Right now mamehooker is the app in active development, mostly for personal reasons. (My cab is getting a hardware upgrade atm.) So I thought I would share my progress.

I saw headkaze's controls.dat viewer and how it can display secondary artwork on a secondary screen and thought that would be a good layout to make for mamehooker considering it supports display layouts. Then I remembered that mh doesn't support pngs, full path names, aspect ratio preservation, nor does it use the "%rom%" flag when loading images in a ".dis" file. Luckily all of this is easy to implement, so I took 20 minutes and added it all! Also I found some nice example code for vb6 that loads pngs purely with gdi+, which means I get to omit png librarys and the like. This is good news for some of my aging vb6 apps as I can remove the functional, but very slow libpng.

I also thought about the dream cheeky missile launcher support and realized how silly it would be to add it. I don't want to be adding hid devices for the rest of the app's life. This lead me to a better idea. Namely all hid devices support pure byte writing to control them. I will instead add a generic hid function that allows you to send a byte string to a device. All you need is the vendorId ProductId and Device number. And trust me, if you know enough about the device to know what raw bytes to send to it then these things are easy to obtain. I'll try to add this for the next version and also support for the DC missile launchers in the form of mamehooker scripts for each direction. If I can successfully do this then, in theory any future input devices that are made for the community can be supported without me, ensuring the app a long life!

After a very lengthly absence, my first NEW piece of software!

Mamehooker adds a ton of features and bugfixes. Main highlights include support for wiimotes, xbox 360 controllers, speech synthesis and more. For those of you that want a more lengthy "what's new" read the readme. I would post it but the last version of mamehooker released to the public was 2.1 and we are on 3.0 now. The link is in the interop section to the right.

While we are on the subject, the mamehooker section will be redesigned to include sample scripts, layouts and real-life examples. Also we've started a mini-project of documenting all the outputs in mame. I will be working on all of that next. Also the source code will be up soon, but I need to clean out the source folder first.

Version 2.1 of the source code is up. Be warned, the addition of the pac-drive was a bit of a hack and as of this build it is rather messy in there.

This release, amoung other minor bug fixes adds Pac-Drive support! Andy himself did the testing, so be sure to thank him!

Mame Hooker 2.0 is out!

Major updates include but are not limited to:

Command-line/DDE support, which means that developers of front ends and emulators can interact with mamehooker directly via dde interface and users can send commands to an already running mamehooker by simply launching it again with command line options.

Fixed various bugs with the new display system.

Added a more advanced force-feedback command, and a launch and wait command.

Also mamehookerstart and mamehookerstop have been added.


The source code won't be up for a while as it needs cleaning.

It's in the interop section to the right, grab it now!


On a side note, it has been a while since the new site has been up and although I promised some big releases this summer, I haven't exactly made good with that promise. Unfortunately the real world often takes away from my programming time and summer has gotten away from me. Big releases are still on the way, just be patient. I promise, it should be worth the wait.