...and following this road trip done almost 8 years ago
...it's time to do 'something' on that game!
Ok, few months ago I checked what's wrong on that one, and what a deception when I sized all the problems so far :
- main board has problem (but I already knew that when I bought it)
- power supply problem
- monitor not working anymore
Now regarding the cabinet, in addition of the side arts to replace, I've also discovered that the bottom/side of the cabinet is damaged!
Well, with the very less time I had now for the hobby, and although I really love that game, I didn't have the motivation to start a massive work on that and spend too much time/money to restore it in its original form. In addition, Spy Hunter is also well know as an horrible game to maintain working...
I eventually put that one for sale...
BUTI remembered that I bought 6 years ago a interesting device called "Led Wiz", and I remembered the idea I had in mind back then...
And what If I could emulate Spy Hunter? Sure this game can be easily emulated, but I would like to emulate it in the real cabinet, with all the it specific features: lights, yoke, pedal, shift, RGB display....
and all of this of course in a non destructive way : not a single cable must be cut! All the modification must be reversible! To have no regrets, I would still try this way before selling it...
OK, among the list of the Spy Hunters specificities, only one bothers me : how to pilot -over mame- the real 'weapons/van' light on the control panel? I've seen on the web few similar projects but none of them were clearly documented... so I'll do it here!
To resume, on a software side, I must use a mame version:
- that can send 'output' signals to a device that will light on/off the right bulbs the control panel
- that can manage the two positions (low/high) shifter on the control panel + the driving wheel /gaz pedal
On an hardware side :
- a device that can drive lamps : I have it... it's the "Led Wiz" board
- a device that can hook the original controls to a computer : the U-HID Universal Interface Board will do the job with no problem
So I wanna see if the main thing that bothers me can really & easily work as it should be! Let's install the "Led Wiz" board, and do a basic thing... Hello World, just light one led please
Ok, so far so good! Now let's install mame & Spy Hunter.
Now I need a software that 'captures' all the output signals produced by mame during a Spy Hunter game, and send them to the "Led Wiz" board. And the program to use is called
MAMEHOOKER.
Holy shit, after few configuration attempts, it works!
In Spy Hunter, when the Weapons Van is coming, the "Weapons Van" button lights, and this is exactly what happened here!
The test results was the green light for me. Let's remove my 'Spy Hunter for sale' topic and continue the 'experiment'!
