USB-DVG Users support thread

The Opti-pac is so customizable that I'm not sure what its default "mode" is. It has been a while since I worked with one.
The Ipacs work properly when they are in bare-bones keyboard mode and the newer ones have a single trackball and spinner header.
If I can get time to actually get back to this maybe I can try my second Opti-pac also and we can commiserate?

Some positive news after messing around with this for a while.

I updated the advmame.rc and advmess.rc in both the /home/pi/.advance and /usr/local/share/advance directories with the mouse data for mouse 0 to 3 and for mouse, trackball, dial and paddle.

Still didn't work. This has been with using my old optic-pac (that I had from the zvg setup) and connected with the Chasm encoder.

I plugged my iPac in with a trackball connected, and without changing any configuration, that worked.

So, seems that either my opti-pac is dead or something is up with the encoder / wiring. Next step is to wire the encoder up to the iPac and see if that works. If it does, I'll just order another one (the one I had on hand is for another mame project) and go from there.
 
FWIW, I didn't have any luck with iPac2 optical inputs either. The GRS spinner I picked up as a stopgap was plug-and-play; I have a USB ball mouse which works fine, going to hack that for the Tempest spinner in my final control panel.

The keyboard interface on the iPac works without a hitch, though.
 
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The Opti-pac is so customizable that I'm not sure what its default "mode" is. It has been a while since I worked with one.
The Ipacs work properly when they are in bare-bones keyboard mode and the newer ones have a single trackball and spinner header.
If I can get time to actually get back to this maybe I can try my second Opti-pac also and we can commiserate?
If you feel like testing it, cool; if not, no big deal. I'm more just confused as to what happened on it NOT working now, since I had this running with the opti-pac before.

My plan for today is to hookup the spinner to the iPac2 I have (and just confirmed works with a trackball) and see what happens.
 
I was able to get the spinner working, just....not the way I expected it.

I haven't been able to get the opti-pac to work at all. I connected the spinner and trackball to the iPac2, and at first only the trackball would work. I ended up connecting the spinner to the trackball connections and jumping the x1/y1 and x2/y2 connections together. That worked? Sure, I guess.

At I'm the point I'll just order another iPac2. I'll use the one I have to finish up the DVG project, and the incoming one will be for my next mame project. No idea why this seems to work, but it does; so just rolling with it.
 
Up and running off the dvg. Have it booting straight into Chasm. Wrapping up the final parts hopefully in the next couple weeks, and then can finally call this one done. Would also like to adjust the monitor a bit so it shows a better picture.
 

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UPDATE: Problem was the i-Pac, throwing spurious esc commands. Moved "exit game" over to a different key and it's rock solid. Wish I'd thought to check that a month ago.

So, not a USB-DVG issue at all, just a secondhand keyboard emulator glitch.

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I'm still getting game crashes. Loaded up a new SD card with Mario's image, no changes, and it worked fine. Space Duel stayed up for 15 minutes, which is considerably longer than I've been getting for a while now, at that point I started going through my mod steps, figuring I'd do them one at a time, running games in between, and see if I can isolate it.

After the very first one, changing device_keyboard from auto to raw, game crashes started happening. No particular idea why, and it doesn't matter whether one or two keyboards/keyboard emulators are plugged in, you still get crashes. So I don't think it's a spurious esc keystroke, but I can't 100% rule it out, either. The one thing I think I can rule out is hardware issues, at least as far as the Pi and DVG are concerned; for a long time I thought this was heat-related, but if changing the software load makes it go away, it's time to concentrate on that side.

Can't entirely rule out a squirrelly i-Pac, though. The 15-minute test was with a standard keyboard hooked up, so not out of the question the i-Pac is throwing uncommanded esc and causing this problem. {EDIT: Yes, this was actually the problem.} I do have another one that I could swap in, but that'd be a major PITA. Think I'll try just moving that button to another key on the i-Pac and resetting the "quit game" command to that one in MAME, see if that cleans it up.

The reason you want that setting is for ease of configuration setup and troubleshooting, otherwise advmame will lock on to the first device it sees, whether that's a real keyboard or an i-Pac, and treat the other one like a completely different device (which won't do anything).

I guess I could mech up tab and return keys somewhere, maybe inside the coin door a la test switches, to enable the configuration menu and make the second keyboard superfluous most of the time; once you exit to Linux you can plug or unplug keyboards to your heart's content. Or I could do a dance of setups with a keyboard plugged in, then unplug and restart vmmenu and advmame, which would probably work but would be painful.

Irritating, to say the least.
 
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Anyone have a recommendation on audio amp? Or what are people doing for audio?

I tried a small amp that I can wire the 3.5mm raspberry pi to, and then output that to the speaker. It works alright, it's just quiet; and the volume pot is horrible on it, lol. Just figured I'd see what other people are using or could suggest.
 
Very cool.
I struggle occassionally to locate a 2.1 to run a sub in my builds sometimes.
 
UPDATE: Problem was the i-Pac, throwing spurious esc commands. Moved "exit game" over to a different key and it's rock solid. Wish I'd thought to check that a month ago.

So, not a USB-DVG issue at all, just a secondhand keyboard emulator glitch.

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

I'm still getting game crashes. Loaded up a new SD card with Mario's image, no changes, and it worked fine. Space Duel stayed up for 15 minutes, which is considerably longer than I've been getting for a while now, at that point I started going through my mod steps, figuring I'd do them one at a time, running games in between, and see if I can isolate it.

