PowerMAME - New Derivative Build

[Silver]

Hey good work!

I was going to submit my fixes for correcting the use off lightguns in several games, but they've just been put into mame 0.104u1, so no point....

Maybe we should make a little to-do list, or wish list (perhaps things being worked on in todo, and things that someone thinks is good in a wish list?). We could add correcting pedal inputs to the list... 

[JoyMonkey]

don't forget about this one.

I had a few minutes so I threw this one into PowerMAME.  It is config file configurable so you can personalize the message and also get rid of it alltogether.  PowerMAME32 has a GUI interface that allows you to enable/set the message.

Is this "Game Paused" tweak included in the current build? I downloaded it again but couldn't see anything in the PowerMAME32 options about it.

[Santoro]

It would be really cool if you could display a custom Graphic over the game when paused.

Thanks for the hard work on this.

[mahuti]

I've begun officially learning C & C++ to contribute.

After all of these years I've spent learning OOP languages... what's a few more?

[MikeQ]

don't forget about this one.

I had a few minutes so I threw this one into PowerMAME.  It is config file configurable so you can personalize the message and also get rid of it alltogether.  PowerMAME32 has a GUI interface that allows you to enable/set the message.

Is this "Game Paused" tweak included in the current build? I downloaded it again but couldn't see anything in the PowerMAME32 options about it.

No.  If you go to release notes on the download page, you'll see what is in it and what is coming (done so far) in the next release.  Also, I changed it from being a file that is read to a command line option that is passed in.  This fits better with existing options and means that  the information gets saved in both mame.ini and mame32.ini.  It is also assignable per game.  This way you can have custom messages for each game or apply the default to all games.

I was planning on only doing a release with each official mame release but if I get enough stuff done in between, I'll release one if people are looking for features.   I'd like to keep this to a minimum as a release kills an entire evening.  I have to build all configurations and run some basic testing as well as baseline the release.

[MikeQ]

I've begun officially learning C & C++ to contribute.

After all of these years I've spent learning OOP languages... what's a few more?

Cool.  If you know java then C++ is easy.  If you know C++ you can learn C.  If you have any questions, you know where to find me.

[MYX]

Hey Mike,
I posted this on the LEDWiz section but got no reply yet. Do you know if Randy is working on a MultiLEDwiz version?

[MikeQ]

Hey Mike,
I posted this on the LEDWiz section but got no reply yet. Do you know if Randy is working on a MultiLEDwiz version?

I saw the post but was waiting for Randy to respond.  The short answer is, "I think so".

I'm sure it is on his list.  I've sent him at least one email about virtualizing the software so more LED-Wiz just appear as more LED's.   This way when creating sequences, the user doesn't need to worry about what device LED's are physically on.

He and I both have been meaning to look into using the LEDWiz.dll in Visual Basic.   I think he wants to switch to it for his program.

[MYX]

Cool, I will patiently wait. Wish I could help. I just don't know the first thing about VB.  Used to write basic on an apple IIc. Somehow I don't think that this will cut it.

10> Make MAME Work
20> If MAME don't work then Bang head on wall
30> Go to 10

[MYX]

I found this when I was on my quest for knowledge about 49 ways the other day.  Kinda of eerie.

well.. maybe RandyT will invent a cheap output board based on the KeyWiz that could be used for driving LEDs, Solonoids(Qbert, T2 recoil), lamps, relays.. etc.. of course you would need something inbetween to change the TTL signal to something with more current or whatever.. but you can find lamp driver board from pinballs and skeeball machine for cheap AFAIK.. in fact I probably have a few mixed with all my junk..   I'm no engineer but I bet Randy could make a USB device like the keywiz but with different firmware that would have all outputs instead of inputs.. of course writting drivers and incorporating it into mame would be a whole different story and perhaps parallel port might be easier.. I dunno.. just tossing out the idea...

Keep it up guys. 

