Posted by Krusty on 19, 2001 at 7:19 PM:
In Reply to: operational buttons on control panel posted by bernard on 19, 2001 at 5:00 PM:
I put a pause button on the panel (one for each player, so I guess that would be two, although they perform the same function) and a FUNCTION button. I can access all of MAME's features by using the FUNCTION button in combination with the other player buttons. For example, I have Player 1 Button 1 programmed to go to the TAB menu when you hold FUNCTION and press it. I have re-assigned each of 12 different functions to a Player 1 or Player 2 button (there are 6 buttons for each player on my panel). I didn't want to clutter up my panel with a bunch of buttons, and this seemed to be the best way to go.
To program this in MAME, you will need to re-program most of the inputs. I stuck with the basic button layout (left CTRL for button 1, ALT for button 2, etc). However, I programmed the normal game functions to be BUTTON NOT FUNCTION. In other words, for Player 1 Button 1, I have the definition of LEFT CTRL (NOT) B (B is assigned to my function key). Alternately, I have the config menu assigned to LEFT CTRL (AND) B. In other words, pressing just LEFT CTRL will work as a normal game button push, but pressing it with B will go to the config menu. I set up various functions, like reset game, throttle, show frames, etc to be tied in with the regular buttons.
You can experiment with this using a regular keyboard before you set up your panel - that's what I did. To program the keys, go to the CONFIG MENU and go to INPUT (ALL GAMES). Then, go to the function you want to re-program, and press ENTER. If you press a key and wait for it to return, press ENTER again before moving off of that entry, and then press another key, it is like doing an OR function (A OR B to fire). If you press ENTER, and press 2 or more keys before it returns, it is like doing an AND function (A+B to fire). Last, if you press ENTER, and press one key once and one key twice, it will do a NOT on the key you pressed twice (A NOT B). This may not make perfect sense, but once you get in there and mess around, you will see how to do it. If you screw it up and want to get back to the original configuration, you can delete or rename the DEFAULT.CFG file in MAME\CFG. However, this will have all your other config defaults, so be sure you can afford to do this. MAME will recreate the file with defaults on the next game run.