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

[SirPoonga]

o you tell normal MAME to a spinner to the mouse vs keyboard?

You don't, you can always use the keyboard for directions.  You have to enable mouse in the ini file for mouse control.

So how does controls.dat modify the control settings?  Does it replace the .cfg files or does it require a specail build of mame?  I thought controls.dat was used to create an image of a CP with the buttons that a game uses.  I didn't realize it reprograms all the input mappings.

Controls.dat is just an information file.  It's up to the progrmmer to determine how to use it.  Like Johnny5 uses it to create a graphics of your control panel with the buttons correctly labelled (cross referencing your mame cfg and ctrlr files).

[MikeQ]

Thanks for what you have done.  I say if it's burning you out, let it go.  Do your thing.

I think that is what I'v decided.  SirPoonga and gl.tter have this area covered already.   People can download buddamame today and have LSE working.  Sirpoonga is hooking up the controls.dat stuff up too. 

Anything I release would just be labeled as a lesser solution and I just don't have the time/desire to rewrite all my stuff to support controls.dat and LSE.

I'm still going to extend the LEDWiz driver to support multiple devices but that will probably be the extent of public contribution.

I'm looking forward to playing Cruisin USA at 1600x1200 with FSAA.

[JoyMonkey]

If anybody's really interested, I could put up a PHP-collab system... there'd be an online system for sharing, documentation, bug tracking, etc.

I can't program anything in MAME, though, so my role would be strictly administrative.

Mahuti, if this is something that you have the time to set up I think you should go ahead and do it. A "Diff Depository" would be great, I'd love to be able to pick and choose different features. An easy way to grab MikeQ's upcoming LEDWiz support, gl.tters LSE engine, SA Dev's tweaks and AdvMame's 'Safe Quit' features and roll them into a custom build of Mame would rock!
Once a site is up and running, I'm sure everyone working on custom Mame builds would flock there. If you build it, they will come.

(oh, and if you need webspace, joymonkey.com has a ton of space and bandwidth just sitting there).

[mahuti]

Thanks for the offer. Among other things... I own a hosting company, so I'll probably find some room there.

[MYX]

MikeQ, um... When I read your last post here, the only thing I have to associate with the emotion of the post is your avitar unhappily smacking it's head. Is it reflective?

[MikeQ]

MikeQ, um... When I read your last post here, the only thing I have to associate with the emotion of the post is your avitar unhappily smacking it's head. Is it reflective?

Replace the frown with a devilish sarcastic grin and it would be a better fit.

(not sure what a sarcastic grin would look like, but you get the idea)

[MYX]

Well... Thats good to hear. Because a guy that just smacks himself all day long couldn't be a happy camper. 

[MYX]

Actually, I had a thought (yes it hurt) last night that actually woke me up. It sucked too cause I could not get back to sleep. But, If you run 2 light wiz'z, when you set up the animations in the controll pannel you will have to write different animations for each LW. Meaning that if you want them to synch you will have to count frames and make sure that the timing of all the frames add up. That could turn into a logistical nightmare. I am toying with the idea (and it was someone elses idea that I borrowed) with doint 1 LW for the main CP full color and one for the cabinet, with left overs going to single color CP. This means that if I wanted to scroll lights across the CP like in muhuti's video, I would need to make sure that the frame count for each set was exact. It would almost have to be storyboarded on paper. 

Edited -> <- Sorry, it was a necessary add.

[MikeQ]

Actually, I had a thought (yes it hurt) last night that actually woke me up. It sucked too cause I could not get back to sleep. But, If you run 2 light wiz'z, when you set up the animations in the controll pannel you will have to write different animations for each LW. Meaning that if you want them to synch you will have to count frames and make sure that the timing of all the frames add up. That could turn into a logistical nightmare. I am toying with the idea (and it was someone elses idea that I borrowed) with doint 1 LW for the main CP full color and one for the cabinet, with left overs going to single color CP. This means that if I wanted to scroll lights across the CP like in muhuti's video, I would need to make sure that the frame count for each set was exact. It would almost have to be storyboarded on paper. 

Edited -> <- Sorry, it was a necessary add.

