CPWizard/Mala issue

[DP Louie]

Okay, I've got CPWizard and Mala on my cab.  What I've done is set up Mala to call CPWizard as an external application (under the "controller/keyboard" setting).  I did this so that when scrolling thru my gamelists, pressing a designated button on my cp will launch CPWizard and bring up the relevant game info.  It works like a charm, with 1 annoying problem - it takes anywhere from 8-20 seconds from the time you press the button until CPWizards menu pops up.  Any ideas on what could be causing this lag?  Another minor annoyance is when viewing  a game manual .pdf in CPWiz, the pages are larger than the screen, and you have to scroll down to see the whole thing.  Is there any way to "zoom out" so that the .pdf fills the screen from top to bottom?  Thanks!

Greg Williams

[headkaze]

Your running CPWizard in standalone mode. If you launch CPWizard before Mala with only the -minimized command line option it will run in resident mode. That means all the data is loaded at one time and stay in the icon tray and it should load a lot quicker next time you launch it from inside Mala.

If you don't want to run CPWizard in resident mode then set "Dynamic Data Loading" option so it only loads the data for a game at a time. Without that option set in standalone mode it loads all the data for all games every time you launch it and that's alot of data to load each time. I've been meaning to make that option automatic for standalone mode but havn't got around to it.

Right now there is no way to have the pdf pages to fill the screen but its an easy enough option to add. I'll add it to my todo list.

[DP Louie]

Thanks HK for the fast reply.  I checked "enable dynamic data loading", and it helps, there's still a lag of about 6 seconds before displaying the CPWiz menu.  The emulators that I have set up show up fine, however MAME games control panels are not labeled (it shows the layout screen, with all controls labeled).  If I leave the box unchecked and run CPWiz in resident mode (minimized) the results are better, only about a 3 second delay, and everything works fine, but running this way makes MALA lock up the first time you call CPWiz.  In other words, if I run CPWiz and minimize it to the icon tray, then run MALA and try to call CPWiz, MALA locks up.  After Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close the unresponsive MALA, I can run MALA again and CPWiz works fine every time.  Any idea why MALA would hang on the initial run?  Thanks, and thanks for offering to add options to the pdf viewer.

Greg Williams

[loadman]

(see attached pic)

Isn't this how you load control panel viewers in mala? rather than load before mala

[headkaze]

Thanks HK for the fast reply.  I checked "enable dynamic data loading", and it helps, there's still a lag of about 6 seconds before displaying the CPWiz menu.  The emulators that I have set up show up fine, however MAME games control panels are not labeled (it shows the layout screen, with all controls labeled).  If I leave the box unchecked and run CPWiz in resident mode (minimized) the results are better, only about a 3 second delay, and everything works fine, but running this way makes MALA lock up the first time you call CPWiz.  In other words, if I run CPWiz and minimize it to the icon tray, then run MALA and try to call CPWiz, MALA locks up.  After Ctrl-Alt-Delete to close the unresponsive MALA, I can run MALA again and CPWiz works fine every time.  Any idea why MALA would hang on the initial run?  Thanks, and thanks for offering to add options to the pdf viewer.

Greg Williams

Hey Greg, I've released Version 1.67 which fixes the Dynamic Data Loading not working in standalone mode. It should use it automatically in standalone mode whether you have it set in options or not too. Also added a zoom button for the PDF viewer (select button toggles the zoom).

As for the crashing in Mala first time viewing CPWizard. Can you check your CPWizard.log file for any errors.

[headkaze]

(see attached pic)

Isn't this how you load control panel viewers in mala? rather than load before mala

Yes I would say thats the way he's doing it, but because CPWizard is more than just a CP viewer program it has to read in more than just Controls.xml, it reads in Command.Dat, History.Dat, Story.Dat, MameInfo.Dat etc. which is about 18 MB of data in total. While on my P4 3Ghz even in standalone mode CPWizard only takes a few seconds to load all that data, on slower machines your better off running it in resident mode (in the icon tray) and calling it via command line after that so the data is already loaded in memory.

Also forgot to mention if you run CPWizard in resident mode, you don't need to send it command line info for Mame only other emulators. CPWizard detects the game running in Mame automatically, so if you run it that way don't bother putting anything in the control panel section for Mala. Well that is only for when you want CPWizard to show when you press the pause button, but I think Greg wants it to show from inside Mala so in that case you will need to put that command line call in there.

[DP Louie]

Wow, thanks HK for the quick update!  I've installed the newest version of CPW, and it works like a charm now, with about a 6 second delay.  Note that I'm still having a problem with Mala freezing on the initial running of CPW if CPW is resident.  I'll see if I can post my CPW log, although I really think this is a Mala issue.  Thanks for the pdf improvement, that's awesome!  Loadman - I've tried to use the control panel viewer feature in Mala, but the problem I encountered was that I am running CPWiz via a command line, and I have to specify an emulator (not with MAME, but with other emus), and as far as I can tell, the variable %emu% in Mala is only available for use with "external applications" and not with the control panel viewer command line.  I hope that makes sense...  Thanks again guys.  This forum is great!

Greg Williams

[headkaze]

Yeah 6 seconds is a bit too long I think, it would be better for you to run it in resident mode. If you can find more info on what is causing the crash in Mala I'll see what i can do.