LEDBlinky: LEDs sometimes light up other buttons/wrong colors

[r38007]

Hey all...I have quite the issue I can't seem to figure out..

I currently have a BigBox set up (on the latest build) running Ultimarc RGB buttons connected to a PACLED64 on a PC running Win10.
I've got LEDblinky setup to light up the RGB buttons that are in use for the current launched game as well as change the colors to match said game.
This has been working without issue...but now I am running into an intermittent issue.

When I launch a game via BigBox sometimes the buttons do not light up, other times its lighting up the wrong ones.
For example, if I launch MSlug2, it should light up buttons 1-4 on player1 and buttons 1-4 on player2, changing them to the NeoGeo colors as well.
What happens is sometimes it never lights the buttons or it will light up other buttons random colors. One example is it lighting up player2 button 6 (which is not used for this game) and then like my spinner 1 button, colors will be random too.
I went down the basic t-shooting, checked my configs, made sure all my buttons are mapped correctly, checked mame.xml, made a new one to boot and so on...same issue. Not always 100% of the time but it does come back.

So, I decided to run the LED-trouble shooter to get some debug logs to look at....and this is where it gets odd.
If I enable the debugger, launch BB like normal and select MSlug2 (or what ever game, issue is the same) the issue goes away..game buttons light as they should and everything is happy. As soon as I disabled debugging for LEDBlinky, issue comes back.
I can't figure out why LEDBlinky works flawless when I have debugging enabled but as soon as I launch it without, there's a 90% chance the issue comes back.

I have uninstalled LEDBlinky, deleted my configs and remapped all the RGB buttons again. Rolled back LB/BB, swapped usb ports for the PACLED64 and the issue persists, but if I enabled LED Blinky debugging, no issues whatsoever...

Anyone have a thought as to what might be the issue?

[r38007]

messed around and made some progress..If I remove my custom animation, that just slow flashes all the lights while in the main menu of BB,when I launch a game the buttons light up the correct color and follow the mappings. Still does not explain why when I enable debugging that it all works with the custom animation.

I have also found out if I enable the preview control option in LEDBLinky, that sometimes those light wrong too, but not all the time. Going to dink around more, but if there's anything to try let me know.

[Fursphere]

Do you have a slow PC?   BigBox is kind of a pig, and on lower end systems the bigbox messaging queue to ledblinky can lag so bad that it doesn't light up the right controls. 

On my older Intel i5 2500k, I have to select a game in bigbox, make sure the all the artwork loads, video plays, ledblinky preview happens, THEN start the game.   If I try to just jump to the game and hit start in BigBox, I'lld get mixed results.   My other cabinet is an Intel i5 10600k and does not have this problem at all, as its significantly faster.

[r38007]

I would not call this system too slow, i7 7700k, 16GB, SSD. This was all working before for a few years, only change was moving my hardware into a new cab. Still using the same buttons and pacLED64. So from a hardware point, nothing has changed, just its all in a new cab. I'll dig around on the pc and the BIOS as this does seem like some odd ball timing issue or something.

I still can't figure out why enabling debugging in LEDBlinky makes the issue go away. I forgot to mention but I am on the latest version of LEDBlinky as well. Done full uninstalls and re-installs of both LEDBlinky and LB/BB, same issue.
I am able to work around it about 95% of the time if I just don't run any animations and leave the LEDs off till mame starts, and then the buttons light up.

Kicker is this all worked fine till I moved it into a new cab...Love tracking down issues like this 

[r38007]

Didn't find anything that stuck out to me on the BIOS. It does look like if I set am FE Active animation I can get this problem to come back most of the time. Also looks like when I launch a game and I have the issue, its lighting up the buttons that the FE animation was just using. So for example I launch a game and the FE animation has lit up 4 of my admin buttons, those 4 buttons then switch to random colors but my mapped buttons do not light up. I'll try to get a vid of this later.

Still the kicker is if I enable debugging in LEDBlinky, issue is gone 

[r38007]

I think I figured out a solution for my issue.... So I still get every once in a while the preview controls not working correctly, but to tell you the truth I really don't use them, so I just disabled them.
I would still get the issue at launching a game where some of the time the buttons do not light up to what I have mapped in mame or the correct colors they should. This however seems to be fixed now!

I set "Game start delay" to 2 seconds and also checked the box to turn off all LEDs during the game start delay. My thinking with this is when I run a FE animation it seems that this is not being "cleared" 100% of the time before the game launches, so its, somehow lighting up those buttons that had just been on seconds ago.

Happy to report this looks to have fixed my issues!!! Still not sure the why, and at this point I don't care to ask anything more of the machine spirit. I have tested it on and off the last few hours and all seems well...now I can get back to finishing up the rest of the cab!