What you need is a sequence editor that will allow you to layout LED's on a virtual mock up of your CP.  You then could set the LED's and timing in a WYSIWYG fashion.  The sequence editor could hide fact that your generating commands or more than one LEDWiz.

This brings up a good question though. 

Randy, will you modify Luma to have a selection for which LEDWiz you are setting up a sequenece for and will this information be stored in the LWA file or will the LWA file be independent of the device?  With the clipboard interface, you won't be able specify which board to go to unless you introduce a new LWZ_DEVICE command or something like that.

[RandyT]

This brings up a good question though. 

Randy, will you modify Luma to have a selection for which LEDWiz you are setting up a sequenece for and will this information be stored in the LWA file or will the LWA file be independent of the device?  With the clipboard interface, you won't be able specify which board to go to unless you introduce a new LWZ_DEVICE command or something like that.

A slightly altered command structure will need to be introduced.

Currently, everything is called with an LWZ prefix.  I think the z will indicate device 0 and LW1 through LW9 will be sent to the proper device.  This will limit the number of devices addressable by the clipboard feature to 10, but that's the breaks

As for the LumAura panel, I think that will need to be expanded with a drop down control indicating the current device number.  Could be a programming nightmare to track that many devices, but it might not be too bad..  I'll have to think about it some more when I get back into it.

RandyT

[Deefish]

Randy or anyone else that has hooked up the LED-Wiz with the RGB Drive's, Am I correct in assuming that by the diagram that comes with the Drives that each RGB Drive uses 3 hookups? Does that mean that I can only hook up 10 RGB Drives per LED-WIZ's? Or can you hook up more than one RGB Drive to the three points? If this is possible, does this mean that all the RGB Drives hooked up to the same contact points will have to be blinking the same sequence?

I have 23 buttons and ordered 23 RGB Drives. Should I have gone with individual LEDs instead? I really want to use the RGB Drives so as to have the option for all the different colors, but if that requires additional LED-WIZ's I'm not sure I want to go that big with it.

Thanks in advance,
deefish

[mahuti]

Randy or anyone else that has hooked up the LED-Wiz with the RGB Drive's, Am I correct in assuming that by the diagram that comes with the Drives that each RGB Drive uses 3 hookups?

yes

or can you hook up more than one RGB Drive to the three points?

yes

If this is possible, does this mean that all the RGB Drives hooked up to the same contact points will have to be blinking the same sequence?

yes

I have 23 buttons and ordered 23 RGB Drives.

they will have to be duped.

[MYX]

If you wanted to get a little silly you could use 1 output to power a relay (double pole double throw). Have the relay control a ground line. Then you could have 2 seperate runs of lines that can be controlled via the interface.

Lights 1-10 ground line 1
Lights 11-20 ground line 2

out put 32 is low so line 1 is a closed circuit and lights 1-10 blink. Then 32 goes high and line 1 is broken and line 2 is closed. Lights 11-20 blink.

Would this work.

[forbiddenlyrics]

I was just wondering what brightness the LED's you guys are using to light your buttons?

[JoyMonkey]

Back to the 'how do we figure out which buttons light up if Mame doesn't really know which buttons are used' argument...

A thought occured to me on the way to work this-morning about how Mahuti's app works and how MikeQ's upcoming LEDMame chooses which buttons to light.

Couldn't a little app be written than generates CFG files for every game based on how many buttons is listed in controls.dat? It could check how many buttons xmlinfo says a game has, compare that to how many controls.dat says, then write a CFG xml file that sets the obsolete buttons to NONE.

Wouldn't help with games that aren't yet listed on controls.dat (like individual NeoGeo games), but it'd mean you'd have to manually configure less games.

[Silver]

Thats exactly how i used controlDat for displaying game info on a LCD screen.

It parses both controlDat.xml and mameinfo.xml, then goes through all the games you own, and for each checks if its in controlDat, and if it is creates a lcd file (just a text file) for that game display the controls, buttons and what each button does (Fire/Jump).
If its not in controlsDat, it uses mameinfo.xml to display control and number of buttons.
As far as i can see, that is way to get the most reliable info available.

I am sure the CP view programs (Johnny5? CPviewer?) do the same process for displaying CP layouts with correct controls. Probably better than my proggy too... 

