CMD Command Line Wrapper v0.05

[joeblade]

Apologies for not getting it ready last week as I said I would.
2 kids - a 2.5 year old girl and a 10 week old boy - need I say more.

It can be downloaded at the usual spot:

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/joe_blade/cmd/


Howard, apols about not yet sending you a post,  will definately do it tommorrow (from work).

A big thanks for the +ve feedback from all that have given it a go.

Changes are as follows:


* v 0.05   09/07/2003

Fixed a bug that I found myself. If the emulator exit'd (due to it recognising
the exit key being pressed), and the cmd wrapper 'missed' this keystroke (it was
possible as the sleep time between checking was quite high), then the emulator
would exit, but the cmd wrapper would keep running, and the focus would not
return to the FE.

I did 3 things to fix this:

(1) Made the default 'sleep time between checking for the exit key' lower. It is
    now 1/10th of a second (100 ms).

(2) Made the 'sleep time between checking for the exit key' configurable in the
    cmd.ini file. It always actually was, I just didn't publicise the fact.
    Refer to the sample cmd.ini file for further information.

(3) Added code so that when checking for the key press, it also checks that the
    spawned process (the emulator) is still running. If it isn't, then the cmd
    wrapper exits, and the focus will return to the FE.

Also added some extra logging, in the area of exiting the spawned executable.

Created the keycodes.txt file. This file provides decimal and hex values for
the virtual key codes.


Cheers

Martin

 

[BuZz880]

I like this, thanks it will come in handy.  Is there anyway to not have it automatically stick in a "space" after the "pre-romname" options?  I was trying to use it to launch visual pinball but I'm OK because I found Howard's wrapper but for future reference it might be nice to know.  The problem was using the pre-rom option of "-PLAY -" you can't have a space after the second "-".  I suspect the issue may come up again for those that try it with Daphne but I am not there yet.

[BuZz880]

Howard, regarding your visual pinball wrapper (which is awesome except for this problem).  For some reason it works great until I hit a newer machine - take X-files for example that uses the vpinmame roms for the first time.  I get the little popup menus and answer as I always do then when I get into the machine I suddenly am missing the top 1/3 or so of my screen even though the vpinmame led display is still there (I use the compact display).

After this occurs once all other vpinmame enabled games are affected until I reboot - after which X-files and all others will be fine again until I hit another for the first time.

Any thoughts?  I am at 640x480 fullscreen mode.  Using an ArcadeVGA video card and launching vp-launch2.exe via mamewah.

[Howard_Casto]

Yeah... sounds like you are having rendering issues.  There's not too much I can do for you but I think it's an arcadevga thing (interlaced mode).  

You might want to try turning off the transparency effects and see if that helps.  Other than that I'm not sure.  

[BuZz880]

Interestingly I did a little more checking at it seems if I click my mouse on the bottom half of the screen it fixes the problem so really I think it is actually that Visual Pinball editor is creating an invisible window that blocks my screen until I click under it.  I guess I'll live with it because it is better then using the Bat file I wrote myself to launch Vpinball.

[joeblade]

BuZz880, got any suggestions for how to specify this (no spaces or spaces) in the ini ?

I think to pick up spaces/no spaces in the PreRomText and PostRomText fields would be a bit fidgety, and probably error prone - Quite often people might forget to put a space in, or accidently put one in when not wanted. I would prefer to still strip the leading and trailing spoaces from these strings.

A quick thought was to maybe add a couple of extra params such as:

PreRomTextSp=00
PostRomTextSp=00

The 2 digit value could be used to specify if a space should precede (the 1st digit) or follow (the 2nd digit) the corresponding text.

e.g

# A space before the pre-rom text.
PreRomTextSp=10        

# A space after the pre-rom text.
PreRomTextSp=01

# A space before and after the pre-rom text
PreRomTextSp=11

Thoughts ??

Martin

[BuZz880]

Well, I know you are busy so I wouldn't bother doing this for me unless its something pretty simple (Minwah pointed out the Daphne problem won't be solved so easily so I am still going to use my BAT file there).

I thought the easiest might simply be to require the user to specify spaces or not as part of the pre or postrom text string.   I thought perhaps one way to make this work would be to require quotes around the string to make the space or lack thereof clear.  Your debug log is outstanding so I found it very simple to identify when context errors have been made.

If you think that would be confusing however, then along the lines of what you suggested would make sense.  It is probably safe to say you never need a space before the pre-rom text or after the post rom text so you could probably reduce the flag to:

PreRomTextSp=  (0 or 1)
PostRomTextSp= (0 or 1)

The assumption is the preromtextsp occurs after the text string and the postromtextsp occurs before the text string.

My 2 cents at least.

[joeblade]

Thanks BuZz880.

Busy or not, its good to have some new features to add in. I love (designing) & coding software (I'd have to, I do it 8hrs a day, 5 days a week), so I will get cracking on it as soon as I can anyway.

I must admit, it sounds like a useful feature !

I like the idea of the quotes aswell, better than additional parameters.

Cheers

Martin