Ok...finally I am doing the update. I have made a LOT of progress since the last major update. I am feeling very good about how it is turning out. So, After getting the cabnet it's self finished, I hauled it upstairs to my gameroom. Then began the process of installing the gutz. It seems to be a fad on the board to use your Air Hockey table as a staging area for anything and everything that gets done in the game room. Well the same is true here. I stacked everything I intended to put into the cab here. Although soon enough it all made it's way onto the floor to the point where no one could walk through there. I eventually would get so frustrated with the mess that I would stop everything and clean the whole place just to repeat the cycle again.
EDIT: BTW, There are just far to many distractions. My ADD side keeps getting wrapped up in other things. Part of the delay was the WIKI. I started playing with that and lost several weeks. I decided that I was not allowed to play with the WIKI until I was finished. This is a little sad because I started a whole section that is really sad looking right now so I really need to get back in there to clean it up. Then there is church. I go to it and am involved there. I do sound there and am in a men's bible study which takes time. Kids and family take time (actually they have to come first) So many times , planned to work on the cabinet and something would come up with the family. I have gotten in
too much trouble for letting the cab come first. The cab became an obsession. There really is a sickness that sets in when you start to see progress. You get excited and want to work on it that much more. I have been late to work (on more than
one several a lot of occasions because I just wanted to finish just one more thing.
Somewhere in the flow of things I went to two arcade auctions and bought some stuff. This was a side track because most games from auctions require some TLC. So that diverted me several times. Plus, I have been repairing some stuff that a friend of mine bought.
I also got side tracked by the software dilemma. Once the thing was able to produce a picture I have been modifying and tweaking and trying to learn how to make MAMEWah, PowerMAME, PowerMAME32, Atomic FrontEnd, and DragonKing work. They all have their cool sides. Once I got my head wrapped around MAMEWah the others seemed easier to play with, but trying to understand the bugs of each...well. The pictures that you will see in a little bit are shown with MAMEWah.
I have been desperately trying to use PowerMAME because of the 49 way support and the LED stuff (not to mention many other cool things). Infact I bought so much stuff based around PM that I had to make it go. I also liked MAMEWah because of the quickres utility and the ability to skin the thing however I liked. Now I am finding out that most allow this though. So I have to figure out a resolution solution. because it seems that MAMEWah uses the resolution info to pass to MAME it does not change what MAME wanted to do if set on auto. When I am PowerMAME32 I can not seem to get a good resolution setting on anything. I have 2 49 ways with GPWiz49s and a LEDWiz. so far I love both. They play well the GGG LEDWiz with the ICE buttons are fantastic together. I have gotten many beautiful colors out of the RGB LEDs. They are nice and bright in a lit room, and are over the top in a dark room (in a good way). So I just have to figure out how to make it all play well together.
I do not remember how I found TigerHeli's link, but he has a page for the set up of auto select for the GGG GPWiz49 with a 49 way joystick.
LINK This will take care of the 49 way issue, but I still have to figure out a better way of programming animations on for the LEDWiz. Being a video editor and lately leaning more towards motion graphics and animation, I am frustrated by the LEDWiz interface. In after effects you have total control. In the LEDWiz app you are fairly limited and it is cumbersome. No don't get me wrong. I love the app as it is the only way to program the thing and I have done some very nice stuff with it, I wish it was easier to use.
I am really leaning towards Atomic Front End because Youki will be adding LEDWiz support, but I still have not been successful with getting it fully running. I am getting to a point where though not totally finished, I feel I can work on the config of this thing to get it totally playable.
Right now in order to play it at all I am using PM32 with is nearly blinding to look at on a CGA monitor at 640 x 480. but that is the only to see everything I need to see if I go into menus n such.