I dont think making such files is hard. You then need a program which will parse this txt file and send it to ledwhizz on game launch - so you could just get a frontend to do it for you. Of course, you still need clever programs (MikeQ's mame hopefully, or something with LSE in it?) to have really good stuff like flashing player start/in game light effects that I'm really hoping for....

[JoyMonkey]

Yep, I can't wait for MikeQ's LEDMame to come out, thats why I thought generating CFG files that set unused buttons as NONE would be a help (since LEDMame will figure out which buttons are used by looking at the CFG files). Can you knock out a quick app that generates these cfg files?

[MikeQ]

Back to the 'how do we figure out which buttons light up if Mame doesn't really know which buttons are used' argument...

A thought occured to me on the way to work this-morning about how Mahuti's app works and how MikeQ's upcoming LEDMame chooses which buttons to light.

Couldn't a little app be written than generates CFG files for every game based on how many buttons is listed in controls.dat? It could check how many buttons xmlinfo says a game has, compare that to how many controls.dat says, then write a CFG xml file that sets the obsolete buttons to NONE.

Wouldn't help with games that aren't yet listed on controls.dat (like individual NeoGeo games), but it'd mean you'd have to manually configure less games.

The only games I've found that I light incorrectly (by default)  are the NEO-GEO games.  This really doesn't seem to be a problem though since the games show you a big picture with an X through the buttons that aren't used.  The first time you play one of these games, you can go TAB to input menu and delete the extra button assignment.  You do this 1 time and never have to do it again. 

I think most people are going to have to make some adjustments to inputs based on their control panel anyway.

[MikeQ]

Yep, I can't wait for MikeQ's LEDMame to come out, thats why I thought generating CFG files that set unused buttons as NONE would be a help (since LEDMame will figure out which buttons are used by looking at the CFG files). Can you knock out a quick app that generates these cfg files?

I don't actually look at the .cfg files.  I actually parse the input port structures in the driver and lookup what key sequences/analog devices are assigned to the ports.  There is more information in the structures than in the cfg files.  I can determine if some of the controls are for cocktail use or not as well as other info that lets me make a more informed determination than the cfg files.

[JoyMonkey]

Ah! Now I understand. Okay, my bad.

[MikeQ]

LEDwiz.dll now supports multiple devices (Up to 16) and hot swap.



I'll package it up tomorrow...today and document the new API.

Basically, the only change is a function to retrieve handles for all the LED-Wiz devices that are connected.   Also, all the LWZ- functions now take a device handle parameter.

[MYX]

Dude, you rock! 

Ok, so how do we synch em and set them up. Do you have to make 2 different animations and then call them up independantly?

[MikeQ]

For now, you would have to make an animation for each device and call them independently.  It would be easy to make an API function that treats all the LEDWiz as one big virtual one.  The only problem with this is that you would need to know when you wire them up which one is device 1,2,3,4, etc.  This isn't a real big deal though.

The other issue though is we don't have a LWA editor that will generate a sequence for this API.  You would have to write the LWA by hand.

[MYX]

Ok. There is a lot of tech speak, most of it I will admit, over my head. I have been doing my best to keep up, but it gets a little deep sometimes. So for my own clarification, I'm trying to convert to english. Please correct me if I am wrong. I just want to make sure I understand all this.
The game you are in makes the buttons act a certain way right? So if is asteroids it looks at something in the game and brings up the 5 button lay out. Does this come from the layout I set up within the game (tab - input general - button 1,2,3,4 etc.). Is this right? In Mahuti's set up each game calls a LWA as perscribed through a text doc that you tell it which configuration to use, so you could have the buttons pulse n stuff while you are in game XYZ. Can we do similar stuff with this (call animations into the game). Also if I use LEDWiz 2 for cabinet lighting, will it go away when the game starts?

[MikeQ]

*********************************************************************
NEW LED-WIZ dll released.  Multi-Device capable and hot-swapable
*********************************************************************

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=48495.0

[MikeT]

Hi Guys,

I

[Toonces]

Which resistors do I need for use with the RGB LEDs and the LEDWiz?

