Wincab and mame at the same tiem - possible??

[eggedd2k]

just downloaded wincab for my mame cabinet.  it would be great if i could run wincab at the same time as playing a game on mame (with no sound from mame).

is this possible using just the basic controls on the mame control panel?

[Chris]

MAME and WinCab will both play sound at the same time, although it's possible that your results may vary based on your sound card's mixer.   (Note that I haven't tested this since about beta 4, so there's a possibility that changes in MAME or WinCab make this no longer true... I'll check it out when I get home.)
 To get WinCab playing with no sound in MAME, you'll have to disable the sound in MAME.

WinCab can adapt to just about any control configuration, even down to a Pac-Man machine with a single joystick and a start button. Tell me what controls you have and what type of monitor you're running and I can make more specific suggestions.

--Chris

[eggedd2k]

control panel has two joysticks, six buttons for each player plus 1 and 2 player start buttons.

surely the difficult part is going to be disabling the sound in mame, then going back into wincab and then back into mame - without a keyboard

[Thenasty]

why not just dire up winamp and put your TONS of song on the playlist and run MAME ? You sre making it to hard on your self...

[Chris]

He still has the same issue if he wants MAME to be silent while the music plays. But you can disable MAME's sound in mame.ini, can't you?

Have you tried listening to them both together?  For games without background music, I don't think the sound effects are going to detract from the music that much...

--Chris

[Thenasty]

you can set MAME to no sound and you can listen to your music while palying. But remember that some games in MAME won't load without the sound enabled.

[Chris]

But remember that some games in MAME won't load without the sound enabled.

That's been fixed in the last couple of releases.

[eggedd2k]

the difficult thing is going to be disabling the sound in mame when i want to listen to the jukebox and play games at the same time. also, once i've loaded the jukebox i need some way of getting into mame.

the best solution to all this i can think of so far is to have a wireless keyboard and mouse near to the cab.

[Chris]

the best solution to all this i can think of so far is to have a wireless keyboard and mouse near to the cab.

Or have a button wired up to Alt and another to Tab, or find a hotkey program to map Alt-Tab to a single keystroke.

[sWampy]

Hey, Chirs, this looks like the perfect excuse to add frontend capability to your jukebox. ;-)  Put a toggle button to flip between songs and games, and wincab/doscab would make a pretty cool looking mame frontend.  At the very least a lanuch exe button would be cool, where you could launch a fe easily from wincab.

[eggedd2k]

now that would be good. perfect even.  there's still the issue of disabling the sound in mame32 when you feel like listening to the jukebox

[richms]

Perhaps 2 soundcards, with MP3 playback on one and emulation on the other, then you can either put a crossfader on the cabinet, or else run the line out of one to the line in on the other and let the jukebox app look after changing the line in volume to let the mame sounds thru.

Be aware that apps that use the braindead MS media player control will only play to the default sound device, so you will need to find a slightly more advanced jukebox.

[allroy1975]

am I simplifying this too much by thinking this:

Have Mame32 installed in 2 different places (one configured with sound and one without.  Have 3 icons on your desktop, one for Wincab, one for Mame32 and one for Wincab with mame32 that points to a batch file that launches Wincab and your alternate Mame32 install that has the sound turned off in it?

shouldn't be hard to write a batch file like that. 

FWIW IMHO it sounds better to have both just because that's what arcades sounded like to me...music blasting and you could still hear your game...at least a little. 

Allroy

[richms]

The problem is changing the volumes mid game, which is where I like the idea of putting a couple of sliders on the cab on the 2 soundcards. I like the idea so much I may actually do it.