LEDBlinky... Worth switching from Zero Delay to IPAC?

[vicfrankenstein]

So I've got a 4 player arcade cab that's getting a lot of use.  I love the idea of LEDBlinky showing people which buttons are used for which games.  However, I have four Zero Delay's running the system.  I've thought about getting an I-Pac4 or two I-PAC2s just so I can use LEDBlinky.

Is it worth it?  I know from reading the forums here that I-PACs are more difficult to install and not really a lot of other benefits.

[retroD999]

I have a 2 player arcade cab with an IPAC2 (I don't have LEDBlinky) and a modified 2 player XArcade joystick with x2 zero delay boards instead of the stock board. I can say I prefer the IPAC2 purely for the flexibility of the customisation.

You can program them to be read as DInput, XInput, or keyboard, and you can reconfigure the buttons to be whatever you want (e,g, triggers, the xbox home button, a direction of one of the 2 analog sticks, etc)

The IPAC has also more buttons per player, and on top of that, each button can have 2 configurations (1 standard and 1 shifted - you pick what the shift button is), which I found super handy when you need some extra special case buttons in some emulators. - Great for an arcade cab, not that useful if you have a PC with a keyboard in front of you

The wiring is not difficult but probably not as simple as the zero delay that come with their own connectors. I have seen places that sell the pre crimped wiring for them though if you hate doing that stuff yourself

Programming the buttons was pretty straight forward in my opinion. You download an app that lets you reprogram the buttons via a user interface - I thought it was very intuitive.

I guess what I am saying is that I would get the IPAC2, plus the LEDBlinky would make  it even cooler :), but it depends on your budget/use case.

Edited April 15, 2021 by retroD999

[Hifihedgehog]

IPAC2 does not have LED outputs, so I am not quite certain why a IPAC2 is being mentioned here. You don't have to change your input method to augment your setup with dynamically lit LEDs. What you need is an LED controller and that is where something like the PacLED64 comes into play. LEDBlinky doesn't care so much about the protocol of your controls (when I say protocol, I am speaking of the language your controllers speak in), be it keyboard-based or DirectInput/XInput-based (two protocols for game controllers). What LEDBlinky needs is a compatible LED controller. Then, when you are assigning each of the numbered LED strands in LEDBlinky, you map them to either keyboard keys or the button numbers of each of your player controls. Then when it interfaces with BigBox/LaunchBox, it knows to light up LED 1 for button 1, LED 2 for button 2, and so on. Plus, you can convert any keyboard or DirectInput-based controller to XInput anyway with x360ce version 4.x in combination with WhiteKnight. That's pretty much the long and short of it.

Edited May 7, 2021 by Hifihedgehog

[Boomerps2]

....or you can just go with the Ipac Ultimate which has the LED controller built in which is very convenient 

[rom116]

I was pretty anti-ipac for a long time.  I had a guy build me a 4 player machine and he used RGB LED buttons and an ipac with an additional ultimate io board to accomodate all the buttons.  I would constantly get booted out of games because of button combinations...So I hated them and always went with encoder boards.

Eventually I got into building arcade machines and I wanted to get LEDBlinky working with RGB buttons.  I realized the way the other guy setup the buttons (or lack of setting them up) was the issue.  Now I have 2 ulitmate IO boards running on a 4 player cab with trackball and all the buttons not only light up or turn off with different games, but the buttons light up the color of the original arcade machines, or any custom set of colors I want them too.  I would not go back to encoder boards.  The other nice thing about an ipac is since it's basically a keyboard, you don't have to worry about windows messing with the order of your joysticks if you plug in another device...That's the worst thing about windows and arcade machines...lol