flashing buttons when credit has been inserted?

[djuret]

Hi!

I'm in the planning stages of building my first MAME machine. I bought "the book" and have gotten halfway through. Not sure if the book covers my question, however I'm very eager to get an answer. Basically what I want to do is:

have P1 and/or P2 (start) buttons to blink when a credit has been inserted (and game is ready to be played). And then when a game launched i want the flashing to stop and stay off. Is this possible by using a PAC-Drive?

clarification:
i.e. inserting a credit in P1 coinslot adds 1 credit (game is ready to be played) and therefore the P1 start button should blink. If. P2 also adds 1 credit in the P2 coinslot, his P2 start button should blink.

[TheShanMan]

Yes, but only for games which actually do that - it's a minority of the games that mame supports. Most notably early atari games.

[djuret]

Theoretically, it should be possible to do this without a PAC-drive...
I am by no means an electrician (I barely understood electrics in high-school).

However, It feels like I should be able to create some kind of circuit with a timer functionality that just makes a LED blink. And then have an additional wire from the coin-mech-trigger that closes the circuit, thus forcing the LED to blink. And then have an additional wire from the "start" button to open the circuit, thus forcing the LED to stop blinking.

and of course, the coin mech and start are also connected to the I-PAC.

[DaveMMR]

I believe Arzoo's LEDBlinky application (works with Mala, Hyperspin) has this as a feature, with limitations (i.e. it only works with certain games that had that feature and newer MAME versions).  I know a few games on my cabinet blink the start buttons when a coin is inserted and it's pretty cool. 

Here's a link to the thread: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=73905.0

[AndyWarne]

As mentioned above, some games have this feature built into the ROM code. What they do is flash the keyboard caps/num/scroll lock LEDs.

For this to work, ie without using any external software etc, the game has to have it in the ROM code, and the Mame implementation has to have it working. Galaxian is an example of this.
The keyboard LEDs are actually a neglected part of Mame and arcade controls. Some games make extensive use of all 3 LEDs.
Andy

[ahofle]

To further expound on what Andy said, the LED blinking stuff was moved out of the MAME core and into a helper application called ledutil.exe (which comes with MAME).  To get this working with an IPAC, you will need to have that running in the background to listen for the 'blinking' events from MAME.  LEDUTIL then blinks the appropriate keyboard LEDs.  If you are planning on using an IPAC and super bright LEDs under the P1 and P2 buttons, you will also need a driver board that connects to the IPAC to provide the proper power to the LEDs:
http://www.gamecab.com/products.asp?cat=26

This is the setup I have running and it works great. 

[arzoo]

LEDBlinky uses headkaze's mame output library which I believe uses the same code (with some additional bug fixes) as ledutil.