Questions about the LCD part of the LCD/LED plugin

[Circo]

Ok, I have been searching on this board for clarification on the but most of the posts seem to deal with the LED wiz part of this plugin.

This week I replaced Mala with GameEX on my cab, for the most part it is perfect and bulletproof. I worked fairly closely with loadman when he developed a similar plugin for Mala when headkaze developed the plugin for GameEx. I figured they would be similar but I can't quite figure out how to get the LCD's to work. So far I have not been able to get anything to populate on the displays. I currently have a betabrite and a bpp-440.

Where do they get their data? In Mala I had two choices, it would either pull an lcd file or just sent basic information to the display. I would let Mala sent internal information to the betabrite ie: Mame - Game Name, Year, Manufacturer, Controls, and it would filter out useless controll information like NOT USED. In other emulators it would send Game Name, System, Game List info. For the BPP-440 i set it up to use .lcd files when available. It went to an lcd directory and automatically searched in a corresponding sub directory for an emulator ie: i:\lcd\snes , i:\lcd\mame. Currently I can not see any way to do this in GameEx. The nice thing was is that if I had not created an .lcd file for the BPP-440 the Mala would just shoot over line 1 Game Name, line 2 System, and line 3 Game List.

Is there a way to do this using the plugin for GameEx?

Also on a side note for the LED-WIZ, is there a way to create sytem specific lwa files to light up the controls for other emulators, ie: snes genesis?

Thanks!

[Circo]

Got the BetaBrite up and running, a few ideas.

It seems as though all information is being pulled directly from the control.ini file. Maybe if it also pulled from the MAME.XML file it would work for all games. I notice that now only information from games listed in the control.ini file shows. If a game is not listed say 2020 Super Baseball, then the betabrite still continues to show information from the last game played.

Scan through information in mame as:

In MAME:

MAME

Game Name

Manufacturer

Year

Control (Filtered IE joy8way= 8 Way Joystick)

Buttons (Filtered IE NOT USED does not show up) - This would be the only info neccesary to pull from control ini, and if it wasn't listed then it would still show everything else.

Other Emulators:

System

Game Name

I noticed in game ex many console games have manufacturer and year listed would be cool if that would output too,

Not sure if this is a bug but the LCD panels would not work until I enabled the LED-WIZ. Once I did that whammo the betabrite worked. However I was not able to get two lcd panels working at the same time but figured would use this for the betabrite and send .lcd files through the command line interface.

[headkaze]

I will be working on the plugin again Circo, and my main problem has being lack of beta testers. The Mala guys like loadman seemed to have plenty of people willing to help out and beta test, but I only had loadman to test my LEDWiz stuff and that was it. I had a couple of people who tested a few signs, and they seemed happy with the way the plugin worked so I never heard anything more from them. I guessed it was working flawlessly. I don't believe there was anyone who had two signs working at once, so I don't know if that ever worked, I assumed it did.

As for how the plugin works, it shouldn't just take information from controls.ini and it should also take info from GameEx (which is ListInfo.xml) if there is no info from controls.ini. I'm not sure what is going wrong there, but I'm not working on the plugin right now anyway. Maybe you could PM me your e-mail and work with me when I go to release the next version of the plugin. This will hopefully be happening after the CPViewer has been released.

Secondly my plugin doesn't work with Silvers lcd files because I painstakenly wrote classes from each Sign's protocol documents and created classes to deal with them internally. This will allow for much more flexibility sending info to the BetaBrite's.

Right now there is no support for other emulators, but I intend on adding this feature in the next version.

The second problem I have is I don't have a plugin tester like the Mala guys have. We really need to write one because testing plugins is a sure pain in the butt without one. For example I have my development machine in one room and my arcade machine with my LEDWiz in another room. Just to test my plugin I have to compile it, send it to the arcade machine, launch GameEx and test if it's working. As you can imagine it's a nightmare! lol

[Circo]

I will be working on the plugin again Circo, and my main problem has being lack of beta testers. The Mala guys like loadman seemed to have plenty of people willing to help out and beta test, but I only had loadman to test my LEDWiz stuff and that was it. I had a couple of people who tested a few signs, and they seemed happy with the way the plugin worked so I never heard anything more from them. I guessed it was working flawlessly. I don't believe there was anyone who had two signs working at once, so I don't know if that ever worked, I assumed it did.

As for how the plugin works, it shouldn't just take information from controls.ini and it should also take info from GameEx (which is ListInfo.xml) if there is no info from controls.ini. I'm not sure what is going wrong there, but I'm not working on the plugin right now anyway. Maybe you could PM me your e-mail and work with me when I go to release the next version of the plugin. This will hopefully be happening after the CPViewer has been released.

Secondly my plugin doesn't work with Silvers lcd files because I painstakenly wrote classes from each Sign's protocol documents and created classes to deal with them internally. This will allow for much more flexibility sending info to the BetaBrite's.

Right now there is no support for other emulators, but I intend on adding this feature in the next version.

The second problem I have is I don't have a plugin tester like the Mala guys have. We really need to write one because testing plugins is a sure pain in the butt without one. For example I have my development machine in one room and my arcade machine with my LEDWiz in another room. Just to test my plugin I have to compile it, send it to the arcade machine, launch GameEx and test if it's working. As you can imagine it's a nightmare! lol

Well I did plenty of beta testing with loadman on his plugin, so I would be more than happy to help test the next version. Just let me know when you are ready!

[loadman]

Well I did plenty of beta testing with loadman on his plugin, so I would be more than happy to help test the next version. Just let me know when you are ready!

Who is this Loadman?