Main > Main Forum
LED-Wiz USB LED and Output Control Device now available. *Blinky lights*
SirPoonga:
--- Quote from: NiN^_^NiN on October 11, 2005, 08:55:14 am ---Do u give details or a OCX or something on how to use it with our own software if were using it for a different purpose than mame?
--- End quote ---
See what Randy said a little earlier...
--- Quote from: RandyT on October 03, 2005, 05:32:29 pm ---
--- Quote ---3. Will there be the ability to load different configurations on the fly?
--- End quote ---
Yep! But the approach may be a little unusual. It'll probably go like this: One application that talks to the hardware stays active in the background. Another application, which terminates upon completion of its task, sends information to the resident application.
BTW, it'll be pretty easy to talk to the resident application. It'll even be possible from notepad ;) My guess is that if so inclined, the MAME team or an enterprising C programmer could hack in all kinds of support with this method.
--- End quote ---
So even notepad can talk to the resident application.
Actually, this application has nothing to do with mame. Unless someone modifies mame to talk to the resident app it isn't taking any commands from mame. However, I see the keyboard LED emulation, which probably just detects when windows wants to turn on and off a keyboard LED. But then that is watching for what windows is doing (mame tells windows to turn on the leds).
crashwg:
In Warlords when a player inserts a coin (among other things) their button blinks. MAME supports players 1-3 with the NUM CAPS and Scroll locks which is obviously not enough for the cocktail version which supports 4 players.
Will there be a way of setting up your device to work with all 4?
RandyT:
--- Quote from: crashwg on October 11, 2005, 12:55:47 pm ---In Warlords when a player inserts a coin (among other things) their button blinks. MAME supports players 1-3 with the NUM CAPS and Scroll locks which is obviously not enough for the cocktail version which supports 4 players.
Will there be a way of setting up your device to work with all 4?
--- End quote ---
If MAME doesn't support it, then a custom version of MAME would need to be written. If MAME could be coaxed to output an external signal for those LEDs, as it does with the NL, SL and CL lights, then those events can be "hooked" through software.
But if the info doesn't come out somehow, it's not possible to act on it.
I think gl.itter (sorry if the name is wrong) started looking at this a while back and I have no idea where his project stands. I think the MAME team would have been required to add support for his solution as well, but I could be off on that one.
If someone connected with the MAME effort wanted to integrate support for the controller, I would work with them on it.
Linking specific inputs to specific LED actions might be possible down the road. Something like the lights going apedooky when you hit the smartbomb button. It would happen every time you hit the button, not just when you had one to fire off as that, again, requires information from the main application. This is a software thing that will evolve as time goes on, but currently it is a device that gives you high output LED capability for your keyboard indicator lights, allows you to animate lights on your CP/behind your marquee, use multi-segment LED indicators, use RGB LEDs to theoretically achieve over 100,000 different color possibilities and provide basic pulsating effects with zero USB traffic. It can also get enough power from a single USB connection for most applications.
Have you ever wanted to light up just the buttons used in a game and make those buttons the same color as those on the original control panel? This will let you do it and then do all kinds of other cool stuff in the mean time.
The rest will follow eventually.
RandyT
SirPoonga:
What Randy said. mame just supports the three keyboard leds. Someone would have to build support into mame to output to hardware.
Note, this LEDWiz can be used for more than just LEDs. Hook up a relay to an input and you can now switch on/off anything, like afterburner step motors, or more realistically T2 recoil. (Or I plan on dedicating one to qbert knocker)
Silver:
Don't know if gl.tter sunmitted is Light Engine to mame devs yet.
Read Buddabing thread about his LED controller, its where gl.tter posted his (very impressive) progress. He developed an internal messaging system for mame to catch the LED lights events. He also used a system similar to cheat.dat for monitoring a games memory address to catch events that did not originally light in the game.
Note I think its very important that everything that is submitted to mame is explicity to improve the accuracy of emulation. Such as mentioned if there was a game that ORIGINALLY flashed player 1-4 buttons, it is something mame can not currently do as it only uses 3 keyboard LEDs. Allowing it to signal elsewhere would improve the accuracy of the emulation.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version