MAMEWah controls

[DaemonCollector]

What does the launch control viewer key in the Minwah control system do?

[Minwah]

It will launch a control panel viewer, such as Howards Johnny5 or JCrouse's CPViewer.  These can be used for showing a graphic of your control panel, with the selected game's controls indicated on it

[DaemonCollector]

Ahh...so it shows the selected games controls, hmm...would it be possible to somehow get Johnny5 to show the MAMEWah controls setup? Thats what I was hopin it would do  

[Minwah]

would it be possible to somehow get Johnny5 to show the MAMEWah controls setup? Thats what I was hopin it would do  

Not sure about Johnny5, but Mr Crouse was working on exactly this as a separate app...check out http://home.comcast.net/~cpviewer/

[DaemonCollector]

Hmm, I've looked at CPViewer before and never saw anything about showing the frontends controls...how would you do that?

[Minwah]

Hmm, I've looked at CPViewer before and never saw anything about showing the frontends controls...how would you do that?

Have a look on the downloads page - I think John only added the 'Generic Console CPViewer' today - that is what you want.

[DaemonCollector]

Hmm, but how would I be able to use both CPViewing apps at the same time? Like if I wanted the key to show MAMEWahs current scheme, but wanted it to show the games controls when it starts a game?

[Crazy Cooter]

I'm not sure how the cpviewers use the controller ini files to show the button bindings, but couldn't MAMEWAH do this on its own?

I'm at the laptop so my terminology will be off, but here's what I started on until I saw these cpviewers:
I'm building a modular control panel and wanted to display what panels were needed for each game.  I created a folder in my MAME directory called control_panel.  In that folder I photochopped what the entire control panel should look like for each game (only a couple so far for testing purposes).  I'm calling it into MAMEWAH under the artwork3 variable.  It works perfectly.  Now I see that these cpviewers are calling actual text to identify what each button does.  Couldn't MAMEWAH also generate this text by reading the controler ini file for that specific game?  Similar to how it reads the monitor information?  Or am I missing something?  If these controller variables were defined in MAMEWAH, I wouldn't care if I had to spend the hours writing a controller ini for each game.  I could even filter by layout and adjust the fields displaying the info so it looked perfect.  Unless the launch control viewer command can embed the graphic into MAMEWAH?

Personally, I'm not so concerned about displaying the button bindings for MAMEWAH itself.  I plan on printing out a card for that.

[Minwah]

Hmm, but how would I be able to use both CPViewing apps at the same time? Like if I wanted the key to show MAMEWahs current scheme, but wanted it to show the games controls when it starts a game?

What I forgot to mention is that there's no easy way to launch the 'generic' viewer from MW  

I'll be adding some shortcut events to enable this, hopefully for the next release...

[Minwah]

I'm not sure how the cpviewers use the controller ini files to show the button bindings, but couldn't MAMEWAH do this on its own?

Sure it's possible, but it is probably best left as a separate app.  A good example of why is the recent change in ctrlr format - that would have played havoc if it were built-into MW.

However I will eventually be using the info from controls.dat, similarly to how I use the info from MAME & catver.ini currently.

Check out Buddabings work - this will probably be right up your street

[SirPoonga]

Check out Buddabings work - this will probably be right up your street

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=25555
http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=23986

[DaemonCollector]

What I forgot to mention is that there's no easy way to launch the 'generic' viewer from MW  

I'll be adding some shortcut events to enable this, hopefully for the next release...

Ahh, so I'm no goin crazy . Can't wait for the next release in that case