Friday, July 29, 2005
Software + Hardware = whole lotta progress
The software for the mame cabinet is coming along nicely. I think I'll be using "MameWha" as my front end. I like it for it easy to use interface and the fact that it's not a pain to take a screenshot of the game and have it pop up when the (totally free and legit) rom is highlighted in the program. There is one more front end I thought of trying, but I don't remember the name right off hand. I'll write about it after testing.
The keyboard is almost setup as well. In case you didn't know, the way you hook up your arcade controls to your computer is to use what is called a keyboard hack. You basically break open a keyboard and strip it down to nothing but the circuit board and the wire hanging off of it. There you will find 2 sets of 15-20 solder points in rows. The way a keyboard works, is when certain pairs of these connections are connected (completing the circuit) a key press is generated in the computer. So you have to take a piece of wire and a key mapping program, and start touching points together to see what key has been pressed, then you write it down (e.g. x1-y1 = a, x1-y2 = t). This is called "mapping keys". After this is done, you can solder the two wires for the arcade buttons to the correct points in order to generate that key press. Time consuming, but cheaper than buying a unit to complete this task. The only thing to worry about using this method is "ghosting" or "blocking", and I'll talk about these when I get to them.
Question: Will I have to add extra buttons for functions like Esc, and the letters "o" and "k"?
