Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: chiLLbiLLy on February 19, 2009, 04:36:41 am
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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.
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It was moved out of mame.exe and into ledutil (which comes with mame).
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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. 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]
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.
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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.
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LEDBlinky can drive the LED-Wiz, PAC-Drive, and U-HID, but not the IPAC.
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You out of spare LED ports on your ledwiz? If not, use that for the p1/2 start led's and don't bother with the ipac outputs.
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Yeah, I've got a few open ports on my Led-Wiz. I guess I only need two, actually. What I was trying to do, was that I had a spare led harness from Ultimarc laying around and I thought I could actually fit those led's (without the conical bezels) inside my Atari volcano buttons. Yes, I actually think I could get them to fit and I did test it out with the red led, out of the three, and it was bright enough to shine through the red cones fairly well. The green and yellow leds were way too weak, however.
But, after hearing above that LED Blinky wouldn't power them through the IPAC, I think I will take your advice and just hook them up to the LED-Wiz and use the original white leds that came with the volcano buttons. Unfortunately, my electrical knowledge and skills are at a 3rd grade level and I already know that wiring up the led part of volcano buttons is not entirely simple. I believe I have to wire in either a 220 or 330 ohm resistor on each individual volcano button. I'm just not entirely sure how to do that, as I've never messed with resistors before. Hopefully, it's not that difficult, but I'll probably make a separate post in the next day or so, just to make sure I'm actually hooking them up properly.
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I'm actually in the process of wiring up those very same volcano buttons right now, to my minipac. The resistors weren't too hard to work with, I just soldered one leg of the resistor to a quick connect, and the other leg to a length of wire. Now I can use an in-line resistor, and it preserves the integrity of my NOS volcano buttons.
You mentioned that you had a 'spare' wiring harness lying around that you might not use. I don't suppose you'd be interested in sharing it, would you?