I have a brilliant idea.... too bad i'm too dumb to pull it off.

[Howard_Casto]

I've ben struggling for ages now on how to make the data in the controls.dat project really useful.  The viewer is nice, but the truth is you really need to see the layout as you are playing, which is impossible as windows' version of mame uses dx exclusive mode and toggling between the two would cause issues to say the least.  

So an idea pops into my head.  Mame uses png files for the artwork system and the artwork system can display/show bits of the artwork via code.  Why not take advantage of it?
So the idea is you prerender the layout and mame will display it on the screen when you press a key.  Mame is already setup to do this (kinda)  But I'm not good enough with the mame code to finish the job.  

Here are the issues:

Mame already supports al default piece of artwork (named mame.zip)  that'll display whenever the individual game's artwork is missing.  There is the first major problem.  The image would have to be added to the game-specific artwork and work independantly of it.  

Also different games have different aspect ratios and the artwork system gets it's coordinates based on those ratios instead of fixed pixel values.  The png image would have to work independant of those ratios so that it wouldn't look squished on vertical games, ect.  

Finally a new input key would have to be added so you can toggle the view of the layout.  This is by far the easiet part.  Just figure out where the ui inputs are defined and add another function.  


I know this is too much for me to handle right now, so I'm asking is anyone else up the task.  If your not interested in the controls.dat keep in mind that this function could be used for any png file related to the game being played.

The only drawback I  can see is memory consumption.  As you know turning on the artwork system takes a small amont of resources.  Other than that I think it would work great.  

So.... any takers?

[Minwah]

Great idea Howard...

Would the image be able to be displayed 'over' the game?  I mean I use an arcade monitor so this would only be really useful for me if the controls artwork image could be displayed full-screen.

I don't have the know-how either to help much on this tho

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah, I also use low res monitors so I agree.  Fullscreen is the only way to go.  I suppose it could be color-keyed though so that only the text and buttons were visible and the background part was transparent.  

That kinda stuff is trivial though as the artwork system already supports such features.  If somebody would do the hard work I could monkey with the rest.  

I've been thinking about it though.... in theory I could toggle between mame and the viewer.  The viewer would just have to be "always on".  

[Minwah]

I've been thinking about it though.... in theory I could toggle between mame and the viewer.  The viewer would just have to be "always on".  

You mean the current viewer?  That would be just as good, as long as it wouldn't use much CPU (guess it wouldn't as it would be idle most of the time).

[Lilwolf]

Because of the low resolution, and how most people like to use their full video realistate..  I like the middle ware idea better.

Or the other idea I was thinking (that would be easier to implememnt... I think...  Is use the historical.dat.

Mame can pull it up as text.  

So modify mame so you can pull it up with a keypress.  

Then its all an exercise of creating text art... And then adding the additional help and history files into one large super-history .dat

[2600]

Howard,
Somewhat related.  What's your opinion of the command.dat project?  You could display the controls like that.  For me it's one key to display it just the way you mentioned it.  

Personally, I'd like to see the projects combine with the controls.dat as goal one, and the command.dat as goal two.

Anyways, just wanted to see your opinion.

[GadgetGeek]

Let me see if I understand you're idea correctly.  
Right now if I hit tab, mame brings up a menu overlay.  
Under your proposal, if I hit {some key}, mame will bring up a control panel summary overlay for that game.
Brilliant idea.  Hopefully someone here has the skills and time to implement this.

[Tiger-Heli]

Another problem is the artwork is not a standard size currently, and mame uses the gamename.art files to re-size it.

I like the concept, but if you can't figure it out, I'm lost  

[SirPoonga]

HC, I've been thinking about this, ever since the start of controls.dat.  Remember the huge discussion on wheither or not it should be in mame with the mame devs.

I think the best thing to do is to do like the history.dat, have it show up in the menu.  That is super easy to do.  I would like it to be like the history.day, where you just drop the controls.dat file into the mame folder and it's there.  It doesn't appear that hard to do.  The only issues would be do we use the ini or xml version? if xml what parser to use? if ini how do we parse it?  Frankly, I don't think you will want the xml version, as some of the dat files are in ini format so the code to parse ini is already in mame.

It might be possible, like command.dat, to have low resolution icons too.  I bet you whoever does command.dat could write something up quickly.

[Lilwolf]

I would also like to see someone write something that would combine .dat files..

think how cool it would be if the controls.dat combined with commands.dat and history.dat into one.. super dat file

I would also like to see someone create a program to combine catver.ini files.  Why?  I would like to add some custom ones that can be used in any frontend (like system (stv) and maybe 'classic' tags for myself).  Seemed like someone would find a good use for it.

