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Coin-up keyboard light function still in Mame?
chiLLbiLLy:
Ok, am I missing something or did newer versions of Mame drop the functionality of using the keyboard lights (num lock/caps lock/scroll lock) for various older games when you coined up? I recently upgraded to MameUI .129 and when I tried coining up Asteroids, Tempest, Missile Command, etc., I get nothing in the way of blinking num lock or caps lock lights. Checked on another computer and still nothing. Did Mame drop this function a while back or am I just missing something simple here? I was wanting to use an IPAC led harness for a project and decided to quickly test a much newer version of Mame, from what I had, but unless I'm doing something wrong, that function may have been dropped at some point along the way.
TheShanMan:
It was moved out of mame.exe and into ledutil (which comes with mame).
u_rebelscum:
Short answer: you now need a separate application to use keyboard lights.
Long answer: A long time ago, 0.107u4, mame moved the light outputs from using a keyboard hack to a general light output format.
--- Quote ---Added support for notifying external clients of changes in output
states in the Windows OSD system. See windows/output.h for a list of
messages that external clients can register to receive. Removed the
built-in hacky LED support in the Windows OSD layer. Created a sample
application ledutil.exe which subscribes to the external events and
routes the "led0", "led1", and "led2" outputs to the keyboard LEDs
just like before. If you want to continue to have LED support, simply
copy ledutil.exe into your startup folder and let it run in the
background. [Aaron Giles]
--- End quote ---
This is great for games that have more than three lights, and portability between OSes, and cleaned up the game drivers so they all output lights the same way. Also, it gave the ability to have 3rd party multi-LED devices that light up instead of just the keyboard lights working. However, this makes it a little more work to get keyboard lights to work now.
chiLLbiLLy:
Thanks for the info, guys. I guess that's what happens when you don't bother upgrading your Mame program for several years. :-\
Now, after reading more about it, it appears as though the LED Blinky program can handle this coin-up/credit light function, too, but does anyone know if LED Blinky can actually drive the keyboard led's via an IPAC with attached led harness, or is LED Blinky more for use with dedicated lighting boards, like the LED Wiz?
Just trying to figure out which utility to use, ledutil or LED Blinky (or if I would have to use a combination of both, if that were even possible. I want to utilize both an LED Wiz for multi-color, lighted buttons and the keyboard led's (via IPAC led harness) for coin-in/player 1 & 2 start lights, as I originally thought this would be simple. Perhaps not, though.
arzoo:
LEDBlinky can drive the LED-Wiz, PAC-Drive, and U-HID, but not the IPAC.