Description
If you look at some of the chess computer roms, e.g. glasgow.cpp or mephisto.cpp, and run one of them, its usually typing in something like "e2e4" and getting back a reply like "e7e5" on a big red LED display. Then, you can type in the next move and so on..
How can we convert this to a simple command line application without any video, that takes stdin input and outputs the LED value to stdout? Specifically, we just need the output of output().set_digit_value(..) to be written back to the console.
I am looking for the simplest way to do this via Lua and a tiny build. The chess branch of my tree - https://github.com/sshivaji/mame/tree/chess has a tiny build for just the chess modules.
In the past, a few people have made an attempt to modify mame.c to get this functionality. I have stored one of the patch attempts on mame-0138 here - https://github.com/sshivaji/chessroms/tree/master/Source_WBMessMephisto_04_07_2010
In summary, I would like a way to disable video mode, disable even audio, and just get command line output for chess roms. I also would like to do this without modifying mame.c or changing the drivers too much. Ideally something in Lua or a solution that is easy to maintain while the mame tree keeps updating to newer versions.
A less ideal solution is perhaps to have glasgow.cpp and mephisto.cpp output the moves to a logger method. We can maybe run this with -screen None mode.
Would appreciate suggestions on this.
Thanks, Shiv