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I'd be amazed if it could run on something that old.

What is necessary to run LED Blinky?

Even if I go to the manufacturers sites - that LED Blinky lists on https://www.ledblinky.net/ledblinky.htm ;  the schematics are very basic to non-existent.

So, if I wanted to create a setup where the LED/RGB arcade Buttons change colors/blink to the beat of the music on whatever game is on the PC as well as have their input recognized; what is needed?

An LED controller such PacLED64, the buttons and wires that come with the buttons and LED Blinky, and that's it?

Or is a control interface such as one of those Ipacs necessary?

Scott, thanks for helping out here with Temp123's questions.

All I'll add is it seems like this may be your first arcade build and I would suggest reading some of the other threads in this forum or other resources around the web on building mame systems. Then after you have your control panel wired up and working, and your front-end and emulation software installed and configured, you can circle back to getting LEDBlinky configured.

you sure it's not just your eye pupils adjusting for the light of the monitor?

place a static image on the screen and see if it's doing it.

not sure what you mean by "flashes"... periods of bright white is what i think of when someone says "flash" could be a problem with the signal going into the tube not being even... could also be a voltage or blanking problem. hard to tell from your description.

the chassis B+ voltage will bounce around as the screen image changes... dark images or black will show a high voltage... bright screens and white will show lower voltages. (as the tube consumes power to make the image) again, place a static non moving image on the screen and see if the voltage changes. it should only vary a tiny bit, not more than say... a 0.2 of a volt? its going to depend on lots of things. if it's still wildly swinging around even with a static non moving image, i'd look into the main B+ capacitors and replacing them if you haven't already.

Thank you for your comment.
In the video I have attached, when you look at the left side of the letter p, it is very noticeable. I can describe it as a flash or jump.

Even if I give a fixed image (test screen), the same jumps or explosions continue.

I didn't change the cap but it should be a last resort for me

Not working:
- Lighting up the LEDs for all games NOT found in CONTROLS.INI, but found in MAME.XML

Some more details (was analyzing this issue for hours and tried everything I could imagine):
- Tried different MAME.XML versions from different systems (0.179, 0.196) -> No luck
- Tried chaning the Encoding of the MAME.XML from UTF-8 to ANSI (found this as a hint in the web) -> No luck
- Tried chaning the Encoding of LEDBlinkys Minimized-MAME.XML from UTF-8 to ANSI -> No luck
- Added full file permissions to MAME.XML, since Windows 10 could prevent the reading -> No luck
- Checked the LEDBLinks-Startup logfile and there are about 13k games and 17k cloned loaded from the MINIMIZED-MAME-XML -> Seems no issue with reading games at least...
- Added a buch of MAME.XML-only games to the CONTROLS.INI by hand -> Working, so the issue seems to be with the MAME.XML

My questions:
- Anyone encounted this before? Any Ideas?
- Could there be an issue with finding the correct Buttoncount from MAME.XML?
- Is LEDBlinky capable or reading UTF-8 XML-files? The autogenerated Minimized-Mame-XML is UTF-8 by default, maybe this is a Win10 behaviour?

This is a typical entry from my minimized-Mame.XML:

Code: [Select]

<machine name="10yard" sourcefile="m58.cpp">
<description>10-Yard Fight (World, set 1)</description>
<input players="2" coins="2">
<control type="joy" player="1" buttons="2" ways="8"/>
<control type="joy" player="2" buttons="2" ways="8"/>
</input></machine>
Thanks for your help. And please keep up the great work!
Duglim

Hi, please email me your debug.zip and/or debug.log files and I'll take a look.

I wanted to have an arcade cab that could also play music. Aha! I thought I needed some jukebox software. However, ultimately I decided to use no jukebox application at all.

Jukebox software like DWjukebox and others are great for arcade cabs, but here is a key limitation: once you have the right music queued up, you probably want to play a game. So you have to quit out the jukebox application, losing the music you just started, to load the game!!! Obviously this isn't an issue with a dedicated jukebox, but is annoying with an arcade cab.

Instead, I went with a few free software tools including MP3tag, MPlayer, Nircmd and MameWAH (almost any front end capable of launching games will do).

Use MP3tag to "curate" the collection (getting the tags right, like artist/album/title etc) and, once done, use it to generate playlists. Generate your playlists into multiple "romsets", like "Albums", "Singles", whatever you want.  You can use MP3tag to download media info from online libraries. It works for all kinds of music formats afaik. This "curating" will likely consume much of your time, but you will need to do it regardless, even if you use jukebox software.

Use MPlayer to run the playlists from command line. MPlayer is a free open source highly customisable and compilable media player that can be run from command line and importantly (by default) has no GUI or any control interface at all. It uses very little memory and does not impact on most games performance, even when running both MPlayer and MAME on a pentium 4. Launch MPlayer with a batch file that takes one parameter, the playlist ("MPlayer.bat").

I use the Nircmd free windows command line utility to kill any MPlayer processes early if desired. Set this up in a batch file "kill.bat". Create a shortcut to the batch file (desktop will do) and edit the properties so you can launch kill.bat with a keyboard hotkey combo (I use CTRL-ALT-2, which corresponds to default P1 buttons 1&2 and P2 start). You would also call kill.bat before starting a new playlist.

For those interested in keyboard combos, you need no special software, it is available for vanilla Windows shortcuts/properties. I also have CTRL-ALT-1 setup to launch the frontend.

Finally, setup your favourite frontend to run Mplayer (via batch file) with your playlists as parameters. For the frontend, you can treat sets of playlists like "romsets" and individual playlists as "romnames". With multiple playlist "romsets" you can have multiple music lists (e.g. collections, albums, singles, genres, years, etc.) to choose from via the front end.

After choosing your music playlist, you can then go to your games lists, play pretty much whatever you want, and the music will continue in the background. If you decide the music is too much, you want it to stop, just hit CRTL-ALT-2 to kill the process.

I just quickly hammered this post out - if these ideas excite people, I'll add extra details soon like the batch files I used, how to generate the playlists, and sample command lines for the frontend. There is a lot of flexibility, with the software tools used, to customise for your own needs.

This project keeps getting cooler.
I still haven't even had time to implement the last one yet!!

I need to quit my adult life so that I can get on with some stuff that is actually important.

I love it!

Cheers guys!  I needed that motivation to kick on with the project.  The Jumpman sprites are going to be the most difficult to get right,  and there's 18 variations of the fella! 



That's one down.  I may tweak colours.  That blue is quite dark against a black background.

hi Mike, sent you a PM about a week ago and haven't heard back. Could I get you to have a look at it and get back to me? Thanks!

Sorry didn't see it. I emailed you

maybe his inbox is full

I'm writing a guncon2 driver for windows10. It can map the movement to joystick or mouse.
I can't find a way to send commands to the gun. So I think it change it's mode based on the sync signal.
We might need to make some reverse engineering on the games to see how they set the gun mode.
BTW I'm also planning to make a guncon1 to guncon2 converter using an arduino.

Hi there! Did this project happen? I am very curious to see if I can use my official Guncon2s with Groovymame on a CRT. Thanks!

Use mp3tag (free) to help curate the tags for your music collection

Oooo...
Thanks for the tip Andrew- need to look into this one.

I have an unmanageable pile of music and hopefully will finally start the jukebox project within the next month.