After the very first one, changing device_keyboard from auto to raw, game crashes started happening. No particular idea why, and it doesn't matter whether one or two keyboards/keyboard emulators are plugged in, you still get crashes. So I don't think it's a spurious esc keystroke, but I can't 100% rule it out, either. The one thing I think I can rule out is hardware issues, at least as far as the Pi and DVG are concerned; for a long time I thought this was heat-related, but if changing the software load makes it go away, it's time to concentrate on that side.

Can't entirely rule out a squirrelly i-Pac, though. The 15-minute test was with a standard keyboard hooked up, so not out of the question the i-Pac is throwing uncommanded esc and causing this problem. {EDIT: Yes, this was actually the problem.} I do have another one that I could swap in, but that'd be a major PITA. Think I'll try just moving that button to another key on the i-Pac and resetting the "quit game" command to that one in MAME, see if that cleans it up.

The reason you want that setting is for ease of configuration setup and troubleshooting, otherwise advmame will lock on to the first device it sees, whether that's a real keyboard or an i-Pac, and treat the other one like a completely different device (which won't do anything).

I guess I could mech up tab and return keys somewhere, maybe inside the coin door a la test switches, to enable the configuration menu and make the second keyboard superfluous most of the time; once you exit to Linux you can plug or unplug keyboards to your heart's content. Or I could do a dance of setups with a keyboard plugged in, then unplug and restart vmmenu and advmame, which would probably work but would be painful.

Irritating, to say the least.

Sorry to report that uncommanded exits from games is still an issue for me. Not sure why swapping entry 'keys' seemed to work for a while, but then didn't, but that's the situation I'm in. I even went as far as buying a new I-Pac2 and replacing the unit I'd had in the cabinet... and it still does the same thing. Changing the keystroke from ESC to something else, moving the exit switch's wire around to other posts, still the same behavior. Changed misc_safequit from yes to no in advmame.rc, also no change.

Is anybody else seeing anything like this? At this point literally all the pertinent hardware (except for the Pi 5) has been changed over, with the same random game quits still happening, so I'm reasonably sure this is a software issue.
 
Sorry to report that uncommanded exits from games is still an issue for me. Not sure why swapping entry 'keys' seemed to work for a while, but then didn't, but that's the situation I'm in. I even went as far as buying a new I-Pac2 and replacing the unit I'd had in the cabinet... and it still does the same thing. Changing the keystroke from ESC to something else, moving the exit switch's wire around to other posts, still the same behavior. Changed misc_safequit from yes to no in advmame.rc, also no change.

Is anybody else seeing anything like this? At this point literally all the pertinent hardware (except for the Pi 5) has been changed over, with the same random game quits still happening, so I'm reasonably sure this is a software issue.

Follow-up: I unplugged the I-Pac2 and started up a game. It ran for a solid hour without a MAME crash, which is much longer than any run with the I-Pac attached. I'm surprised: I've used I-Pacs and other Ultimarc parts for many years, and this is the first time I've ever had a problem; I've certainly never seen this behavior before.

At the suggestion of Fred K., I also swapped in a shorter USB cable (3') from the I-Pac to the Pi, and I'm still getting MAME crashes/exits from games (although with a small number of tests, they do seem to be fewer and farther between). That's about as short of a cable as I'm going to be able to run in this build.

I wonder if there's an advmame.rc setting that I'm missing here. That's been the source of almost every prior issue with this build.
 
Would it be possible to track/log the inputs of the I-Pac2 while a game is running? Similar to logging keyboard inputs with a app like Marco Recorder. Maybe that would show something.
 
Would it be possible to track/log the inputs of the I-Pac2 while a game is running? Similar to logging keyboard inputs with a app like Marco Recorder. Maybe that would show something.

Maybe. My Linux-fu does not extend to keyloggers, but I can do some searching.

The fact that this is repeatable over identical hardware that's years apart in production suggests it's not an issue on other builds with an I-Pac2. There are probably thousands of those installed all over the world, if this was a common problem I think Andy would have fixed it by now.

I did try changing up the device_keyboard drivers in advmame.rc, and the only one that works at all is 'raw.' The rest either don't work ('sdl,' which requires the sdl video driver to also be loaded), won't recognize the I-Pac at all ('event') or will only accept inputs from either the I-Pac or a second keyboard ('auto'), but not both. That last might be marginally workable if it was consistent, but it isn't--sometimes it recognizes the I-Pac on boot, and sometimes it doesn't.
 
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Geez Will, sorry to hear this is still giving you problems.
It has the flavor of a board reset issue due to low logic voltage though, doesn't it?
Could it be that your Pi power supply isn't adequate or something else is causing a voltage drop large enough to cause a reset?

Maybe try plugging the Pi into a completely different outlet somewhere with an extension cord just to eliminate that possibility?
 
Geez Will, sorry to hear this is still giving you problems.
It has the flavor of a board reset issue due to low logic voltage though, doesn't it?
Could it be that your Pi power supply isn't adequate or something else is causing a voltage drop large enough to cause a reset?

Maybe try plugging the Pi into a completely different outlet somewhere with an extension cord just to eliminate that possibility?

Don't think so. The Pi has its own dedicated (Pi 5 approved) wall wart and power cable. And it's hard to see a keyboard emulator being the cause of a significant voltage and/or current drop (although the DVG might be a different story).
 
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