question regarding LED lighting

[nvanvlymen]

Have a cab im converting (beachhead 2000/2002) into a mame cab.

The CP i want to do some custom lighting on. Specifically i want the player start buttons to be illuminated only when the player is active.  So when you press player 1-4 the button will remain lit until the player dies and needs to press the corresponding start button again.

Ive looked at LEDwiz, and pac-drive and they seem to work on the principle of momentary triggers. Since this would be based on mame detecting an active player, i doubt there would be an easy solution.

I could just hard-wire a on/off button toggle under the player start buttons, but then it wouldn't be dynamic based on the player being active in a game.  I'm not sure if there are event handlers that can be used to synchronize with a ledwiz or other LED controller to perform this kind of action.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Nick

[Roo]

If you want easy context sensitive lighting, LED-Wiz and LEDBlinky software will do that for you.

Anyone please feel free to correct me if I am missing something, but AFAIK your specific goal falls into the category of "where no man has gone before".  Anything is possible though.  I don't think MAME has any built-in signaling, so you'd be looking at adding custom code to MAME to signal the LED-Wiz that a player is active/inactive.  Good thing the source code is readily available  


Edit: come to think of it, MAME is emulating the hardware that the games run on. It doesn't really know what is going on inside the game.  So I'm not sure how you could do this.  It'd be tricky to pull off, IMO.  That said, some games had a feature built in to flash player start buttons when credits were available.  For those games MAME already provides the feature to signal the player start buttons to turn on/off.  But this was a very small list, if I remember right.  I'll see if I can dig the list up.

[Roo]

Couldn't find the list of games where MAME supports lighted controls but it's basically limited to early Atari games.

Basically MAME will flash the caps/num/scroll lock LEDs on the keyboard to emulate the way Asteroids would flash the player 1 start button when a coin was inserted, for example.  This won't work with USB keyboards though.  LEDBlinky software also listens to MAME for those signals.  

But this is only for the small list of games that had this functionality, and where MAME emulates it.  Not quite what you wanted, but unless you're comfortable digging into MAME's code and revising it you may just have to settle for the functionality LEDBlinky already provides.