Posted by Druin on 1, 2000 at 12:28 AM:
If the idea of having the MAME team include controls used in specific games, I think a good place for them to include it would be in the -listinfo commandline switch. That feature gives details on drivers used in each game, dip switch names, clone info, number of players, etc, and it seems to be an appropriate place.
With the current number of games and the amount of info listed on all games, it generates over 6 megs of text, which a utility could generate on every new release of MAME to get updated into, then search for the control keys used in any game within the text file dump so it can load the generic picture with non-used controls faded out.
I've never tried giving suggestions to the MAME team and I don't know how open they would be to adding something like that. At least it's not a brand new function we'd be asking for, it's just an enhancement of an already implemented feature, and it SHOULD be relatively simple to add...maybe I'll even experiment with the source and see if I could plug in an extra lot of control key info in that -listinfo thing to see how feasible it is, and if one of us could get it working, we could submit the source modification to the team and then they don't even have to do any work, just approve the idea and plug it in?