Posted by bernard on 20, 2001 at 3:13 AM:
In Reply to: I just put two extra buttons on my panel (more)... posted by Krusty on 19, 2001 at 7:19 PM:
Krusty thanks, I think your solution is just about excatly what I need. Adding such a FUNCTION button easily doubles the use of every button on the control panel. Each button as themselves can work as a GAME-PLAY button, but each combined with the FUNCTION button can serve as an OPERATION (like reset, snapshot, display fps, etc.) What's more this will give the owner of the machine the ability to have his/her operation buttons in plain sight and accessible, but not have to LABEL the buttons which will change options, and therefore allow people to MESS with all the settings etc, so you don't have to HIDE your operational buttons.
I think I'll do just that...I'll add a FUNCTION button and a PAUSE button (I knew I wanted a pause feature on the panel) and you really want PAUSE to be it's own button, easy to hit. I knew you COULD assign 2-key combinations to an operation, and that you could assign multiple keys to the SAME operation but didn't know how. It will be tedious to go through each game and set up it's button assignments (whatever the default ALL-GAME settings don't solve), but I was planning to do that anyways. I don't understand the purpose of having the NOT for key assignments (A NOT B).
Thanks for the help Krusty, your solution is just what I need. -bernard
By the way...can you LIST some of the most important operations I'll want. Of course I'll want : options menu, game reset, exit, enter. Maybe also : show fps, snapshot. What about SERVICE MODE? I know a lot of Williams games (like Defender, start up in Service Mode, so you'd need to get out of that). Anways...thanks again.
: 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.