Sorry. I had power outtages yesterday and I didn't get a chance to check the files. GigaWing was missing from the pack and the cfg file for Raiden III was messed up.

Please download 1.1 to get the full, fixed, version.

In case you've been living in a cave the past couple of weeks, the Taito Type X Arcade "system" (it's actually a glorified pc running win xp) has been hacked and we can now run arcade versions of the games on our pc!

Unfortuantely the vertical shooters don't come with a rotation option. I've written a wrapper that mostly solves the problem and you can find it in the "Misc Downloads" section to the right. You'll need to download irotate to get them working and even then the stability is a bit iffy, but buggy rotation is still better than no rotation. ;)

A fair bit of setup is required prior to using them, so please read the readme carefully!!!

You have two flavors, the tiny less than 1mb version or the gaint 17mb version that includes nice bezels like the following:

After much delay and a lot of bug testing (thanks Dave and Ben) MameHooker 4.0 is finally ready!

There are a metric ton of additions this time, including a new built in ini editor, which should ease the pain of some of writing scripts. Please understand that because of the sheer amount of new additions to the code, there are bound to be bugs, so just let me know so I can get them fixed!

Also note the new "Tutorials" section for mamehooker. Mame Hooker is incredibly powerful, but judging by the example projects I've seen that use it and the scripts that the people write for it, it has become obvious to me that nobody but myself truely understands how to use the damn thing!! Right now there are just two basic tutorials, but I there are at least 3 or 4 more on the way and I'll be adding more periodically. These tutorials will cover everything from generic usage to extremely specialized examples.

Also new display files are on the way as well, but it might be later this summer as those take a while to churn out.

So without further delay, here is the massive new feature list:

What's New
==========
4.0

Added the ability to display data in hex in the debug window.
Because the popup menu is getting a tad crowded, I've made a new menu entry and moved things that are only helpful when you are debugging to that one.
Added a "new output alert" Now when mame is running and mamehooker finds outputs that haven't been previously found, it will play alert.wav.
Re-arranged the force-feedback init a little so that more controllers can be supported.
Added DirectShow Sound support which will allow you to play a wav file to a specific device instead of though all sound cards.
Added a bit more error handling... now if you don't add the right amount of cases on a value-specific state, mamehooker won't crash.
Modified keyboard state detection so that you have the option of keys defined in the default.ini being checked even if mame is closed.
Added a comprehensive script/ini editor. This should help those who have trouble writing scripts.
Changed the "Pause" event to "OnPause" and made it auto generate like the other general options.
Made the KeyStates section auto-generate as well, so people know it is there.
Made a "OnRotate" entry for the general section. This removes the annoying "Orientation//..." output from games and keeps mamehooker from generating a ini for every single game in mame.
Added entries in the general section to make the new Alerts optional and make automatically adding outputs to the default.ini optional.
Fixed a bug in the Xinput Driver preventing users from controlling player 2-4's rumble.
Added a little bit more error handling... now if you send a mal-formed command, with will give a syntax error in the debug menu.
Added a "**PAUSED**" indicator in the debug menu for when mame is paused.
Cleaned up the debug window... now things are a lot more obvious.
Added Full support for the Ultimarc PacDrive family of i/o devices, including the pacled64 and UHID (Thanks to Ben, Dave and Andy for their help)
FINALLY added optional parent/rom/driver parsing to make it easier when assigning outputs for a family of games (neogeo) or all of a games clones.
Added %parent% and %driver% flags to go along with the existing %rom% flag
Changed the way backgrounds are rendered on display files. Hopefully it will fix the "screen cut off" image errors.
Added "+" and "-" support to the sds command. Now you can set the next or previous value to true (+1 or -1) instead of specifying a absolute number.
Added a special %prd% flag that works for display files only... using the new parent and rom variables, using a %prd% flag makes mamehooker automatically look for the most accuract match.
Added support for multipliers, which allow you to bind a math operation to a output's state...


As usual, the link is in the menu to the right... Enjoy!

This time today I should have been releasing the new version of mamehooker, but things didn't turn out that way. By a strange turn of events, I went about writing a gui for the newly released supermodel alpha. This is nothing new. I've done launchers before, but they have all fallen out of dis-repair mainly because the command line options of emulators change over time and I rarely have the will to keep up with them.

So the supermodel gui evolved into a generic gui. The gui can be used by emulator developers as a shortcut to making an actul gui in their emulator. What options are shown, how they are configured and what value they write can all be configured via the ini files in the GUI folder. The source code is also provided incase someone wants to add features.

You can download both in the Misc Downloads section to the right.

That being said, the app works with supermodel out of the box.... simply extract the zip file to the root of your super model directory, launch, set the rom folder, and you are good to go!

For more info on Supermodel, please visit the Supermodel Homepage

I've spent the last month or so jumping back and forth between various projects all in the hopes of getting my assembly line of apps flowing out the door again.

MameHooker 3.8 will be the next release. This is probably the most major release in the history of the application, with 15 lines of added features in the what's new alone!

The most notable change you will see is the addition of a GUI for editing scripts quickly without the need for the readme.txt I never thought that I would add such a feature but during the debugging of the latest build I became so annoyed over having to lookup the commands and checking for syntax errors when i use them. I figured if I was having trouble then there isn't any help for the average user.

The new method won't be perfect, but it is infinately easier to use than previous builds... at least for simple scripts and commands... you'll still have to do a bit of manual typing for really advanced stuff.


The reason I'm making this post is that I've totally rebuilt the pacdrive (now ultimarc) sections to incorporate the pacdrive.dll, which is richer in features. I need people with ultimarc devices (pacdrive, pacled64, UHID) lined up to test upon release as I don't own any of these devices. PM me at BYOAC if you would like to help.