[MikeQ]

I found this when I was on my quest for knowledge about 49 ways the other day.  Kinda of eerie.

well.. maybe RandyT will invent a cheap output board based on the KeyWiz that could be used for driving LEDs, Solonoids(Qbert, T2 recoil), lamps, relays.. etc.. of course you would need something inbetween to change the TTL signal to something with more current or whatever.. but you can find lamp driver board from pinballs and skeeball machine for cheap AFAIK.. in fact I probably have a few mixed with all my junk..   I'm no engineer but I bet Randy could make a USB device like the keywiz but with different firmware that would have all outputs instead of inputs.. of course writting drivers and incorporating it into mame would be a whole different story and perhaps parallel port might be easier.. I dunno.. just tossing out the idea...

Keep it up guys. 

I'd like to know who said that.  I think I need some lotto numbers from them.

[Ahigh]

.

[Ahigh]

.

[Farmboy90]

It would be really cool if you could display a custom Graphic over the game when paused.

Thanks for the hard work on this.

Santoro, you are thinking like me.     I am working on that actually.  I want to display an image (like my CP with the buttons marked as to what button is used for what) that will show directions on how to play.

I will let you guys know and then we can add that to the PowerMAME build as well as my other Game Paused change.

[MikeQ]

It would be really cool if you could display a custom Graphic over the game when paused.

Thanks for the hard work on this.

Santoro, you are thinking like me.     I am working on that actually.  I want to display an image (like my CP with the buttons marked as to what button is used for what) that will show directions on how to play.

I will let you guys know and then we can add that to the PowerMAME build as well as my other Game Paused change.

Cool.  Let me know when It is done and I'll integrate it into the code base. 

[Buddabing]

It would be really cool if you could display a custom Graphic over the game when paused.

[mahuti]

yeah, that's what I thought... but I was too lazy to post about it.

[Santoro]

Sorry guys, I am not familiar with every function of every MAME variant. 

All credit to those that have done this before.  It's a good idea

[kkingsto]

How about fixing some of the games that run slow?  I know Gorf is one of them...

But this is a cool idea...

[mahuti]

most of us that might be able to make some modest contribution (and I'm not talking about MikeQ here) aren't good enough to enhance the emulation. But we can do what we can to make some enhancements to way MAME behaves on a cabinet.

[Farmboy90]

By the way, can we include the skip_startup_frame/fast_forward_frame stuff that is going on over here?

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=48674.0

I am not sure if this is planned to be incorporated or not.  I did search the thread briefly and didn't find anything, so hopefully I am not asking a question already answered.

At any rate, a feature like that is VERY useful and user friendly for cabs.  So I have been monitoring it and would like to see it in PowerMAME.

[MYX]

Interesting artical in retroblast about Aaron Giles. Kind of cool to get to hear a MAME Dev POV. Link  Between Mike Q, Sir P, Mr. Mahuti, I am seeing a whole different side to the computer world.

[MikeQ]

Interesting artical in retroblast about Aaron Giles. Kind of cool to get to hear a MAME Dev POV. Link  Between Mike Q, Sir P, Mr. Mahuti, I am seeing a whole different side to the computer world.

I read it.  James emailed me a link.  I was surprised to hear him talking about accelerating with D3D.

[Silver]

I found this when I was on my quest for knowledge about 49 ways the other day.  Kinda of eerie.

well.. maybe RandyT will invent a cheap output board based on the KeyWiz that could be used for driving LEDs, Solonoids(Qbert, T2 recoil), lamps, relays.. etc.. of course you would need something inbetween to change the TTL signal to something with more current or whatever.. but you can find lamp driver board from pinballs and skeeball machine for cheap AFAIK.. in fact I probably have a few mixed with all my junk..   I'm no engineer but I bet Randy could make a USB device like the keywiz but with different firmware that would have all outputs instead of inputs.. of course writting drivers and incorporating it into mame would be a whole different story and perhaps parallel port might be easier.. I dunno.. just tossing out the idea...

