not bad...


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Posted by bill connolly on 29, 2000 at 10:26 AM:

In Reply to: Re: how about an instruct.dat file for mame and/or frontends? please comment posted by Druin on 28, 2000 at 4:19 PM:

not a bad idea at all.

but I wonder if that would work if you remapped your controls for a particular game. For example on Asteroids I perfer to use buttons instead of the joystick so I mapped P1B2 for left rotate and P1B3 for right, then P2B1/2/3 for fire/thrust/hyperspace. Would it work for this situation?

: My first attempt at an ideal brainstorm idea may be just a dream since it would maybe involve a bit much and may be harder to integrate, and I might have left something out or explained it awkwardly for now but here's a try at some ideas.

: If we could somehow get the MAME team to incorporate this type of idea, which would make for seamless adaptation to any setup people are using, or maybe if there's a data file or commandline switch that already exists that I'm forgetting about that lists what controls are used by each game, there could be a commandline switch for MAME to spit out some formatted text detailing controls used in the game for each player, then another product such as a front end or a separate small utility could capture that and relay the info via the picture shots.

:
: For instance if you were to execute MAME -listcontrols Contra > tempfile.txt
: or something like that, then the other program could read in tempfile.txt and it will learn that you need joy up, joy down, joy left, joy right, Button 1, and Button 2 for player 1 and similar for player 2, and it would display some generic one-time pictures that denote this, such pictures would be custom maybe for each cabinet, people could take pictures of their joystick and their button layout, then one by one in separate graphic files they save a copy of all possible button combinations they know of that could be used with others grayed out, like button 1 and button 2 showing, with the rest grayed, then another picture with button 1 only, and the rest grayed, another with all 6 showing, etc...If the utility determines that player 1 needs buttons 1 and 2, and 6 exist on the panel, it will call up the file but1_2.png, if 3 were needed it would call but1_2_3.png and it would show the buttons used. A text config file could be custom edited to map out the button names, so a section on Contra in the file would show that button1 = fire button 2 = jump and the utility would list those manually to let the viewer know what buttons on their own panel to press for what functions.

: I can't merge my thoughts on how this type of thing would be interfaced with mame and front ends to have an opportunity to display these graphics and the text info on the action names for the buttons used in each game...unless in some front ends, instead of having them load mame.exe maybe they could run a batch file and pass the commandline parameters to the batch, then have the batch file run the picture utility and then mame with the commandline options....after pressing a key to continue...I'll just save this message, go check laundry, then re-read what I wrote and see if I can add anything.




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