PC watchdogs?

[jelwell]

So, once in a blue moon my arcade cabinet will lock up. Usually this has more to do with bad roms, or some error window being hidden from the user because of MAMEWAH. (It's not MAMEWAH's fault, but if there's a problem with one of my emulators it's not easy for MAMEWAH to realize this).

Retroblast is working on a review of a new Ultradcade product that sparked my interest.

The USBlinx has a "Watchdog circuit" that will reboot your PC if it detects that the system has frozen up.

I did some searching and I found a few other solutions. ISA Cards, some Motherboards have this already.

MAME even seems to have some sort of Watchdog Timer support, but I get the impression that it's per game and not something that you can configure to reset your whole machine.

Does anyone have a watchdog setup on their Cabinet? Any suggestions on products that work well?

Also, while a hardware watchdog (which presumably detects if the machine is frozen) would be nice; a software watchdog (that could detect if the machine is stuck) would be even better. I hate having my friends yell at me that the cabinet isn't working. I'd much rather it just reboot itself automatically. Although I wonder how quickly the watchdog would notice anyways. If it's not fast enough I'm still gonna hear complaints from the peanut gallery. Damn you peanut gallery, damn you to hell!

I'm trying to imagine how I would even detect if the software is stuck programatically. I suppose if I could figure that out I could write something that would unstick it - rather than having to reboot. *shrug* It almost always happens because of Visual Pinball. The wrapper for MAMEWAH just doesn't seem to handle tables that don't load or missing VBS files.
Joseph Elwell.

[Tiger-Heli]

The KeyDog has this also: http://www.keydog.net/ - but it's pretty pricey just for what it does.

I wouldn't buy from www.ultracade.com just on general principal.