The Dragon King
About Mame Hooker 
About Mame Hooker Overview:

 

 

 

Overview:

Arcade games have always had outputs.  Lights, sirens, motors, solenids scoreboards or what have you, cabinets Have always had ways to interact with the player.  Until recently, mame had all but ignored this, with flashing keyboard lights as our only source of output.  Thankfully, Aaron Giles built us a whole new output system that allows mame to relay the states of various outputs to any windows application.  Unfortunately, knowing the state doesn't magically make a device fire, thus the need for this app.  Mame hooker keeps track of outputs and uses their state to control several output devices including, but not limited to the keyboard leds, ledwiz, the parallel port and force feedback controllers.  More devices will be added as the project progresses.  To learn in detail how to use Mame Hooker, please consult the read me file included with the application.

Mame Hooker is Part of the Mame InterOp Project and is Open-source for personal use.

 

 

Supported Commercial Devices:

I/O Warrior (outputs only)

LedWiz

LedWiz Hack (hacked using I/O Warrior chip)

Mala Interface (outputs only)

Ultimarc Output Devices

Microsoft Force-Feedback (compliant with most, if not all direct-x controllers with force-feedback)

Microsoft XInput Devices (In other words all xbox 360 controllers that support rumble.)

Nintendo Wii Remote (Both Rumble and all 4 LEDS.)


Supported Homebrew Interfaces:

Parallel Port (Simple 8 pins)

Parallel Port (Raw Data)

Serial Port (Raw Data)

Keyboard LEDS (Including led pins on encoders like the I-Pac)

HID Interface Writes

 

 

Misc Supported Functions:

Display Files (Used to display graphics on a secondary monitor)

Sapi Speech Synthesis

Command Line Usage (For launching Exes and Batch Files)

Sound File Playback

Direct Sound Playback (playback to a specific soundcard)

 

Supported Emulators and Applications:

MAME

MESS (Unconfirmed)

SuperModel (SVN r266 and higher)

 

Note that Mame Hooker has a fairly robust DDE and command line interface, meaning any application that supports launching applications or DDE communication can, in theory, support Mame Hooker.  Of course it is also possible to use Mame’s method of message broadcasting, but it is more strict and complicated to setup.  If you are a developer interested in adding support for Mame Hooker, please contact me.