Lighting my control panel; a reality check!

[arzoo]

My 4-Player/2-Deck/Franken-Panel has been in development for months now and I

[DaveMMR]

Sigh Arzoo... now someone else knows my pain.  We should start a LedWiz support group.  "I would have had the cab done already but I wanted the buttons to light up...." 

Don't get me wrong, I love the product.  I played around with it, did a few tests and it works just the way I expected it to.  Once everything is ironed out, I will not regret the money I spent on 2 LedWizes and a heap of RGB/Electric Ice buttons.  Just the one big omission that kind of nagged me was the lack of multi-unit support right out of the gate, which doesn't seem unreasonable considering RGB LEDs take three inputs and many people would undoubtably want to rig up the whole shabang with multi-colored blinkies (plus those who like turning their cabs into Christmas trees). 

EDIT:  In all fairness, I was aware of this limitation before I ordered them, but figured PowerMame would help me out.  Unfortunately, there was talk of the project ending, so a lot of us are scrambling for more options.

By the way, it's not only for looks.  Quite a few games had color specific buttons (e.g. Mouse Trap, Name That Tune, etc.) that makes the game a lot easier to play.

What I could suggest to you now is the same think I'm planning to do.  Wire up the buttons you want in attract mode in device number 1 and the rest in number 2.  There are other work arounds as well, but I think multi-device software (outside Powermame) won't be too far off.... I hope.

[MYX]

I only bought 1 LED Wiz when I bought my GGG stuff. when I bought it I sent Randy a note stating that I would buy another one if he put together some software that allowed for 2 Wizs to be programmed. I think that many folks would buy several if this were the case. I mean heck, I bought 2 49 ways and 2 49Wiz boards, I am willing to spend the $$$ is the support is there from the manufacturer. He has been quiet for a little while. Hopefully he is working of a miracle software piece.

[RandyT]

The updated KeyWiz software is just about ready.  Multi-unit LED-Wiz support is next on the agenda.

I'll make the resident software and the OCX support it first (the playback side) and release things as they are stable.  Making the animation editor support  multiple boards is really the thing that is most daunting on the project, and will follow once the basic tools are ready.

RandyT

[Timoe]

Thank you thank you.


let me go check my account balance

[Cameronj]

Oh wow. I am in the midst of my LED Wiz project right now and it has been a lot of wiring. I was feeling glad that I was able to sacrifice a bit and keep myself down to one controller. I am tempted to go with two though if the software is up to it. The agony and the ecstacy.

[DaveMMR]

Multi-unit LED-Wiz support is next on the agenda.

Thank you!!

 

[arzoo]

Randy, we all knew you'd come through for us in the end! 

For now I'm going to re-wire my RGBs so that a single color is controlled from device #1 and all the other colors from device #2. This way I'm good to go with a single color, and after the software is updated I'll be able to add the other colors.

[KillerArcades]

Everything said here has been great, and I also felt my stomach jump when I read that Randy's looking to get some more work done on the LEDWIZ's - hooray!

One thing I thought I'd throw out there for you, though, arzoo, is that one of the "compromises" I decided upon when doing mine was that of grouping buttons. By that I mean, I wired up more than one button per ouput on my LEDWIZ. You could do the same to conserve your 32 outputs, but still have dual, or even tri-color LED per button "group".

The drawback to this is then of course the type of animations you can do, though, I strongly feel that 80% of what you're hoping to get out of some sweet animations, can still be accomplished well even with some buttons grouped, so long as you're careful in which ones you group to keep things symmetrical, etc. so that things don't distract the eye when running attract sequences etc.

The other big drawback is that depending on which buttons you group, you might very well loose some of the PowerMAME features of lighting individual buttons properly.

But, what I did to preserve the PowerMAME support and still not exceed my LEDWIZ outputs, was to combine my credit buttons together, my admin buttons, and I combined my P1, P2, P3, P4 buttons with my GGG balltop lit joysticks - (link to blog in case you want to see how mine ended up: KillerArcadeMachine blog).

Anyways, just thought I'd throw that out there to make sure you were thinking of all the options - though the best setup of course will be to have every button independently controlled and capable of a full RGB LED setup - though I figure I'll need 4 LEDWIZ's to do that on my CP, so, like I said, I made some compromises.