All sold out of Minimaids. Thanks!

So I'm in the process of installing my minimaid now that I'm finally settled in a house and don't intend to move for a while. The issue I seem to be having is that the minimaid will not install in Windows. When I connect the card via the USB cable, it shows up as a USB device along with another unrecognized USB device and neither of them can install drivers. They are shown in the device manager under the unknown devices area and have the yellow sign with the exclamation mark in it. Starting Stepmania gives the "access violation" crash, which I believe is due to the device not installing properly. Any suggestions?

Here's my setup:

Windows XP on an old Sager 9750, which is part of their old D900K line. It has an AMD X2 processor, 2GB ram, and NVidia 7950 GTX graphics card.

Minimaid is connected via the usb cable and DVI -> VGA cable from the laptop.

The cabinet is a Korean 3rd Mix model with a 15kHz monitor. I need to check whether I still have the pads jumpered from back when I used to run a J-Pac on the cabinet. The cabinet runs fine with the old Extreme rig (hacked version I think, but thankfully not the Megamix junk) and I used to run a PC on there with Stepmania and a J-Pac but that was a few years back.

I'll check this post regularly and reply to PMs.

Thank you!

-CGCC in Houston, TX

-edit: So after trying with a different laptop, the minimaid is installed and working property. I'm assuming there is just some issue with the old laptop I was trying to use that prevents the minimaid io from installing as a USB input device. I have since also setup open itg on a linux desktop and am hopeful that I will be able to get SM or ITG working with light control.

i only get access violations from itg trying to get into something that has to go through UAC

Sorry for the time lag in my response to your question. I am afraid that I cannot help much on the soft15khz since I use MiniDP->DVI connecting to a retrofitted flat panel monitor (Samsung syncmaster 275T), audio is connected separately to the amp. The cab I have is a Euromix1 (was running 575 analog so was really cheap) whos monitor had seen better days - sadly now non-functional. I was unable to track down a replacement for anything near a sensible price so ended up putting in the syncmaster to get the machine back working again quickly.

Without a CRT monitor to test with I'm afraid I really can't offer anything concrete either way, working or not. To try to help, I've spent a little bit of time tonight searching around and from everything I've read so far its not looking good. Based only on a couple of hours of reading through various arcade restoration forums soft15khz on the Intel HD graphics seems highly unlikely to work (I've seen several posts of people trying without success on the much older version than the HD5500), I've not found any post that has clearly stated that the Intel HD series does work even on places like jammaplus.co.uk. Most seem to opt for ATI or NVidia if they know they need to use soft15khz to drive their arcade hardware.

As an experiment, I did manage to get soft15khz at least installed onto the NUC system and claimed it was "active" but since I lack the monitor hardware to test the signal works with I wouldn't place any trust in the softwares claim.

If the ultra small form factor is the bit that you are interested in, there may be another option other than the Intel NUC which may stand a better chance of working with the soft15khz:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5096#ov

The gigabyte BRIX linked there has an NVidia GTX760 on board, during my searching I did find evidence of people getting soft15khz working with the GTX760 (based on a post I found in Italian and read via google translate). At the time of writing they are a bit on the expensive side (~£600/$893, 1USD = £0.671 right now) but might offer another possible hardware option for you to consider.

Its seems worth me giving an update regarding the NUCs long term operation, especially as you were considering one, you should probably be aware of any issues I've seen:
There have been a couple of occasions where the xHCI/bad drive issue troubled me again, dropping it down the EHCI has certainly reduced the frequency but not eliminated it . The only way to completely avoid hitting the bad driver issue from my earlier post is to unplug the USB connection, boot the system and then connect the USB once the OS has completed its boot. Because the system is so small, I've got it located behind the coindoor so its fairly easy to get to. Its highly likely that the BRIX system I listed as an alternative might suffer the same issue since its based off a similar chipset to the NUC, so is worth keeping that in mind when you consider your hardware.

I am fairly happy with the NUCs operation for my use case (a private operated machine) but if you were wanting to get completely issue free boots every time you might be better off considering an alternative.

I just had to create an account on here and say that the Minimaid I bought several years ago now is still working perfectly and in use several times a week.

I had mine installed on an old home-built PC and it worked great for years, but recently died. I wanted the option of running Stepmania 5 eventually, so I decided to go with Windows 10. I knew that the 'care package' for the Minimaid was designed for Windows XP, but I decided to try my luck.

I had an older Mac Pro 'cheese grater" from 2009 (model 4,1 flashed to 5,1) that has been a workhorse for years that still was quite fast, so I decided to try and upgrade it to an M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive. I had recently upgraded my home office Mac Pro 5,1 with the latest Mojave macOS, and read that the firmware update gave these old machines native NVMe boot functionality.

I was planning to install Windows 10 on the Mac Pro and have it boot the NVMe drive, but I found that Boot Camp doesn't support Windows 10 on this machine. I tried it anyway, without Boot Camp, and the only way I could get it to boot was to install it using the EFI Boot on the Windows 10 DVD. Luckily, it worked and installed in a flash, literally!

In order to keep Windows 10 from doing any updates, i disabled it in the group policy settings. Since I was going to try to get the Minimaid working with lights on a Windows 10 machine, I wanted to start from a fresh install. After installing the files from the 'care package' OUTSIDE OF PROGRAM FILES (I used C:\Games\) and copying the updated EXE's and INI's into the respective places, I attempted to run openITG and Stepmania just to see if they would try to load the parallel_lights_io.dll and crash, since I had not yet connected the Mac Pro to the Minimaid and the DDR cabinet. They both did, so the next thing was to determine how to get 15khz out of the Mac Pro for the DDR machine's CRT monitor.

I had used Soft-15khz in the past, but I didn't think it would work with the Radeon HD 5870 card in the Mac Pro. Therefore, I found another newer solution, CRT Emudriver 2.0, which, luckily, supported the HD 5800 series, but only on newer Windows versions. I was glad, at that point, that I had chosen to use Windows 10!

After installing CRT Emudriver 2.0 and setting it up for the HD 5870 card, I enabled its EDID Emulation, and immediately the LCD monitor I was using to set up the machine flashed 'Out of Range' and went to sleep. It looked like the 15khz was working, so I blindly shut down the machine and hooked it up to the DDR cabinet and Minimaid.

After hooking everything up, I fired up the Mac Pro. Almost immediately after the Mac chime, I see the Windows 10 desktop on the DDR machine's monitor. Holy fastness, Batman! The NVMe SSD was fast!

Then came the moment of truth. I fired up openITG, and, THE LIGHTS WORKED PERFECTLY! WOOT WOOT!

I again checked to make sure Windows Update was disabled and it was. I don't want anything to install and 'break' this working Minimaid installation!

I knew it is possible to break it because what I did above was actually the SECOND time I had tried installing Windows 10 and the care package, gotten the lights working, and then having Windows update install something and break the lights or crash openITG and Stepmania or lock them up at startup. That is when I decided to try disabling updates.

So far, it has been working solidly.

Thanks again for such a great product!

If anyone is selling a minimaid let me know... Just bought a cabinet and I'd love to upgrade to openitg

i have a minimaid but a friend of mine is possibly looking for one. are they still made or is that it?

what if ours dies?!

I doubt itll die, i had mine in water and still worked. Once they are out they out. They are solidly built pieces of equipment

Help!
Does anyone know what's wrong there?
Problem after third use of minimaid
It will keep typing that
Using Win7 and Win10, the problem is the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu--40dyP6U

Thank you all~

The problem has been solved.
Use circuit board cleaner + blower
Clean thoroughly and then air dry minimaid
Power on and work.