Keep it up guys. 

I'd like to know who said that.  I think I need some lotto numbers from them.

Is that "brandon" again? Crazy - with these new lightguns on the block, I was testing loads of lightgun games, but found several that worked great but the pointer was offset from where you were pointing. Anyway, I came across an old post by someone who had problems with the same games with an analogue joystick, with mame thinking the joy was not centered when it was. He solved the problem, and lo and behold 6 months later his fix turns out to be perfect solution for all the lightgun games with the issue (8/9 I think). I changed all the games with his fix, submitted it, and all the fixes just got incorportated into 0.104u1.

That someone was "brandon". Maybe we need to trawl through this guys old posts and see what else he's suggested..... 

[MikeQ]

By the way, can we include the skip_startup_frame/fast_forward_frame stuff that is going on over here?

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=48674.0

I am not sure if this is planned to be incorporated or not.  I did search the thread briefly and didn't find anything, so hopefully I am not asking a question already answered.

At any rate, a feature like that is VERY useful and user friendly for cabs.  So I have been monitoring it and would like to see it in PowerMAME.

Someone else asked me about this too.  I think there is a diff file that would make this easy to add.  The only thing I don't like is you have to have a config file per game.  What it basically does is skips rendering until a certain frame is hit.  This allows you to skip the "don't do drugs" messages and the boot sequences on some games.  I hate having to have a per game config file.  We can add it though if people want it.

[boykster]

I think the author of that mod is moving toward a unified ini file.....

gamename,framenumber

That makes a ton more sense IMHO.

Rich

[RandyT]

I found this when I was on my quest for knowledge about 49 ways the other day.  Kinda of eerie.

well.. maybe RandyT will invent a cheap output board based on the KeyWiz that could be used for driving LEDs, Solonoids(Qbert, T2 recoil), lamps, relays.. etc.. of course you would need something inbetween to change the TTL signal to something with more current or whatever.. but you can find lamp driver board from pinballs and skeeball machine for cheap AFAIK.. in fact I probably have a few mixed with all my junk..   I'm no engineer but I bet Randy could make a USB device like the keywiz but with different firmware that would have all outputs instead of inputs.. of course writting drivers and incorporating it into mame would be a whole different story and perhaps parallel port might be easier.. I dunno.. just tossing out the idea...

Not as eerie as reading something like that when it's sitting in front of you three quarters finished.  Makes me start looking around for hidden cameras

RE: Multiple units

There's still a little bit of head banging to do on this one.  From a high level standpoint, the inputs should be virtualized.  So hopefully, when talking to the devices directly via Mike's DLL, you would think about addressing output 15 on board 3 like so:

32 x ( [board number] -1) + [output number] = [virtual output number]

or in other words

(32 x (3-1)) + 15 = 79

The actual command language used for creating animations will need to have some additions.  Most likely, I will use the same commands currently in use, but will be deciding which board to send commands to, based on the first 3 letters of the command:  LWZ for the first device and LW1 through LWF for devices 2 through 16, using HEX for the 3rd character.

Hopefully, most of this is stuff only the programmers will need to worry about

RandyT

[MikeQ]

I found this when I was on my quest for knowledge about 49 ways the other day.  Kinda of eerie.

well.. maybe RandyT will invent a cheap output board based on the KeyWiz that could be used for driving LEDs, Solonoids(Qbert, T2 recoil), lamps, relays.. etc.. of course you would need something inbetween to change the TTL signal to something with more current or whatever.. but you can find lamp driver board from pinballs and skeeball machine for cheap AFAIK.. in fact I probably have a few mixed with all my junk..   I'm no engineer but I bet Randy could make a USB device like the keywiz but with different firmware that would have all outputs instead of inputs.. of course writting drivers and incorporating it into mame would be a whole different story and perhaps parallel port might be easier.. I dunno.. just tossing out the idea...

