LED-WIZ and front ends.

[MikeQ]

I'm working on hooking up LED-WIZ to mame32 so that when you select a game from the menu, the games controls on your control panel light up.

[sysrpl]

corrected url:



We are working on a new front end. Check out the development thread here:

http://www.codebot.org/articles/?doc=9346

We might be interested in working with you.

[SirPoonga]

Once I get my hands on an ledwiz I will be making a utility that uses controls.dat.  Just like how I made the set49mode to work with control.dat to get the gpwiz49 DRM mode.

http://fe.donkeyfly.com/forum/index.php?board=14.0

[MikeQ]

corrected url:



We are working on a new front end. Check out the development thread here:

http://www.codebot.org/articles/?doc=9346

We might be interested in working with you.

Checked out your link.  Looks Cool.  I'd be interested in hooking this up to LED-WIZ.

[Howard_Casto]

I intend to add this feature to johnny5 as well, but as sirp said, I have to wait until I actually get a led whiz 

Mine will be the most accurate as instead of just counting the number of buttons, each label in j5 will be binded to a led (just like the labels are now binded to a physical keyboard key)  so remappings and re-arangments of the buttons on your panel for a particular game will be reflected. 

Of course j5 is a tad slow to render a layout, so this would only be useful after a game is loaded, not while scrolling through a gamelist. 

[loadman]

Nice work MIKEQ!       I do enjoy some LED action!

The FE MaLa already supports its own brand of hardware to do what yours does (and LCD's too).

http://mala.arcadezentrum.com/hardware.htm

So... it may not be very difficult to modify the software to support LED-WIZ too..?

You should ask SWINDUS

[Buddabing]

I'm working on hooking up LED-WIZ to mame32 so that when you select a game from the menu, the games controls on your control panel light up.

[MikeQ]

I've actually been having seconds thoughts.  I may just keep the lighting control in mame itself.   I got thinking it would be cool to have all my buttons flash when you get an extra life or some other game related event.  I could also use the game key assignments to do the LED mapping. 

Perhaps I'll do both.

[mahuti]

Ok... so who do I send a Led-wiz to for Christmas.... SirPoonga or Howard_Casto. Hm.... Let me look in my piggy bank.

[Howard_Casto]

I've actually been having seconds thoughts.

[SirPoonga]

That would require some serious hacking of the actual rom.  Now using the interface to run the "force feedback" like code already coded into some cockpit games, seems very doable.  That and adding led-whiz support for more generic lights in mame.  (coin door lights, rank lights, ect)

correction, it would require hacking of the driver.  If you know what op instructions are set when, what pins on the cpu, graphics controller, etc do then you can do it.  Isn;t this what glitter was doinf with LSE?

[Howard_Casto]

Nope... a "1up" is game code, not driver code. 

Now the "force feedback" stuff is actually driver code, but that wasn't what I was referring to with that statment. 

[MikeQ]

I put the lighting in the control panel.  Pics and video can be seen here:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=37190.182

[MikeQ]

Some more updates.

[RayB]

Mike will your work be made public? Any chance of building a few older builds to support it? (like 0.78, 0.55 or 0.56, and 0.36??)

[MikeQ]

I'm not sure yet.   I've tied my code to mame32 right now because of the way I need to program the LED-WIZ.  It is windows specific.   It might be hard for me to make older version available.  I know the input port code went through a major change recently so it would require some work to make my stuff retro to this change.

I think it would be strange to have a version of mame based on another version of mame too.  It might be nice to get my stuff rolled into some flavor of mame (Like mame32).  Not sure how to get that done though.   I'm kinda new to the mame scene.

[loadman]

Any chance of building a few older builds to support it? (like 0.78, 0.55 or 0.56, and 0.36??)

Its something to think about. I think a fair percent of cab builders use older versions of mame as it runs faster (especially of older hardware) and that rocks don't need support for the latest games.

In fact I will start a Poll as I am interested to know...

 

[RayB]

I think it would be strange to have a version of mame based on another version of mame too.

[MikeQ]

I think it would be strange to have a version of mame based on another version of mame too.

[Roughy]

Without getting into any deep, deep discussion here--

Are there significant differences in what/how much Mame32 and Mame can launch?

That is, what may suffer by using mame32 over mame?

Thanks!  This is the type of thing that puts some extra green in Randy's pocket at holiday time! :-)

[MikeQ]

Without getting into any deep, deep discussion here--

Are there significant differences in what/how much Mame32 and Mame can launch?

That is, what may suffer by using mame32 over mame?

Thanks!

[Roughy]

Thanks for that info; I've used Mame32 with Mamewah back when Mamewah hated me and wouldn't work correctly with Mame.

I just wanted to be sure they were both running in parallel as far as terms of functionality go--which it sounds like they are.

Sounds great; would really like to have this type of control/ability in order to make game play that much easier.
----

As an aside, it would be kind of cool to put together a bunch of 1p control displays and then create a naming convention and display the CP view with the appropriate buttons lit up.  Potentially a lot of work, but just saying.