[Tiger-Heli]

think how cool it would be if the controls.dat combined with commands.dat and history.dat into one.. super dat file

EmuLoader does this - With automatic Game Info on, it will pull data from up to four dat files and display it in the order you specify.

[slycrel]

  One other idea (crazy, but I can see people on here doing this) would be to hook up one of those mini-LCD displays to your machine.  Have a custom program to show it on there.  Yeah, I know, nobody will bother, but it'd be cool.  =)

  Does DX do layers?  If so you could draw it in an additional layer.

  Another idea is to do some simple drawing similar to the FPS display that MAME has, maybe in one of the corners.  I haven't looked at the project, so I don't know if that would be reinventing the wheel or not, but it's a suggestion.

  I'm a mac programmer, so I don't have all the answers...  but after my cab is finished maybe I'll play around with this.  It would work wonders for people asking about which buttons do what.  I had a lot of that even with my prototype control panel (street fighter style, lots of questions with pac-man era games.

[SirPoonga]

 One other idea (crazy, but I can see people on here doing this) would be to hook up one of those mini-LCD displays to your machine.  Have a custom program to show it on there.  Yeah, I know, nobody will bother, but it'd be cool.  =)

Not a new idea, someone always "comes up" with this idea every several months  Yet to see it happen.

[Lilwolf]

Trouble is that I want it to be accessable inside mame.  So it would have to create another file (or add support to mame... but I don't see that happening)

think how cool it would be if the controls.dat combined with commands.dat and history.dat into one.. super dat file

EmuLoader does this - With automatic Game Info on, it will pull data from up to four dat files and display it in the order you specify.

[Howard_Casto]

About history.dat inclusion.  It's non-graphical, so I don't see the point.  With the viewer now it automatically re-arranges the labels based on how you ahve the game mapped.  it would be EXTREMELY difficult to pull that off in a sensible manner with ascii characters, mostly because of things like word wrapping, ect.

Command.dat project is cool... I agree, I believe we contacted them at one point and they were uninterested.  It's been a long while though so I could be wrong.  


As sirp said, the lcd idea is super old.... I've been wanting to do it for years now.... in theory the viewer already supports it if the fe properly supports the viewer in "listen" mode, which isn't well documented.  (Dk does it but I don't expect anything else to).  

If I ever win one of these auctions off of ebay and get a good price on a "console" lcd I'll hack it to take vga input, run powerstrip with my dual head and have the first dual monitor cabinet.  That is by far the best setup, but it's technically complicated both on the hardware and software side and I don't expect anyone else to be crazy enough to do it.  


So to sum up...... history.dat isn't up to the task.  Command.dat might be (but it'd be almost as difficult as my viewer only uses a static bitmap, not rendered controls).  

Artwork or toggling of the viewer is still the best bet imho.  

Whatever the solution, conversion between the ini/xml files and the end display needs to be semi-automatic.... anything that would have to be manually done would be too intensive a project.  

[Magnet_Eye]

Too bad you couldn't have an LCD like this one which would display the artwork and/or controls.

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=13;action=display;threadid=21825

Also, is there some way to have the controls on the screen using the same idea as the Bezel artwork that displays with the game screen? Only downside is losing part of the screen. I guess really you need to hit a button, it pauses the game and brings up the controls, huh? I am useless. nevermind.

Hope you guys figure it out!

 

[Howard_Casto]

That's what I'm getting man... and as you said, we already discussed the other bits.  

I'm not putting it inside the marquee though.... that looks pretty tacky. I'll have it flip down from the underneath the marquee, that way when it's not it use it will be out of site.  

[SirPoonga]

Command.dat project is cool... I agree, I believe we contacted them at one point and they were uninterested.  It's been a long while though so I could be wrong.  

I contacted them on how stuff was done, but nothing related to controls.dat.  It might be possible to do simple low res icons like they do.

As artwork, I don't quite understand.  You mean you press a button and a png file will be displayed over the top of the game screen? (even someone translucent...)

[Howard_Casto]

Exactly.... I can output to images quite easily.....

[2600]

I talked to Procyon Lotor(the latest maintainer of the command.dat file)  and couldn't tell me much on the source as it had been a while since he looked at.  I didn't probe him much, It was easier just to look at the Mame32fx source.  From my look at the source, command.dat in it's simplest form uses the same parser and display mechanism as the history.dat and mameinfo.dat.  The 3 dat's are in the same format.  I'm pretty sure you could take the controls.ini file do 2 find and replaces and be able to display it as if it was the command.dat.

That's without the low res bitmap of course which would take a little bit more conversion, but not much.  Although, I'm not sure if the MameDev's would ever accept it.

