MAME output to another screen(s)

[Monkey]

I'm almost ready to finally build my Arcade Cab

but one last thing i want to find out.

as i have a few games, and i will be putting 2 number 6 or 8 button controllers in, not all the buttons wil lbe used for all games, and some games will need instructions/button combinations to play. i want to put 2 7" screens infront of the controllers that will display to games buttons required, and combinations for fighting games for instance. i can do this independantly from MAME, ie have a sepearate PC that controls the 2 7" screens with 4 buttons on each screen, change game up and down, and change page on the instructions left and right. this is obviously a spearate thing from selecting the game in mame.

can i and if so how would i go about doing it, so that when i launch the game in mame, it automatically shows on the 7" screens the instructions for the game i am playing? i dont mind having to scroll through the instructions to find the revelant page IE for a specific fighter.

if it cant be done then i'll do it the manual way.

any help will be appreciated

[notroubleclubber]

I can't see using another pc is going to help. I'd go for using one pc with 2 grafix cards and use something like cpviewer to output to both screens. Not sure how this will work for 2 players though

[Monkey]

i was/am going to use the 2 PC route to keep it separate and easy to manage if i went down the manual route.

if it can be done automatically, then i'll use 1 PC for all, and have a graphics card that can control 2 or more monitors (plenty about) and or use the on board graphics as well (hopefully).

 

[notroubleclubber]

I could see it being a knightmare to try and get the two pcs to communicate what game is being played etc so it would be easier with one pc with one additional grafix card that has 2 outputs and then if your mobo has it using onboard grafix as well if it will allow it show you can output to three monitors.

[Monkey]

I will only use 2 PC's (actually the second one will be a Thin Client, as i have a few of those knocking around) if there is no way to get MAME to tell my software (not yet created) to automatically display on the 7" screens the instructions for the game i selected in MAME. if i can get MAME to talk to my Software then it will be all run from 1 PC.

if i can not do that, then i see no point in having it all on one PC, when i have Thin Clients that will do the job displaying the instructions on the 7" screens perfectly.

the Power consumption of the thin clients are small as well.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/static.php?page=mhdismarquee

Like this?

[Monkey]

Just had a look at CP Viewer.

it does half of what i'm after.

what i am going to do was create a database with all my games on it,

when i start my game in MAME i will then ALSO select MANUALLY (IE not being controlled by MAME) the game i want to play from the databse shown on the 7" screen, using 5 buttons (up and down to select game, select to select the instructions for that game, left and right to scroll through the instruction pages of that game if there is more than one page)

when you select the game it shows the splash screen for that game.

it will then show the button layout i have, (2 rows of 4 buttons, plus the joystick) and it will highlight which buttons work and what they do, all displayed on the 7" screen

if its a fighting game with combos/special moves for each character, you can scroll through that game to find your character and his special move list.

this is to be display on a 7" screen infront of the players controlers.

what i was wondering, is is there a way i can get MAME to talk to my Database (not yet written) to tell it which game i just selected in MAME and automatically select the instructions for that game to be display on the 7" screens? if not then i'll continue with my original plans and do it manually

[Monkey]

http://dragonking.arcadecontrols.com/static.php?page=mhdismarquee

Like this?

Yes similar to that, i wonder if it can work by launching a file as apposed to a .png file. hmm, at least its something to work from. thank you

if i could get it to launch say a PDF, i could have a PDF for every game, or just a collection of image files that you can just scroll through.

hmmmm thoughts are collecting

[Donkbaca]

Are those touch screens?  It would be so much easier and less cluttered if they were.  Easiest way to do it is one PC and 2 graphics cards, one of which has dual outputs.   

I don't understand what you need done that CP viewer does not do.

I also kind of don't understand the point, the only thing this would really be useful for is fighting games and even then, its not that useful since fighting games are pretty fast paced and don't really allow you to look at a seperate screen for moves while you are playing, it seems you would have to pause the game to really look at the screen, and you  can have CP viewer pop up when it pauses. 

The PROBLEM with all of this stuff is that with the fighting games there are pages and pages of moves to go through and its a PITA to get to the character you are actually playing with.

What WOULD be sweet is if you could interface it so that, if you say, played Street Fighter and picked Ryu, that the move list for RYU would pop up on the screen.  BUT, that would entail your MAME PC somehow outputting which character was picked, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

Just my two cents...

