FE + MAME + Marquee monitor + LEDblinky

[zaltec]

Sorry to ask what I'm sure has been answered many times over the years, in many different way (as a result of my current searches)... but could anyone give me a general overview of a current frontend with addins, etc, that would allow me to semi-easily use a monitor-based marquee, active button highlighting, and mame? I've come across many different options, but they all seem quite out of date, and nothing coercive that works together nicely. I'm sure someone has put together an all-in-one post, but damned if I can find it.

Thanks.

[markc74]

Well LEDBlinky has your button highlighting covered and AFAIK works in most frontends. I use it with it the MALA frontend and it works great. You download it into your MALA plugins folder, run a setup program which tells LED blinky which controls are connected where in your LED controller and you're pretty much good to go.

My marquee monitor isn't related to the frontend at all. MAME has functionality built in which displays artwork for a game if it exists using layout files. Basically you have a layout folder for every game you want to display a marquee for and in that folder you have a standard layout file describing how it should appear and the image file of the marquee itself like so:

mame
--artwork
----1942
------layout.lay
------marquee.png
----1943
------layout.lay
------marquee.png
etc

The big downside to this way is that it only works with MAME.  Fine for me but if you want to run other emulators and display a related marquee you'll have to take a different approach.

If you're using hyperspin then there are some other options you could look at such as hypermarquee and there's a program called marquee magician as well but I have no experience of those.

[zaltec]

I've currently got Hyperspin and LEDblinky playing nicely with Mame v153 (lighted active controls, etc), however the marquee is starting to give me a headache... I've got HyperMarquee v3.9 installed (I think), however the guide included with it is for v3.6 which aesthetically looks different, and seems to assume you have a *lot* higher HyperSpin familiarity than I have (it mentions many steps, but does not include actual directions)... it also talks about renaming LedBlinky.exe to use the EDS software or whatever, which I assume won't work with the actual LEDblinky...

The mame functionality seems easiest, however I'm not sure how to do layout files (I'm sure I could google it), but I'd like the full wheel functionality, other system support, etc... Anyone else have any suggestions, or good guides for me?

Thanks.

[zaltec]

So I got this figured out, wasn't nearly as technical as I'd worried, but it was very intimidating (that's why you don't let software engineers write your PR and user guides!). I'd read the first half-dozen pages of a 20+page thread, then skipped to the last 3 or 4 pages, but the info I needed was in the middle of course... I'd missed the part of the HyperMarquee discussion thread where they spun off EDS to support multiple application calls. I was also looking for a stable release, but apparently Beta's are as far as he ever gets in the dev process.

Now I'm running Hyperspin > EDS > LEDBlinky + HyperMarquee, and everything is playing nicely with each other. RGB's are responding properly, marquee's are updating properly, and I've got full marquee support while in the FE.