CPMaker v0.89 released

[Buddabing]

Hello,

I've got CPMaker updated to run with version 0.89 of MAME. I've added support for 4-player panels in this version.

I completely changed the way the patches and source code files work. There are now five separate zip files. This is because I'm desperately low on web page space.

You may want to compile the artwork display code and nothing else. To do that, just download PATCHxxx.ZIP (where xxx is the version number of MAME, 089 for version 0.89), extract it into your MAME root directory, run patch -p1 < patch.txt and compile.

If you want to run CPMaker, you'll need to compile it. If you do not have the CPMLIBS.ZIP, download it and extract it into your MAME root directory. CPMLIBS.ZIP will not change from version to version of CPMaker and MAME. Next, download CPMSRC.ZIP and extract it to your MAME directory. Answer yes to overwrite any files. Finally, either compile CPMaker separately or integrated into MAME. To compile a separate executable, run make in the src\cpmaker directory. To compile CPMaker into MAME, just run make in the MAME root directory.

In order to run CPMaker, you may want the images and sample panels, They are located in CPMIMAGE.ZIP and CPMSUPPL.ZIP respectively.

You need to apply the PATCH089.ZIP patch before loading any of the other source code files.

If the artwork display code alone is compiled into MAME, then the -extmakectrl flag will default to 1 and the -intmakectrl flag will default to zero. If CPMaker is compiled into MAME, then the default -intmakectrl will be one and the default -extmakectrl will be zero.

Here are the links:
PATCH089.ZIP - artwork display code

CPMLIBS.ZIP - library source code, does not change


CPMSRC.ZIP - CPMaker source code


CPMIMAGE.ZIP - Frostillicus' control panel artwork

CPMSUPPL.ZIP - Examples, docs, etc.

Regards,
Buddabing

*EDIT* links changed to new host: 12/20/04

[Popcorrin]

Buddabing can u tell me how to apply the patch.  I do not have alot of experience compiling mame but I have done it before.  When I try to apply the patch I get an error saying the patch command is not recognized.  Plz advise.  Thanks

[Buddabing]

Buddabing can u tell me how to apply the patch.

[sofakng]

I'm sorry...but what's CPMaker?

[sWampy]

Is there anyway you can make cpmaker, cpmame since you release the source anyway, and put out precompiled binaries.   It sure seems like an improved version of mame as much as nonamemame, mamefx, etc.  I love the idea of control panel help, but am way to busy/lazy to keep a mame compile environment up to date, since I don't have to recompile every release to add -lmr anymore. ;-)

[Buddabing]

Is there anyway you can make cpmaker, cpmame since you release the source anyway, and put out precompiled binaries.

[Buddabing]

I'm sorry...but what's CPMaker?

It's a way to dynamically create an image showing controls for a specific game and display it on the screen when pause is pressed.

[sWampy]

Now that I have a host, yes I can do that. Once I have the v0.90 version ready, (probably next week), I'll post a link to it.

Or if you want a WIP v0.89 executable, check out my thread on the movie maker extensions I am putting into MAME.

Cool, I had seen that thread, didn't want to make the above post to long, and wasn't completely sure that you could distribute and exe with that, since it might be a violation of some of mame's license agreement, since it bypasses all the ok screens.

[Buddabing]

Now that I have a host, yes I can do that. Once I have the v0.90 version ready, (probably next week), I'll post a link to it.

Or if you want a WIP v0.89 executable, check out my thread on the movie maker extensions I am putting into MAME.

Cool, I had seen that thread, didn't want to make the above post to long, and wasn't completely sure that you could distribute and exe with that, since it might be a violation of some of mame's license agreement, since it bypasses all the ok screens.

It's a derivative work, so it should be okay, plus it only provides the option to bypass the video warnings, it doesn't remove them.

I don't see why MAMEdev should care.

[Popcorrin]

I was missing the patch.exe.   I finally got it compiled and it seems to be working.  I have been working on creating some images of my cp and updating the panel.txt files.  I have been able to get my cp image to display with the proper controls dimmed out but I have had a few issues. 

If the vertical resolution of my cp image is too tall compared to the horizontal resolution it may cause some games to not utilize the entire screen.  It's an easy fix, just had to reduce the vertical resolution.