[Monkey]

Are those touch screens?  It would be so much easier and less cluttered if they were.  Easiest way to do it is one PC and 2 graphics cards, one of which has dual outputs.   

no not touch screens, the CP will have a sheet of Perspex over it, and i wanted the screens to be under the perspex, Thus touch screens wouldnt work. but i have thought about it though

I don't understand what you need done that CP viewer does not do

CP viewer just overlays the controls on the main screen, from what i have seen it can not output just the controls to a second screen.

I also kind of don't understand the point, the only thing this would really be useful for is fighting games and even then, its not that useful since fighting games are pretty fast paced and don't really allow you to look at a seperate screen for moves while you are playing, it seems you would have to pause the game to really look at the screen, and you  can have CP viewer pop up when it pauses. 

The PROBLEM with all of this stuff is that with the fighting games there are pages and pages of moves to go through and its a PITA to get to the character you are actually playing with.

not always, but when your new to the game  its handy just ot have a glance between boughts, or as your selecting a fighter, i wouldnt see it being a PITA to select your character, yes there would be alot but it would be there to see.

plus its not JUST for which button does with, other instructions would be included, like what is a bonus, info about power up etc. once your familiar with a game,(regardless if its fighting, 1945, Moonwalker etc) yes you wont need to look at this, but i forget stuff easily, and my family and friends who will want to play wont remember either, as they probably wont play the games enough

plus its cool, its another thing that (in my reasearch) hasnt been done before, it adds that little extra.

What WOULD be sweet is if you could interface it so that, if you say, played Street Fighter and picked Ryu, that the move list for RYU would pop up on the screen.  BUT, that would entail your MAME PC somehow outputting which character was picked, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

Yes, i thought about that, but i think this is beyond the call, being able to scroll through the characters will be fine

Just my two cents...

all comments welcome. i appreciate the time that you took to read and reply.

[headkaze]

CPWizard can output to a secondary screen. And while it cannot detect which Street Fighter character you're playing (that's impossible) you can view the special moves. It also has "Sub Screen" support which enables it to display images to a secondary screen while playing a game. Anyway it might be worth a look.

[Howard_Casto]

I think cpwizard might be your best overall choice and easiest to setup, BUT if you want something more visual and are willing to make up/crop instruction cards, I made this script for an upcoming mamehooker tutorial. 

It's specifically designed for fighting games.

When the game starts up, the script shows the marquee, just like in the display file tutorial on the site. 

However......

There are dedicated naviagtion buttons for both player 1 and player 2. 

If you start using the navigation buttons in a 1 player game you can flip through all the cards for that game in your cards folder, in the case of fighters display moves for an individual character like so:



The real fun begins when a second player decides to play.  So long as only the player 1 navigation buttons are used player 1 gets the whole screen to display his cards, but as soon as player 2 starts using his navigation buttons:



Blam!  Each player can look up moves independantly of each other!  (Excuse the unreadable text, I've reduced the screen shots)


I kind of got burnt out on writing tutorials after that initial run, but you would be suprised what the scripting system of mamehooker is capable of.  This fighter script would work in the currently released version of mame hooker.


As for supporting text, right now mh doesn't.  I've been considering it though.  I've also though about doing command.dat support again, but there are so many image shortcuts in the file now that I'm lost.  Also while the data is pretty good in command.dat, the file format is terrible.  We need to convert to something like xml or html so we can get some real image support. 


I'm working on a hardware project right now, but I do have a new version of mh almost ready to go.  A user was kind enough to donate a ff wheel and thanks to that I've got single axis ff devices working in mamehooker!  I was working on optional, realtime, html output for showing display files on mobile devices, but that isn't ready yet.  I can always comment that bit out and release what I've got. 

[Donkbaca]

That is pretty slick!  If you DO decide to make cards, please share them!

[Howard_Casto]

Oh I'm not making cards... far too much work and I've got too many other projects. 

But I did manage to make a set of cards for mkii and mk3/umk3 via some html pages I stole.... err borrowed from sme fan sites.  When I do the tutorial I'll post them. 

If we could convert command.dat into a slightly better format I could write a command.dat 2 png program.  That would be the quickest solution.

That being said, you know where most fighters have a bezel insert that has a small protrait of each character alongside a list of their specials?  Get a high resolution scan of one of those and crop the invidual characters into cards. 

