Apologies if this has been discussed already - didn't see it in search results but I'm in my end stages of putting together an emulator with an Attract Mode front end for Mame, and various other emulators on a mac mini. Nearly everything is working beautifully but I have two issues remaining and I seem stuck on both and am on the verge of giving up on the mac (which has already been a journey to say the least) and restart on PC because it feels like the Mac support is much less common but that seems so silly that the place I'm getting stuck is on the mac talking to the Ultimate I/O board.
1.) installed an ultimarc ultrastik and while the computer recognizes the device attached and I can use the SDK to change configuration of it(change the name to player 2 joystick for instance), my FE in Attract doesn't appear to be responding to it....I admittedly need to spend more time troubleshooting here, but I thought it was worth mentioning because it seems like there may be some issues with the SDKor Mac in general once you read problem #2.
2.) I put some RGB led gold leaf buttons from ultimarc on it hoping to light them and while they function as expected through an ultimarc Ultimate I/O, I have found no way to get them to light consistently. I am aware LEDBlinky is a common software used on the PC for this task, but is there really NOTHING out there for the mac to control those RGB signals? I was using the SDK to set some colors to the buttons, but I am never seeing them lit while using the mini. I know it's wired correctly because when I hard boot my mac computer, all the buttons light up on startup but turn off once the OS starts to load. I borrowed my daughters bulky PC and tried it there(running no arcade software at all) and as soon as I plugged the Ultimate I/O USB cable, all the lights came on to the color of the LEDs I had previously configured in the SDK which leads me to believe the SDK is interacting with hardware, but there is something about the Mac not totally compatible with these Ultimarc devices.
I'm using Ben Baker's SDK here because it looks like there isn't much on the Mac that connects to Ultimarc devices except this SDK and the one UI driven pin config tool(that doesn't do the RGB configure in the UI). Anyone with any bright ideas - I can't tell if I have a problem with the Ultimate I/O and my Mac or if it's the lack of a good LED controller on Mac.
https://www.baker76.com/pacdrive-sdk/I'm asking ChatGPT to help me troubleshoot and it seems to think the buttons won't stay on without some LEDBlinky equivalent programing running the background to send signal to the lights. I would have thought the iPac hardware would simply send 5v and the RGB configuration for an on/off state(once configured via the SDK) at a minimum but with GPT telling me otherwise - I'm a bit confused. It seems like this is something with limited data on the web to help troubleshoot which is throwing GPT but has ANYONE out there got either an Ultrastik or the RGB goldleaf Ultimarc devices working with a Mac? I would feel a lot better if I knew this was possible at all because I'm already many many many many hours into juggling mac specific tools dependencies to get all the software running for the various gaming systems. Thanks for your help!