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A word about LEDBlinky…

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RandyT:

--- Quote from: Vanguard on May 03, 2010, 04:41:36 pm ---Yes it was.  There were a bunch of users reporting that the LEDWiz/PowerMAME was either not working for them at all or was very flaky to the point of being mostly useless.

After quite a bit of debugging nothing was determined to be wrong with the driver.   After much triage and research into the setups each user was using, it was determined that the users all had one thing in common.  They all had systems with an Nvidia Nforce chipset.  The ledwiz.dll developer had to acquire a computer system with the same chipset and debug the USB traffic with a sniffer.  Once it was determined that packets were getting lost, the developer had to work with some USB experts at another company to determine what was causing the packet loss.  To this day it isn't clear whether Nvidia is actually wrong with their USB implementation or whether the LEDWiz was expecting USB protocol to be implemented a certain way.   In the end though, it didn't really matter as the problem needed to be fixed in order for the LEDWiz to be a robust product.   The problem seemed to be a timing issue and a workaround was eventually found that solves the problem with software and saved the hardware vendor significant expense recalling his product.   This was all done without the promise of pay.

--- End quote ---

I just want to make something known here in regard to this (in all honesty, I thought I already had.)  The Nvidia chipset was the only one which had this issue....the only one.  Whether or not they were operating within the spec, they seemed to be the only ones doing things the way they did.

Regardless, when the issue came to light, and thanks in part to the discussions with MikeQ ;), the LED-Wiz firmware was modified to account for the the Nvidia USB idiosyncrasy.  After I made this modification, I never had another report of the issues that were being talked about here.  This was about three years ago.

In regard to "vendors supporting their products", I want to make it very clear that I directed efforts toward other areas specifically because of the existence of AtomicFE and MikeQ's PowerMAME (which were the first apps to light controls being used) and LED-Blinky.  It was clear from discussions with Arzoo and HeadKaze that they planned on taking the animation formats in a different direction than I had planned, so I decided to cease development on this type of application and direct my limited time to projects more beneficial to the community and to the welfare of GGG.  I'd also like to point out that we often donate hardware to these causes where the end result is a useful, free application for the community.

But more to the point of the discussion, Arzoo absolutely has the right to compensated for his work.  Regardless of the engine being used to communicate with the LED-Wiz hardware, be it the free one I wrote, or the two or three others out there, there is still a lot of work that was done on the user interfacing, testing, extra features and so-on that Arzoo went through great lengths to not only provide, but to make sure worked well in the setups used by others.  I won't even go into the support aspects, which sometimes eat any profit you might be making right out from under you.

If it turns out that folks have a problem with the shareware concept of LED-Blinky, and don't find other apps which do what they would like, then I will do what I always do and fill the gaps where they appear.  But if folks like the software and it does everything you need it to, there's no reason not to support the author.

RandyT

HaRuMaN:
With the exception of one stick-in-the-mud, everyone seemed to be supportive.   ;)

Santoro:
Shareware is fine with me, $20 is reasonable.  I'll be buying this summer.

Havok:
If the application comes preconfigured to light the correct buttons for whatever game I start in Mame and light them the correct colors (i.e. what the dedicated cab has), I would purchase.

 ;)

ids:
Sure, it's a bummer paying for something that was free a few days ago....but....

Software development is a lot more labor intensive than most people would assume.  Bummer, sure, but oh well, I'll be chipping in when I'm ready.

Thanks arzoo, great stuff.

hmmm... maybe the hardware manufacturers should offer hardware/software combo packages?

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