I don't think there are a ton of fighting games in mame.  Sure there are a ton of variants, but what you do is make a card set for the latest revision and then
remove characters that weren't in the earlier versions.  Typically speaking the special moves don't change from revision to revision, they only add more characters (see sfII). 

I'll see if I can find some snaps of the umk3 set.

[Donkbaca]

Some moves change, some don't, plus moves get added. 

I just have my cab in my office and pull up game faqs on my office PC....

[Howard_Casto]

Some moves change, some don't, plus moves get added.  

I just have my cab in my office and pull up game faqs on my office PC....

Well I'm sure, but in general you don't have to change much is my point.  


Here's some umk3 card shots:






You can tell that I just lifted them from a website, thus the small text, but you get the idea.

[Donkbaca]

Yeah, that is a great project someone should do!

[Howard_Casto]

It might actually be managable. 

I did a search over that mamedb and it lists 359 games in the "fighter / versus" category.  Keep in mind that includes clones and also keep in mind that the typical capcom fighter has around 5 or 6 clones (one for each language region).  So I'm guestimating that in terms of unique games, there are 75-100.  Not an unobtainable number if everybody pitched in. 

[BadMouth]

Oh I'm not making cards... far too much work and I've got too many other projects. 

I did a little proof of concept a while back using touchbuddy to cycle through fighter cards on a touchscreen.
Nobody wanted to put in the work of making cards.

You'd think as popular as fighting games are, someone would have made a "move list card maker" of some sort that spit out standardized cards.
Also had the idea for a program that combined info from command.dat with properly organized images of the fighters and spit out standardized cards automatically.

If I ever win the lottery, I'll hire someone to make this stuff. 

[Monkey]

Howard, Thats awsome, and almsot exactly what i'm after.

Making the cards is easy for me, as its something similar to what i do at work.

and i should be able to produce them in any format

Just tell me what you require and i'll crack on.

i may need a chat with on on the finer points of getting it all working.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

What WOULD be sweet is if you could interface it so that, if you say, played Street Fighter and picked Ryu, that the move list for RYU would pop up on the screen.  BUT, that would entail your MAME PC somehow outputting which character was picked, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

Well you COULD do it a few different ways.. There will be some value in the game's RAM that says what character each player has selected. There's probably some way to hook that location via the MAME debugger and have another program act upon it.

I suppose the more proper method would be to develop something not unlike a hybrid of the highscore system and the output system... Define interesting memory locations in the game in an external file, and then a custom build of mame exposes them to external programs, such as MameHooker does for the output system.

For fighting games you might hook the player choice, time left in a round, player health, current score, etc, for puzzle games you might hook 'next piece', current score, maybe current state of the play-field.. It's not that far removed from the guy that modified the PCB of a 1942 cab to tweet high scores, only this is obviously purely software.

[Howard_Casto]

What WOULD be sweet is if you could interface it so that, if you say, played Street Fighter and picked Ryu, that the move list for RYU would pop up on the screen.  BUT, that would entail your MAME PC somehow outputting which character was picked, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

Well you COULD do it a few different ways.. There will be some value in the game's RAM that says what character each player has selected. There's probably some way to hook that location via the MAME debugger and have another program act upon it.

I suppose the more proper method would be to develop something not unlike a hybrid of the highscore system and the output system... Define interesting memory locations in the game in an external file, and then a custom build of mame exposes them to external programs, such as MameHooker does for the output system.

For fighting games you might hook the player choice, time left in a round, player health, current score, etc, for puzzle games you might hook 'next piece', current score, maybe current state of the play-field.. It's not that far removed from the guy that modified the PCB of a 1942 cab to tweet high scores, only this is obviously purely software.

Ironically this is how the output system in mame was created.  Somebody wanted to hook up a set of lights for some game and I was suggesting things like listening for the apprpriate sound file, making an artwork file with 1 pixel dots that we could get with "getpixel" ect.  And Aaron took pity on us and said:  "Hold up guys, I'll see what I can do" and poof the next version we had an output system. 

The problem with doing it is if you modify mame's source in any way then you are going to have to maintain a seperate build as we would essentially be "hacking" the games.  I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not up to the challenge. 


I can think of some crazy, non intrusive ways though.  The easiest would be to have a file that defines the area of the screen where the life bars are.  Any time the start buttons are pressed take a snapshot of the screen, crop it to the life bar, and run the image through some ocr software.  So long as the text isn't too crazy in the image, it should be able to get the plain text name of the character.  The drawback of course is the dependancy on the display image.  Changing the aspect ratio could move the life bars as well as the new hlsl effects.  The solution then would be to take a snap on the entire screen and run it though, but if the game is text-heavy you might get mixed results.

