Something That Might Help Some LEDBlinky / Mame Users

[jonnieboyrevel]

This isn't a question, just something that happened to me and I thought I'd share in case it helps someone else.

I'd been trying for a while to get LEDBlinky to play nicely with my Hyperspin/MAME setup.

I'd got the LEDS lighting correctly in all the other emulators and any of the MAME games in colors.ini also worked correctly.  However, I couldn't get the games that weren't in colors.ini to light at all.

I was just getting to the point of sending Arzoo a message but thought I'd try and have a read of the debug logs myself.  Looking through the log I realised that LEDBlinky didn't appear to be pulling many games from MAME.xml

I thought, it would be easy to fix and got MAME to generate another MAME.xml using 'mame.exe -listxml > mame.xml' from command prompt.  However, I tried several times and still ended up with a file that didn't seem to have all of the game information for LEDBlinky.

As a bit of lateral thinking, I used romlister (another great program) to generate a MAME.xml for me.  Using this xml, all of my buttons started lighting, both for games in the colors.ini and those that aren't (obviously the ones that aren't just lit the default colour)

When I checked the debug log again, LEDBlinky was pulling the information of thousands of MAME games from the MAME.xml

So, the short version:

If you are having problems with LEDBlinky not lighting the 'used' buttons for MAME games that aren't in colors.ini, it might be worth generating a new MAME.xml using romlister and try using that instead.

Sorry, I do tend to ramble a bit...

[bobmoo79]

I'm new to LEDBlinky and MAME and only a few MAME games were lighting up buttons on my cab.

I currently use a MAME Set that was filtered using ROMLister and just read elsewhere that if clones are removed from the XML (mine are) then LEDBlinky won't work as expected. I need to create a new unedited MAME.XML to fix it and your post includes the command to do that, so thanks. I'll try it when I get home. I hope to still use the filtered MAME.XML in Hyperspin but point LEDBlinky to the separate unedited XML. That should work (fingers crossed)

[jonnieboyrevel]

Hi Bobmoo79

You can definitely use 2 different MAME.xml files.  I do it with my set up.  You just point LEDBlinky to one and have the filtered one in your Hyperspin databases folder (the mame one obviously).

You may be absolutely fine using the command line to create the MAME.xml, it's the way it's supposed to be done.  However, my post was because the MAME.xml produced using the command line didn't include all the required info for LEDBlinky to light the buttons.

What I did was go back to the settings page in romlister, the one where you get it to create a merged xml.  Go through the process as if you were creating an xml to use in romlister (the bit in the merge utility of the settings page).  When it creates an xml and asks you to save it, save it as MAME.xml and use that file with LEDBlinky.

As I said, you may have no problems doing it the other way, my post was just for people who were having trouble.

[bobmoo79]

Thanks for the clarification, that should get me sorted.