I have noticed that the cp image and the button images are somewhat blurry, not too bad though.  I didn't know if there was adjustments I could make to fix this.  I figured it had something to do with hws.

The main issue I had though was with the text.  I am having a very difficult time reading it as it is blurry and distorted.  I have tried increasing the size of the text by altering the .lof file with johnny5 but I haven't been successful and even if I make it larger I don't know how much that will help.

Not sure if you can shed any light on this.  Thanks.

[Buddabing]

I was missing the patch.exe.

[Popcorrin]

Thanks!   That cleared it up.

Now that I got that straight maybe you can lead in the right direction with these layout files.  I have been trying to set up one that works with my cp layout but I have been having alot of trouble.  I am using johnny5 and it seems to error out alot or the changes I make don't seem to take effect.  I thought about trying CPViewer.  What did you use to create the layout files?

[Popcorrin]

After playing around with it some more I noticed that changing artres to 2 really slowed the games down.  I seem to get only around 40fps whether I am running a newer game such as 1944 or an older game such as 1942.  As soon as I change artres back to 0 I get full fps.  Any advice?  Thanks

FYI, my cpu is an athon xp 2000

[Buddabing]

Thanks!   That cleared it up.

Now that I got that straight maybe you can lead in the right direction with these layout files.  I have been trying to set up one that works with my cp layout but I have been having alot of trouble.  I am using johnny5 and it seems to error out alot or the changes I make don't seem to take effect.  I thought about trying CPViewer.  What did you use to create the layout files?

Both CPViewer and Johnny 5 are supported. One of my many projects is to create a GUI panel editor. That's not going to happen for a while.

[Popcorrin]

I seemed to have better luck with cpviewer.  Everything is looking pretty good.  The main issues I am having are that changing the artres to 2 makes it impossible to play any games at full speed. 

Also I noticed sometimes that the control display for certain games defaults to the template.png with no controls displayed.  Not sure why it defaults to the template image even when I have my own panel file created and the cpmaker.ini pointing to it and only it.  Inside the panel file I have it pointing to the jpg of my control panel. 
From what I can tell this happens when the game selected doesn't utilize any of the controls defined in the panel file or the ctrlr.cfg file that the panel file is pointing to.

By the way, I think this program rocks!  I just hope I can get these issues I am having ironed out.

[Buddabing]

I seemed to have better luck with cpviewer.

[Popcorrin]

I've optimized the build and it didn't help the speed issues.
I didn't know you had a precompiled binary with the patch built in.  Do u have a link where I could download it?  I might try it out and see how it does.  Thanks

[Buddabing]

I've optimized the build and it didn't help the speed issues.
I didn't know you had a precompiled binary with the patch built in.

[Popcorrin]

For your panel issue, run MAME with -log and look at the the error.log file to see if something obvious pops out at you.

You may have unearthed a bug where the panel is blank instead of having all dimmed controls. Please email your panel file, ctrlr file, and layout file to me at buddabing at houston dot rr dot com and also lmk what game has this issue.

I just tested it out and I tried to use as many of the default files as possible to keep things simple.  The only change I made was to change the panelfile from the 3panels.ini to the panel1.txt file that u included and this caused the same error that I described to you before.  It happened on mspacman and I am guessing it is because the 4-way joystick is not defined by using only the panel1.txt file.  All u end up with is a blank cp image of template.png.

As far as looking over the error log, nothing really stood out to me?

[Popcorrin]

Something else I just noticed.  The control image generation for 88 games works fine the first time you play it but the 2nd time you load it you get the blank control panel.  If I go into the xmlcache folder and delete the 88games file it will work properly once again but then as before the 2nd time you load it you get the same blank image.
I don't know if this is a bug in the way it caches the files or what?

Also as far as the speed issues go, if I turn hws off I can get full frame rates when I have the artres set to 2.

[Popcorrin]

FYI, I was able to fix my speed problem by changing the switchres in the mame.ini from 1 to 0.

[Buddabing]

FYI, I was able to fix my speed problem by changing the switchres in the mame.ini from 1 to 0.