[newmanfamilyvlogs]

What WOULD be sweet is if you could interface it so that, if you say, played Street Fighter and picked Ryu, that the move list for RYU would pop up on the screen.  BUT, that would entail your MAME PC somehow outputting which character was picked, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

Well you COULD do it a few different ways.. There will be some value in the game's RAM that says what character each player has selected. There's probably some way to hook that location via the MAME debugger and have another program act upon it.

I suppose the more proper method would be to develop something not unlike a hybrid of the highscore system and the output system... Define interesting memory locations in the game in an external file, and then a custom build of mame exposes them to external programs, such as MameHooker does for the output system.

For fighting games you might hook the player choice, time left in a round, player health, current score, etc, for puzzle games you might hook 'next piece', current score, maybe current state of the play-field.. It's not that far removed from the guy that modified the PCB of a 1942 cab to tweet high scores, only this is obviously purely software.

Ironically this is how the output system in mame was created.  Somebody wanted to hook up a set of lights for some game and I was suggesting things like listening for the apprpriate sound file, making an artwork file with 1 pixel dots that we could get with "getpixel" ect.  And Aaron took pity on us and said:  "Hold up guys, I'll see what I can do" and poof the next version we had an output system. 

The problem with doing it is if you modify mame's source in any way then you are going to have to maintain a seperate build as we would essentially be "hacking" the games.  I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not up to the challenge. 


I can think of some crazy, non intrusive ways though.  The easiest would be to have a file that defines the area of the screen where the life bars are.  Any time the start buttons are pressed take a snapshot of the screen, crop it to the life bar, and run the image through some ocr software.  So long as the text isn't too crazy in the image, it should be able to get the plain text name of the character.  The drawback of course is the dependancy on the display image.  Changing the aspect ratio could move the life bars as well as the new hlsl effects.  The solution then would be to take a snap on the entire screen and run it though, but if the game is text-heavy you might get mixed results.

I'd love to see some of the 'definition' type stuff moved out of the mame exe and into xml/ini/dat/whatever files.. things like rom sets, game outputs, etc. Then you wouldn't need a branch like misfit mame (unless there are some emulator sections not included in the mainline distribution). Then to add new functionality via memory location watches you'd just define it as an additional line in the xml.

[headkaze]

I guess I shouldn't have said "impossible" because nothing is impossible, it's just not easy to do in any sort of practical way.

CPWizard has Command.dat support already so I guess it wouldn't be difficult to add support for a background picture based on the menu name. Like if you select "Scorpion" it could check for "Scorpion.png" in some folder and display it behind the special moves.

This is what it looks like at the moment with a blue background. All it needs to do is load in a picture. So if someone wants to collect a bunch of background images I can add support for them in CPW.

[Howard_Casto]

I guess I shouldn't have said "impossible" because nothing is impossible, it's just not easy to do in any sort of practical way.

CPWizard has Command.dat support already so I guess it wouldn't be difficult to add support for a background picture based on the menu name. Like if you select "Scorpion" it could check for "Scorpion.png" in some folder and display it behind the special moves.

This is what it looks like at the moment with a blue background. All it needs to do is load in a picture. So if someone wants to collect a bunch of background images I can add support for them in CPW.

Yeah J5 has/had similar support.  The problem is the command.dat format isn't well suited for images.  Other than just modifying the dat and putting a image tag in there it's hard to tell which text you are supposed to be reading to load the image from and even then where to put the image (it could be fat or skinny.... big or small ect..) is hard to figure out. 

Monkey seems to be up to the challenge though.  I've been talking to him over the course of the day off and on and he wants to have a go at manually creating card images for many of the games.  That would be the ideal solution really as things would just end up looking nicer.

[BadMouth]

Monkey,

Move list scans I've collected uploaded here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Q7VWQRHJ

[Monkey]

Cheers Guys,

As howard says, i'm going to make my own by hand, it should look nicer as i can then make then to suite screens better, and have a more uniform approach.

i have been fiddling with templates today and have a quick mockup just to see how the text height is looking at various different sizes, and if a large image can be scaled down with out loosing the text.

the hardest part is trying to find character pics ag a good enough res/quality

Badmouth.

thanks for that, that will really help