It depends on the LEDs you end up going with and the voltage of your source. There's a great calculator here: http://led.linear1.org/1led.wiz

I am using the LEDs from the eBay seller mckenkenken. The ones in this auction here: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7587789040&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWA%3AIT&rd=1

looking at the data for the LED and plugging the values into the calculator you get 150Ohms for Red and 100Ohms for Green and Blue.

It

[JoyMonkey]

Just to let everyone know, I tested out a beta of MikeQ's PowerMAME32 last night and everything went beautifully!
The in-game lighting is really cool, all it needs to setup is a small cfg file that lists the LEDWiz output numbers and matches them to buttons/controls. It lights up the used controls similarly to Mahuti's app, but from within MAME itself, just like people have been dreaming of since DinoRoger's defunct LAME project was mentioned.
The attract sequences while you're in the Mame32 GUI also work well, you can pick and choose which LWA files you'd like to use from a simple menu.
There's also an event based system that I haven't had the time to try out, at the moment it's only set up for Q*Bert (to make the knocker knock when Q*Bert dies).

I'd imagine a public beta will be around the corner, since the bigger bugs were ironed out last night. LEDWiz owners rejoice!

[KillerArcades]

WOOHOO!!


(that's the best I can do at online rejoicing, sorry)

I can't wait! Thanks guys!

[Tiger-Heli]

REALLY COOL!!!!!

Thanks MikeQ for all the hard work!!!

[SirPoonga]

There's also an event based system that I haven't had the time to try out, at the moment it's only set up for Q*Bert (to make the knocker knock when Q*Bert dies).

The commandline version has this too, I hope
I think I found a power supply and relay for my knocker

[mahuti]

SirPoonga... share man, share. I'd like to get that setup too... and I don't wanna start stripping my pinball machine.

[MikeQ]

It should be going up on the site tonight.  I wanted to wait until I had some ads up so I can pay for this little endeavor.  I guess I'll just skip the ads for now though.  I also need to merge up with the 0.104 release.  That only takes about 15 minutes to do.  My son has t-ball tonight so It may be late tonight but I'll try to get the Open Beta posted.

[MYX]

Good Goin eh' 

[SirPoonga]

SirPoonga... share man, share. I'd like to get that setup too... and I don't wanna start stripping my pinball machine.

Radioshack
273-1668
Resister that down to 27V.

Now, as for the relay I am not sure
275-233
The description says 12VDC but the contents says 5VDC.  So the question is what voltage switches it? 
Eidt: 275-232
The other must have a typo.  I beleive 275-232 is the relay needed.

[MYX]

Randy,
With the somewhat official release of PowerMAME will you be doing a multi unit interface for the LEDWiz?

[Circo]

The little app I wrote can work with any other emulator.

For example; nintendo (which always uses the same buttons)

1. create a LWA for nintendo
2. Add nintendo=nintendo.lwa to the ini file.
3. launch the nes emulator with a batch file that calls my app like so; bloodywiz.exe nintendo

Do you have this up for download somewhere, I wanted to light the controls for the console systems in mamewah and an app like this would be perfect.

[Circo]

Whoops I found it, when I did a search for bloodywiz.exe it showed right up.  Thanks!

[mahuti]

if you have any problems with it, let me know. I don't know if the last version I put up was bugfixed or not. Since noone complained, I left well enough alone.

[Circo]

Ok I have my CAB lighting Perfect...Almost

OK here is where I am at

I am using powermame and bloodywiz to get everything working.

I am using bloodywiz to run the attract lighting in mamewah and light the correct buttons for every emulator except for mame.  It works perfectly, as soon as I load up an SNES game for instance the attract lighting stops and the 6 SNES buttons light up for P1 and P2.  As soon as I exit the game mamewah calls on bloodywiz to run attract lighting and it starts back up.  Perfect!

The problem starts when I load up powermame the last command that bloodywiz keeps on repeating.  Powermame will light up the controls and the attract mode will start back up. 

Here is what i tried:

I made a blank.lwa that turned off all of the buttons, it works but as soon as powermame lights up the controls they blanked out again.

I tried a commandline app to clear the clipboard, no luck.

Any ideas on how to stop the commands from repeating?