Okay, the mame.ini in my zip file was intended to work with the movie maker application. I'm glad you figured it out.

[Popcorrin]

Buddabing, how do u setup a panel.ini file such as your 3panel.ini file so that it chooses the correct panel.txt file.  I don't quite understand how that works?

[Buddabing]

Buddabing, how do u setup a panel.ini file such as your 3panel.ini file so that it chooses the correct panel.txt file.  I don't quite understand how that works?

Try editing your cpmaker.ini file and instead of 3panels.ini use franken.txt. The franken.txt is a single-panel example with all the various control types. You can use that as a template.

[Popcorrin]

I was thinking more along the lines if a person had switchable panels. I have no problem switching the panel file in the cpmaker.ini file to one that works but I noticed as default u had it setup to select the proper panel based on the game that was selected.  I had a look in the 3player.ini file and there isn't much to it.  I didn't understand how it defined which panel to use?  It's not that big of deal, I am just trying to learn more about the program and I didn't see anything about it in the docs. 

Also I had a couple of other questions.I was wondering if it's possible to wordwrap the labels like johnny5 does.  Some of the longer labels get scaled pretty small making them hard to read.
Last question and I'll try to leave you alone for awhile.  I have been unable to get labels to display for the trackball directions.  Is this something that isn't implemented yet?

Thanks again!!

[Buddabing]

I was thinking more along the lines if a person had switchable panels. I have no problem switching the panel file in the cpmaker.ini file to one that works but I noticed as default u had it setup to select the proper panel based on the game that was selected.  I had a look in the 3player.ini file and there isn't much to it.  I didn't understand how it defined which panel to use?  It's not that big of deal, I am just trying to learn more about the program and I didn't see anything about it in the docs. 

Also I had a couple of other questions.I was wondering if it's possible to wordwrap the labels like johnny5 does.  Some of the longer labels get scaled pretty small making them hard to read.
Last question and I'll try to leave you alone for awhile.  I have been unable to get labels to display for the trackball directions.  Is this something that isn't implemented yet?

Thanks again!!

You can set the default panel with the majority parameter.

Also, you can specify a panel for a given game so that the program doesn't pick one.

Given more than one suitable panel, the program takes the first one it sees. So if panel 1 and panel 2 both have the correct controls, and you define panel 1 before panel 2, the program will pick panel 1.

Trackball directions may not be implemented yet. That was a low priority item. Once I have 0.90 working I'll look at it.

Currently, wordwrapping on labels only works for labels that are exactly two words long. I did this because most labels are one or two words long; "High Punch", "Smart Bomb", etc.

[sWampy]

I must be missing something, I got your precompiled version, copied cpmaker.ini to my mame directory, put the the cpmaker files in cpmaker directory, put images in cpmaker\images.   When I pause mame I get nothing.   

[Popcorrin]

I must be missing something, I got your precompiled version, copied cpmaker.ini to my mame directory, put the the cpmaker files in cpmaker directory, put images in cpmaker\images.

[Buddabing]

I must be missing something, I got your precompiled version, copied cpmaker.ini to my mame directory, put the the cpmaker files in cpmaker directory, put images in cpmaker\images.   When I pause mame I get nothing.   

Try turning on verbose mode (verbose,1, in cpmaker.ini) Then run mame with the -log option, and look at error.log. Usually you should be able to tell what the problem is.

[SirPoonga]

I've been looking at the controls.dat webstats.  First, not many submissions in the last couple of months.  Partly because we are running low on good resources to find info.
But file downloaded is staying pretty steady, so people are using utilities like this.

Budda, I added a link to CPMaker on the project's links page.

[sWampy]

Anyone want to help a confused mamer?   

I've been trying to get this working for a while.  It works with the default pictures, but everytime I try to replace it with my cpanel it shows nothing.   I have a working layout for cpviewer, but can't get it to load, I tried to create several with johnny5 and it kept crashing usually after 20 minutes of work, and wouldn't reload the saved files I saved at each step. ;-)    The layout and jpg I'm trying to use are at http://www.landoncrews.com/mypanel.rar if anyone wants to take a look.   I think the problem is I'm lost as to how to create the panel files and what exactly they are set to do.