The transparent viewer sounds good, I couldn't do the code, but a one button access to a pop up viewer that was sitting in the background sounds like a good idea as long as I don't have to change my resolution and use mame artwork.

[Jakobud]

Seems to me that an easier solution would be to have a FE just display the image for a game right before (or while) mame is loading the rom.  Then when Mame is loaded and ready, the FE allows you to press a key to start.

[SirPoonga]

That would be and currently is the solution.  However most of us don't think about looking at the games controls until AFTER in the game

[AlanS17]

That would be and currently is the solution.  However most of us don't think about looking at the games controls until AFTER in the game

Half the fun in a game comes from figuring out the controls as you go along, anyways. Like figuring out halfway through your favorite flying game that you have a super-bomb button!

[Jakobud]

That would be and currently is the solution.  However most of us don't think about looking at the games controls until AFTER in the game

Half the fun in a game comes from figuring out the controls as you go along, anyways. Like figuring out halfway through your favorite flying game that you have a super-bomb button!

LoL totally

[Howard_Casto]

I completely and totally disagree.  If the game uses a joystick and buttons then sure, but sometimes the game uses the "magic waterloo #3 controller"  which is almost, but not quite like a trackball and you are sitting there frustrated trying to figure out why the game isn't responding correctly.  

Also if the game has a ton of controls (dot, defender, ect) you might forget the controls by the time the game loads.  And this is a problem as some buttons don't do anything until special circumstances ect.  

Just trying to give some examples.  This is a legitimate problem, not just some neat hack to add in for the heck of it.  (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)  

[Magnet_Eye]

That would be and currently is the solution.  However most of us don't think about looking at the games controls until AFTER in the game

I think it would be fine to have the controls shown to you at startup, kind of how NEO GEO games do it. There is NO game out there that lets you bring up an image with controls on it in game. I guess you could argue that you can see controls in game on the bezel or other artwork, but I personally look at those before I start playing so I can grasp wth I am doing.

I think if we can get images in a Front End, that would be cool.

But the next problem is that we all have different setups on our control panels, so how is this going to work? We need some type of "CP Layout Designer" where we can move buttons around and add sticks,etc.  to show where our controls are layed out. Then once we design our CP we can attach button #'s and player #'s  to them and then it would be CP specific. So when we go to launch a game, it brings up our "custom" CP and the program "knows" what button 1-6 is according to our layout, and can assign the required buttons for any game accordingly.

Does that make sense?


hmmm...

[maraxle]

 One other idea (crazy, but I can see people on here doing this) would be to hook up one of those mini-LCD displays to your machine.  Have a custom program to show it on there.  Yeah, I know, nobody will bother, but it'd be cool.  =)

Not a new idea, someone always "comes up" with this idea every several months  Yet to see it happen.

I did that months ago.  It's been working like a champ since late March/early April - http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=17856

I don't display this particular .dat file, but my own distilled form of it that shows the controls I want to see.

[2600]

I totally agree with Howard and SirPoonga on this. It's really something that you want access to during the game if you want it.

Magnet_Eye, and some of the rest I suggest you look at the controls.dat website because what you suggested has already been done for quite awhile.  It's really a great project and I'm glad this discussion started talking about how to improve it even more.

[Zathras]

Don't have too much to add to this as I am not a programmer but I think it is a great idea.

One thought though would it be possible to have the overlay screen come up on pause?  That way you wouldn't have to really worry about it interfering with the game and there would be no need to add an extra button to many cabs out there.

Just a thought.  I'll be waiting on the completed project any minute now  

[SirPoonga]

I did that months ago.  It's been working like a champ since late March/early April - http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=17856

Oh, the text LCD screen, yeah, that's been done by a couple of people, but not the graphical ones.

[SirPoonga]

But the next problem is that we all have different setups on our control panels, so how is this going to work? We need some type of "CP Layout Designer" where we can move buttons around and add sticks,etc.  to show where our controls are layed out. Then once we design our CP we can attach button #'s and player #'s  to them and then it would be CP specific. So when we go to launch a game, it brings up our "custom" CP and the program "knows" what button 1-6 is according to our layout, and can assign the required buttons for any game accordingly.

This is Johnny5!  I don't want to put words in Howard's mouth, but I believe in the future it will be more like this.  If I remember the goal was so you can take a pic of your control panel and have the labels show up on that.

BTW, this only works well if oyu use ctrlr files, hence why Howard and I push people to use ctrlr files when they have control prblems

[maraxle]

I did that months ago.  It's been working like a champ since late March/early April - http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=17856

Oh, the text LCD screen, yeah, that's been done by a couple of people, but not the graphical ones.

