too awful happened, but it's always best to play it safe!

RandyT
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