Not as eerie as reading something like that when it's sitting in front of you three quarters finished.  Makes me start looking around for hidden cameras

RE: Multiple units

There's still a little bit of head banging to do on this one.  From a high level standpoint, the inputs should be virtualized.  So hopefully, when talking to the devices directly via Mike's DLL, you would think about addressing output 15 on board 3 like so:

32 x ( [board number] -1) + [output number] = [virtual output number]

or in other words

(32 x (3-1)) + 15 = 79

The actual command language used for creating animations will need to have some additions.  Most likely, I will use the same commands currently in use, but will be deciding which board to send commands to, based on the first 3 letters of the command:  LWZ for the first device and LW1 through LWF for devices 2 through 16, using HEX for the 3rd character.

Hopefully, most of this is stuff only the programmers will need to worry about

RandyT

I think there are 2 aspects to this.  I think the users need a GUI that virtualizes.  In other words, if you have 2 LED-Wiz's hooked up, the interface shows a single group of 64 LED's number 1-64.  A drag and drop interface would be nice but that is another topic.

The user can create a sequence with all available LED's without knowledge of what device they reside on.  The instructions that get spit out in the LWA files will not be virtualized.  A single "frame" of lighting that spans multiple devices will generate an instruction for each device in the span. 

The .DLL will accept the instructions as it does now but convert the LW1, LW2... instructions back into LWZ instructions while also steering them to the appropriate device.


Modified:

Randy, If you can at least define the new language, I can update the .DLL and incorperate it into PowerMAME.  This will allow people to at least hand generate LWA files that support multiple devices.  If the GUI isn't going to be coming soon this will allow people to at least do it the brute force way.

[MYX]

Not as eerie as reading something like that when it's sitting in front of you three quarters finished.  Makes me start looking around for hidden cameras

Yes, we are using hidden cameras and you need to stop picking your nose. 

[MYX]

Randy,
If I am right, we loose one channel to gain another board. Is this right?

The GUI could tell the app what is being done. <-- Sorry, Talking out my butt as I have no idea how this stuff works. But, Click a radio button and another 32 LEDs appear in the interface or  they were already there and become ungreyed out.

[MikeQ]

You don't lose any outputs when a new board is added.  Every board adds 32 LEDs.

[XtraSmiley]

Yes, we are using hidden cameras and you need to stop picking your nose. 

Holy $hit, I started picking my nose just as I read this...

As for the individual game start up, can't we just have a generic option to start all games like 5 minutes into it?  I realize some games don't need a lot of time, but they would end up just repeating the attract screen right?  If 5 minutes isn't enough it could be any amount of time (or user set able).  Would that solve the problem?  If I'm ignorant of how this works, don't worry about explaining out why it won't, just say, no, that won't work Mo...  If you wasted time to explain it to me, it would just waste time! 

Keep up the good work.

[Farmboy90]

Hey MikeQ,

Are you housing all the source at this time?  I mean if I submitted something, you would do the integration etc?

How about an SVN server?  I could set one up at my house and provide access to approved developers.  We could do checkins/check outs etc.  If you have never used SVN before it is source control via the web. 

At any rate, it might be easier to co-ordinate amongst the developers.  I am not sure how much tinkering would be done on it, so it may not be worth it, but just a thought.

Never mind, I just read the first page of this thread.  LOL

Hey MikeQ, can you grant me access? 

[Cananas]

By the way, can we include the skip_startup_frame/fast_forward_frame stuff that is going on over here?

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=48674.0

I am not sure if this is planned to be incorporated or not.  I did search the thread briefly and didn't find anything, so hopefully I am not asking a question already answered.

At any rate, a feature like that is VERY useful and user friendly for cabs.  So I have been monitoring it and would like to see it in PowerMAME.

I think the author of that mod is moving toward a unified ini file.....

gamename,framenumber

That makes a ton more sense IMHO.

