The journey with my little DOFX2 utility goes on. I decided that I wanted my ‘Start’ key to actually start a Pinball FX2 game, and my first Coin key to change the camera angle. Easy, just remap them on the iPac, well I didn’t want to try and do that on the fly from the command line as I launched a different emulator from PinballX.
My solution, add a small relay board (one relay per keyboard key I wanted, two to start, plus two spare for later – 4 relays fitted nicely on the circuit board). The relay is turned on from my LedWiz and it provides a switch input to my iPac using the relay normally open contacts. The iPac is permanently configured to see this new input as the <ENTER> key (start and launch ball in Pinball FX2. So in effect I have two <ENTER> keys when I use Pinball FX2 without remapping keys on the iPac.
Let me explain more. Step one build a relay board with the relays powered by unused outputs on my LedWiz. The board can be seen below.
Step 2, mount the relay board and wire the Normally Open (NO) contacts to unused switch inputs on my Ipac. See below.
Now program the iPac to use those new inputs as the keys I want. So far I’ve setup two of them, the first as another <ENTER> key (to start the game, enter initials, etc in Pinball FX2), the second as the <C> key to change the camera angle in Pinball FX2
Step 3, setup DOFFX2 to have a ‘Launch Before’ message sent to it that reconfigures the KEY_TO_OUTPUT to have a single button activate two outputs (message function available from V2.0). So my standard ‘Start’ button <1>, triggers two LedWiz outputs, the first turns on the LED in the button so I have a visual confirmation of the button being pressed, the second turns on the relay causing an iPac key stroke of <ENTER>. The setup and commands below were used.
DOFFX2_PinballFX2_On.ini
KEY_TO_OUTPUT=32 101 34 103 35 106 36 105 31 120 34 121
DOFFX2_PinballFX2_Off.ini
KEY_TO_OUTPUT=32 101 34 103 35 106 36 105
The “on” file sets two more outputs for various keys I have doing various acrtions, they are my relays. The “off” set it back to just the LED buttons which I am happy to have in FP and VP when DOFFX2 activates selectively via GAME_FLAG_FILE's for them. I can’t leave the KEY_TO_OUTPUT for the relays active, as FP or VP (quite rightly) will not like one valid key trying to do two things!
The KEY_TO_OUTPUT commands could have been sent as a message on their own to DOFFX2, I chose to send them via a supplementary ini (SUP_INI) message instead. That way I can easily add more start-up / shutdown stuff for PinballFX2 later on. Just personal preference really.
The end result is that when in Pinball FX2 my standard ‘Start’ button now sends two keystrokes to Pinball FX2, its normal <1> keystroke and an <ENTER> keystroke. The <1> is ignored by the software and the <ENTER> is used as appropriate.
Well I had fun, got what I wanted, and hope this can help someone else.
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