Arcade RGB Animator

I'm currently making my own RetroPie arcade cabinet, working on the LED buttons and ran across RGBCommander. It's a great program to control the lights on your control board per game and in attract mode. That's why I wrote this animation application. The RGBA files used to animate the lights in RGBCommander are a little complicated, and it would be very hard to visualize an animation without a tool. So I made Arcade RGB Animator (or ARGBA - bad name, sorry).

Create some controls by defining a name and the RGB pins used and then drag them to the grid where the controls in the real world exist. Add some frames, then change the colors of the lights by clicking on the color selector on the control. Select another frame, and repeat to make some animations. Frame times are in milliseconds. Click on a frame to select it, play to see your animation. You can adjust all values in real-time as the animation plays. Note: RGBCommander's slowest frame time is 440ms, and seems to use a value of 0-255 in the RGBA files. Values larrger than 440ms will be scaled down to RGBA max value of 255

When you are done, click Download Animation and you'll get an ARGB file for RGBCommander.

If you have an Ultimarc IPAC Ultimate, and need to reverse the RGB colors for pins 48-96, check the Reverse checkbox before downloading.
Don't need a control, drag it to the trash.
Need to edit the pins or name of the existing control? Click the green button on the upper left of the control, change the name or pins, then click Update Control.
Save will generate an ACP file that will save all your controls and animations in the format needed by ARGBA.
Load will restore the controls and frames so you can work on them again.
Example animation save file

The ACP and RGBA files are totally different, ACP holds more information about the controls and frames than the RGBA file, so please, if you need to reload your animation, save an ACP file.

When putting the RGBA files back onto your RetroPie, please watch the permissions. RGBCommanders default location is in /usr/sbin/rgbcommander/rbga and seems to require the files to have full permission (chmod 777). I had some issues because the files where read-only when I uploaded them.

Warning! - do not hit refresh, back button or close the window until you save your ACP file or your animation will be lost. Also, I'll admit, the tool is a little clumsy to use, so I'll update it as I get a chance :)

by Perfect Digital Boy