Look in that same thread.  Someone sent graphics to a Game Boy Advance screen.

[Buddabing]

ErikRuud was working on getting BoldTower's MACH3 MAME driver to work. This driver used a separate layer to display the laserdisc graphics.

It wouldn't be too hard to create a new layer for the control graphics, and it wouldn't be too hard to get a control to toggle displaying the control graphics layer.

The hard part would be to populate the control graphics layer from controls.dat and from the user's ctrlr file.

There's a lot of information in artwork.c.

[Minwah]

I completely and totally disagree.  If the game uses a joystick and buttons then sure, but sometimes the game uses the "magic waterloo #3 controller"  which is almost, but not quite like a trackball and you are sitting there frustrated trying to figure out why the game isn't responding correctly.  

Also if the game has a ton of controls (dot, defender, ect) you might forget the controls by the time the game loads.  And this is a problem as some buttons don't do anything until special circumstances ect.  

Just trying to give some examples.  This is a legitimate problem, not just some neat hack to add in for the heck of it.  (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)  

Having thought about it some more I can't decide now whether I like the idea or not  

It is certainly a cool idea, and I'm all for it...but when I think about it I don't really want to pull up the controls in-game.  I hear what you're saying Howard but for most games I think it would be easy to view the controls prior to launching (ala J5) and remember them.  I suppose it might be more of an issue for people with frankenpanels, whereas I have swappable panels so less controls...also it might be better for non-arcade-game-freaks to pull up the controls in-game.

As I say I'm all for the idea, but I don't think I really need to use it in all honesty.

[Lilwolf]

Howard...  Couldn't you do another middleware piece to do this?

Have a program (middleware app) to full screen the image.  Then load mame.

Then when you hit a key (your able to catch those) it requests that application to the front.... Then when its done, it sends a request for the mame process to move to the front.

Seems like it should work...  

[SirPoonga]

Lilwolf, not really, mame's resolution changes would be annoying.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah I did some tests last night....the resolution changes were really distracting....

So back to the drawing board as it appears that doing it in mame is the only way.  

[Howard_Casto]

ErikRuud was working on getting BoldTower's MACH3 MAME driver to work. This driver used a separate layer to display the laserdisc graphics.

It wouldn't be too hard to create a new layer for the control graphics, and it wouldn't be too hard to get a control to toggle displaying the control graphics layer.

The hard part would be to populate the control graphics layer from controls.dat and from the user's ctrlr file.

There's a lot of information in artwork.c.

Actually no, the population of the graphics layer is easy as it's pre-rendered from the viewer.  Or if nothing else I can launch the viewer from within mame (this is quite easy as it's already used for the various mame companion exes)  save it's screen to a bitmap and then have mame load it.  

[Aceldamor]

I did that months ago.  It's been working like a champ since late March/early April - http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=17856

Oh, the text LCD screen, yeah, that's been done by a couple of people, but not the graphical ones.

Look in that same thread.  Someone sent graphics to a Game Boy Advance screen.

I tired contacting that guy several times...he never responded.

I went to the forum that one of the other folks posted in that thread and they said it wouldn't be hard to do, but you have to learn to make a GBA rom that contains that info that you want to display.

[Howard_Casto]

I won my gamecube lcd screen. I'll go for an ati dvi2hdtv adaptor soon.  

Look for my first hardware hacking tutorial in YEARS before the summer is out.  

[Jakobud]

Is it possible with an FE to start mame, let it load up the roms in the background, while you display a 'help' graphic on the screen, and when mame is all loaded up and ready to go, it just sits and waits until you press the button to get rid of the help screen and then it proceeds into mame?

[fogman]

Since Mame doesn't use dual monitors, wouldn't it be easy (I say easy since I'm not a programmer) to send a picture to a second display, since most of the newer cards handle two monitors?  That way, the control panel graphic would show up on the second display (or small LCD) and stay up while you played your game.  Since this would be handled by the front end, Mame wouldn't be affected and there would be no additional resources used.

[Howard_Casto]

Man you guys don't read do ya...  It's already discussed in this very thread!  

[Lilwolf]

btw, I don't change resolutions on my cab...

did you test work?  (but just annoyed you?)  because it would work great for me

How about forcing the other app to the same resolution (if you know) in mame?

I thought there was a problem displaying graphics or different colors because you don't know what colors are available other then white.  Is this still true?

because if you always know that all colors are avaible, I would guess you can load a png file pretty easy (since the library to create it is already there)

So generate a full screen png file before launching each game (if it doesn't already exist)... Then have it pull it up.

