While "real world" annoyances are slowing me down a little, I am still making steady progress.

The newest feature to mamehooker that I think a lot of the noobs will be most thankful for is the new ini editor. Run a game in MAME (in windowed mode of course) fire up mamehooker and select "edit ini" from the menu and a color-coded version of the ini file for that game will pop up. What's more, I've added a "add command" feature that allows novices to add commands to the ini via a drop down box instead of having to type them manually. The add command feature is rich enough to where only valid variable values are selectable and descriptions of each variable are given.

I'm powering all of this with a rich text box control, which I've never really fooled around with. I am more than impressed with the amount of functionality that the RTB has available. While the ini editor isn't going to be as smart as a visual stuido environment or anything, I think it will really cut down on the basic questions and hopefully make it easier for people to make their own scripts.

This is a minor revision that adds a major feature. Now you can optionally track key presses and set them up like outputs to fire events when you press a key!

Taken from the readme.txt:

What's New
==========
3.7
Added support for keyboard state detection. Now you can run scripts when a key is pressed!
Added Play Wav File command.
When used in conjunction with the keyboard state command, you could make a nice "quarter insertion sound" when the coin-up buttons are pressed
Made Mame Hooker invisible on bootup (hopefully.)
Finished the New Digit Creator, this program helps you generate led segmented digits for use with display files.


Barring any major developments, this will be the last release for a while. Mamehooker is pretty much finished at this point. I will instead work on building the rest of the mamehooker webpage and get examples and lists of known output-enabled games up.

This version fixes some of the things I didn't fully implement last time as well as adding new functions for all the wacky ideas we've been throwing around over at boyac.

From the readme:

------------------------------------------------------------------

What's New
==========
3.6
Added global pulse speed for ledwiz as it'll be useful for some exotic hardware setups.
Added Looping command for mamehooker script files.
Added Advanced Flagging support, you can now use not only the current ouput's state, but ANY output's state as a variable.
(See Explaination of Scripting language section for details.)
Added Loop From Script command, which loads an animation in an independant, infinate loop
Added Kill Loop command, to stop it. :)
Fixed the "keepaspect" option in display files for non-png images. It should work great now.
Added better image support... now if your machine can view it in explorer, it's supported!
Added a command to output the display file to an image.
Added "buffer math operation command", for more robust data manipulation.
Added log command, which allows you to write the contents of the debug window to file.
Added generic file operations commands... you can now copy/rename files and delete them.

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On a side note you might be wondering why I haven't been releasing the source. The fact of the matter is mame hooker is in a state of flux right now and I'm constantly adding/deleting huge chunks of code. Once things slow down again I will release source code for the latest version.


That being said, mame hooker is about done. There is a digit generator for display files that I've yet to release and many of the display files themselves will need to be updated, but as far as the exe itself is concerned, I can only see one, maybe two more updates in it's future. It does everything I wanted it to do and barring some code changes to add support for other emulators, I consider it finished.


In leu of working on the display files and digit generator some more, I've decided to take time off from it and work on the mame source code. I've been making some progress
with hooking up outputs and I want to get it submitted before mame is updated anymore.

Couldn't sleep tonight so I decided to do one of those missing display files, Seawolf II

Check it out:



I Think she turned out pretty nice. I managed to get all the instruction card text in there, along with all the lamps and a good bit of the bezel artwork. More Importantly I think it looks pretty tasteful.

Anyway, go download it in the display files section.

Enjoy!

Looking to your right in the mame interop section you'll find the all new display files page! Display files are used in mamehooker to display animated artwork on a second monitor, just like mame, but without the game itself. All of these display files are based on Mr. Do's! official artwork files so be sure to thank him for allowing me to use them as a base. You'll see that I've added 15 displays in total, which is practically all of them. The ones I haven't added were left out because the mame driver has bugs, the original artwork file has bugs, or it isn't practical to add them.

The page is a tad rough, but at least you can download them.

Here's a preview of the gorf display file:



I have some more, but they aren't ready for release due to what I said above.

Enjoy!