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Switch GP-Wiz49 modes using your computer!

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Flinkly:
ok, now i'm more confused.

Toonces:

--- Quote from: Flinkly on April 05, 2005, 06:32:19 pm ---ok, now i'm more confused.  are the status register the led's you were talking about?  and what is the control register?  if us simpletons don't need to see it in order to wire up the interface, don't put it...

oh wait...is this that relay board you speak of?

and your S6 and S7 lines overlap...might want to adjust that for clarity.


--- End quote ---

Sorry it's more confusing. There's really nothing to it. Wire pins 2 through 9 on the parallel port to the GP-Wiz49 board. Pin 2 is bit 0. Wire it to Mode Select. Wire pins 3-9 to modes 1-7 or whichever modes you want to do. As far as the diagram goes, graphics are not my strong point so I grabbed a graphic of the parallel port and drew lines. I didn't put anything there that wasn't on the graphic to begin with. There are no LEDs involved. Just 8 wires. The batch file and control programs only control the data bits.

Maybe someone with some graphic skills can help out and draw a better picture.

The Relay board is wired in exactly the same manner only instead of going to the GP-Wiz 49, you wire pins 2 through 9 to relays 1-8. Then you wire up the relays to the GP-Wiz49 as if they were dedicated buttons. There are some pictures of the relay board installed in my cabinet here:

http://www.pachislofun.com/cyberlead/

Take a look at the pictures named relay_board.

I hope that helps.

Toonces

Toonces:
ok, I made a little more generic graphic. I hope this one helps. It just shows the DB25 connector and the name of the pin on the GP-Wiz49 to connect it to rather than by pin designation.



Downloadable here: http://www.pachislofun.com/setmode/DB25_connections.jpg

Hope that helps clear things up.

Toonces

Toonces:
Ok, for the relay board. I bought mine from Hobby Engineering. http://www.hobbyengineering.com/SectionEK.html#IX1268

They were a couple dollars more than the place listed in the readme file but had more shipping options than just UPS ground. They also have it in Kit, Assembled and in an alternate assembled configuration with a case. All are listed on that page. If you decide to use the relay board as I did, you will need either a straight through DB25 M-F cable or you can contruct one yourself. If you make one yourself, you only need to connect pins 2 through 9 on both ends. pin 2 to 2, pin 3 to 3, etc. You will need to supply the relay board with +12VDC. Either through a universal power adapter or as I did by using the +12VDC already available in my cab. There are connections for both types of hookups on the relay board. Connecting the Relay Board to the GP-Wiz49 is exactly like connecting regular arcade buttons. You use a common ground running from the GPWiz49 to the relay board terminals marked with a C (Common). Then wire the Mode Switch on the GP-Wiz49 to Relay #1 NO (Normally Open) terminal. Then wire each of the mode buttons in the same manner to relays #2-8. You will end up with 1 mode left over that does not go to a relay! On my setup that mode is 16 Way. I chose to leave it out because it was a last minute mode that Randy through in at someone's request to try to make 720 (I think it was 720) to be more playable. It's not based on a real arcade control (although it might be usable on a Colecovision emulator??).

You can also choose to leave other modes out but the batch files assume that the modes are in the order specified on the sheet that comes with the GP-Wiz49 and that relay 3 is 8 way mode. If you leave out another mode, say 49 way progressive, you will have to either skip relay #2 (easiest) or move things around in the batch file so the modes line up with the relays you wired to. It goes right on up the line from Mode 1 on Relay #2 to Mode 7 on Relay #8.

I think most of the questions with the instructions in the file are due to not having a GP-Wiz49 in front of you. If you were to read the instructions while holding the GPWiz49, you would see how the board is marked and the rather cryptic looking Upper B, etc would actually make sense :)

Hopefully, soon, someone with some graphics ability will step up and make some better diagrams than I can. It would also be cool if someone that can program would create a better program than a DOS program with a batch file shell. There are a lot of possibilities for other things as the parallel port is also capable of feeding information back to the computer as well. The programs in the .zip are strictly output to only the data bits though so it would have to be written with more capabilities in mind. During my research I ran across hundreds and hundreds of pages of programming examples, DLLs to work with XP, and lots of sample applications but only this DOS one was capable of taking input on the commandline and setting bits on the parallel port. Everything else assumed you wanted a windows interface to do the switching. As long as an FE author or anyone else who might come up with a better solution gives the ability to set the mode via commandline, most FE's should be able to support automatic switching using the info in controls.ini.

I hope this helps clear things up a bit and doesn't overwhelm anyone.

Toonces

Flinkly:
um, just a question, but i notice your running into a few problems trying to get the right info from controls.dat or ini or whatever it is.  why not make a simple gui program like the resolution tool that makes it's own mode.ini or something for the batch files to read from?  then the comp wouldn't have to search the files for the right info, and have to wade through it all everytime, it could just look it up in a list with the correct code.  the benifit of doing it like this is that it would give the user a really simple way of adjusting what modes you want.  also, couldn't you include all the modes if yo used the db25 connector without the relay board?  so is there a chance of two batch file versions?  and i notices that you talked about possibly frying the gp49 or the comp if you didn't use the relay board, is that still a forseeable problem?  cause my comp and the gp49 probably cost more than the relay board...

thanks for all the help with these things, and for taking it upon yourself to solve the communities problem, but don't think its over yet... ;)

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