Rich

Yes, I think this new version is included in the BuddaMame 104 release. A great feature.

[MikeQ]

Hey MikeQ,

Are you housing all the source at this time?  I mean if I submitted something, you would do the integration etc?

How about an SVN server?  I could set one up at my house and provide access to approved developers.  We could do checkins/check outs etc.  If you have never used SVN before it is source control via the web. 

At any rate, it might be easier to co-ordinate amongst the developers.  I am not sure how much tinkering would be done on it, so it may not be worth it, but just a thought.

Never mind, I just read the first page of this thread.  LOL

Hey MikeQ, can you grant me access? 

I don't have a web based system setup yet.  I have some offers to setup one up for us.

Right now, the best way to do it is to download the PowerMAME source, code up your feature, Zip the source back up and email it to me.  I'll integrate it.   To make integration easier, keep your code out of MAME files.  Put it in your own files and just put function calls to your code in the mame code.

I'll take your code and clean it up (change the coding standards and naming conventions) and merge it in to the baseline.  I'm using Perforce for CMS so I do have a revision history.  I just don't have the web interface hooked up yet.  I'll get on this since people are wanting to contribute.

[SirPoonga]

Another thing to add.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=50083.0

I did do a hack for an older mame to do this.  But then they changed the artwork system and I didn't want to learn the new system.  However it might be worth going back to now.

Also, adding a generic bezel.  That way on games that don't have artwork you can fill in with something that matches the design of your cabinet.

[Farmboy90]

Another thing to add.
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=50083.0

I did do a hack for an older mame to do this.  But then they changed the artwork system and I didn't want to learn the new system.  However it might be worth going back to now.

Also, adding a generic bezel.  That way on games that don't have artwork you can fill in with something that matches the design of your cabinet.

I must be misunderstanding what you want to do, because I am certain this already exists.  When I first set up my cab with v0102 I noticed I had artwork on the sides (1942 for example) and I hated it.  It was making me mental.   Turns out it was just a config file setting in the mame.ini, so I flipped the value, the artwork went away, and I had empty space on the sides again.

I can't remember which thing I need to set to get rid of them, but here is what the doc says (I think it was either the artwork flag or backdrop flag):

MAME core misc options
----------------------

-[no]artwork / -[no]art

   Enable or disable usage of additional artwork (backdrops, overlays,
   etc.). The default is ON (-artwork).

-[no]use_backdrops / -[no]backdrop

   Enables/disables the display of backdrops. The default is ON
   (-use_backdrops).

-[no]use_overlays / -[no]overlay

   Enables/disables the display of overlays. The default is ON
   (-use_overlays).

-[no]use_bezels / -[no]bezel

   Enables/disables the display of bezels. The default is ON
   (-use_bezels).

[divemaster127]

This looks like this is going to be a awesome derivative of mame, will we be able to donate to the cause
thanks
divemaster

[JoyMonkey]

I must be misunderstanding what you want to do, because I am certain this already exists.  When I first set up my cab with v0102 I noticed I had artwork on the sides (1942 for example) and I hated it.  It was making me mental.   Turns out it was just a config file setting in the mame.ini, so I flipped the value, the artwork went away, and I had empty space on the sides again.

AFAIK Sir.P's tweak cropped the artwork around the screen, so vertical games were still displayed at the full height of the screen, but with the bezel artwork partially showing either side.

[SirPoonga]

I must be misunderstanding what you want to do, because I am certain this already exists.  When I first set up my cab with v0102 I noticed I had artwork on the sides (1942 for example) and I hated it.  It was making me mental.   Turns out it was just a config file setting in the mame.ini, so I flipped the value, the artwork went away, and I had empty space on the sides again.

All those options are for enabling or disabling artwork.  What we are talking about is filling in the black edges with artwork, which means dropping the artwork so it with the game fit a 4:3 screen.