Posted by Druin on 23, 2001 at 1:35 AM:
In Reply to: MAME Cabinet That Retains Credits Between Games? posted by Mike on 22, 2001 at 3:31 PM:
I also believe it's a software issue and since it's software related, it'll most likely NEVER be implemented (I consider software suggestions to be a fictional dream to ever possibly come true)...
But I also was wondering if there's a way to not necessarily have a nice ideal system where credits can be transferred between games...but rather, just a means to ensure that quarters don't get eaten if they're dropped in while the computer is not prepared to accept them, such as at the front end screen or while the game is booting. If you drop a quarter in too soon while a game is first booting, you lose it...but how about at LEAST having a "virtual holding bay" for quarters that are dropped in and don't get properly used...
It's a tedious method to think of (and I only just thought of it right now on the spot so it might sound messed up) but......say you decide to add a *CIRCUIT* (of course, this is Druin speaking)...that monitors a coin switch as well as a player start switch....for simplicity let's say we only want to do this on player 1, so we have the circuit tapped into the coin 1 switch and the player 1 start switch...
Then, every time a coin is dropped in, the circuit increments an electronic counter, so it knows you now have physically dropped in one quarter. You can be in a front end, out in plain DOS/windows, or in the emulator at the proper insert-coin phase, or in the process of booting the emulator and having the coin go missing, it doesn't matter because the circuit is keeping tabs on the credit. When you press 1 player start, the circuit will know you're using the credit and it will decrement the counter and you'll be back down to 0, or whatever the previous count is supposed to be.
So first scenario suppose you're always in the emulator at the proper setup where each coin that's inserted gets properly registered in MAME. The electronic counter gets incremented and decremented properly too.
What if you put a credit in while in the front end, and then you run MAME. The game will have 0 credits but the counter will show 1 credit. If you simply press 1p start, the electronic counter will decrement down to 0 like it is supposed to but MAME will wonder why you're trying to press start with no credits, and it won't do anything, UNLESS...you press 1p start TWICE, at some flexible but relatively fast interval, maybe up to 3 seconds between the 2 presses. To MAME, this will mean nothing, you're trying to start a game twice, with no credits, and nothing happens, but at the same time you've signalled the electronic counter to indicate you want to not just monitor your credit usage, but now you want to tap into its power and withdraw one of the electronically stored credits for use - so you have one known credit in the machine, MAME thinks you have none, so you press 1p start twice, and this will force the circuit to activate the MAME coin 1 switch, to transfer the credit to mame, and then it will go on to activate 1p start.
Then you get your credits saved for your disposal, you get to use the existing buttons on the machine, and the extra combo of pressing the 1p start button twice as a hotkey shouldn't interfer with anything because normally you don't need to press the start button more than once at a time.
The only other addition might be a visual digit counter to show how many credits you have, but that is only luxury, not necessity...
If anyone would like to consider implementing this, I'll draw up the diagram. It's easy, I think. I'll add the thought to my arcade circuits page too so I don't forget, in case I get some time on my own initiative to develop it.