But if you go that far.  it would be nice to load a snap shoot, cabinet or flyer in game... I can't think of a reason, but once you can get one working... adding another is easy.

[Silver]

Pulling up a picture to overlay would be great - but as an alternative seeing as mame already overlays text (when you press tab) as part of its in-game menus, couldn't it easily display an ascii 'graphic' on the control layout for the game?
 Obviously it will not look as good as a colour pic scan of the original cp cover (which is where I think some of these ideas are heading - or at least using the original gfx off them) but in terms of coding its probably the simplist - all you would need would be a hot key (liketab) to jump to the text....

...and er,... the ascii graphics too. Hmmm. Just thinking out loud....

[Tiger-Heli]

But the next problem is that we all have different setups on our control panels, so how is this going to work? We need some type of "CP Layout Designer" where we can move buttons around and add sticks,etc.  to show where our controls are layed out. Then once we design our CP we can attach button #'s and player #'s  to them and then it would be CP specific. So when we go to launch a game, it brings up our "custom" CP and the program "knows" what button 1-6 is according to our layout, and can assign the required buttons for any game accordingly.

This is Johnny5!  I don't want to put words in Howard's mouth, but I believe in the future it will be more like this.  If I remember the goal was so you can take a pic of your control panel and have the labels show up on that.

It is like this NOW!!! You take a pic of your control panel, crop to size, adjust Johnny5 to position the labels properly and if there's an entry in controls.ini, it will tell you what button does what in MAME.  And if you use MameWah or DK, it will display this before MAME starts (maybe other frontends, too).

Of course it only works for me in Win2K, which I don't use for MAME, but that's another long story.

And I think Howard's idea is cool, but I'd rather see the rest of the bugs worked out of Johnny5 and get it runnning first.

[Howard_Casto]

Pulling up a picture to overlay would be great - but as an alternative seeing as mame already overlays text (when you press tab) as part of its in-game menus, couldn't it easily display an ascii 'graphic' on the control layout for the game?
 Obviously it will not look as good as a colour pic scan of the original cp cover (which is where I think some of these ideas are heading - or at least using the original gfx off them) but in terms of coding its probably the simplist - all you would need would be a hot key (liketab) to jump to the text....

...and er,... the ascii graphics too. Hmmm. Just thinking out loud....

Again, this has already been brought up in this very thread!!!

Do you guys not have enough attention span to read a whole thread or what?

[fogman]

Relax Howard...we're reading the whole thread.  Maybe some are just trying to get into the conversation or are trying to say something that we think is similar to another thread but slightly different.  Maybe we don't understand the other posts completely or you don't understand ours.  I have never considered myself a good writer.

Besides, are you trying to prevent too many useless posts by posting something as useless as saying "this is already covered?"  You don't own the thread, just 'cause you started it.

Just relax and we'll all get through this just fine!

[hulkster]

Relax Howard...we're reading the whole thread.  Maybe some are just trying to get into the conversation or are trying to say something that we think is similar to another thread but slightly different.  Maybe we don't understand the other posts completely or you don't understand ours.  I have never considered myself a good writer.

Besides, are you trying to prevent too many useless posts by posting something as useless as saying "this is already covered?"  You don't own the thread, just 'cause you started it.

Just relax and we'll all get through this just fine!

ha!  very well said.  

im very interested in the progress of this whole thing even though i cant contribute    but keep it up!

[SirPoonga]

Hehe, HC, checkout this somewhat related response on the EL board.
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=61332&page=0&view=expanded&sb=5&o=&vc=1


Now, if you did have a pic off all the games to get them to show up in mame you'd have to do something simular the artwork now, but possibly add in some of your own stuff to get it to work.  You know how you have to deine artwork in mame?  relating it all to the unit square.  That way no matter what resolution you are playing the game at the artwork shows up in the right proportions.  You have to do that with this too.

[Tiger-Heli]

That way no matter what resolution you are playing the game at the artwork shows up in the right proportions.  You have to do that with this too.

I started the related reply in the EL post.  Not sure what you mean about proportions.  Here's the key ideas:

It would be cool if there were a script or option in Johnny5.exe which would perhaps ask for a resolution and then run through either the controls.ini file or the mame -listinfo and generate a screenshot for every mame game.   This could be used in any frontend that displays snapshots without having to write-in support for Johnny5.

The EL example uses a screenshot taken at 1024x768, but with the Lanczos filter activated, you can slide the image window separator over and the image scales nicely.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah that's what I'm going towards anyway, because some fes are simply too old and busted to ever support the viewer.  That's why I suggested the artwork system in mame in the first place.  Getting a viable image from j5 is easy.  Actually doing something useful with it is hard.