Using MALA and MAME with iPac4 for a 3 sided Cocktail cabinet

[GeneSPIDA]

Hi,

Excuse me if this comes across as a stupid question or there is information somewhere on how to set this up. I've been trying hard to research and sort it out myself, but I'm still hitting a wall, so any pointers/tips would be much appreciated.

I have a 3-sided Cocktail table with Player 1 and 2 at the front (horizontal), with Player 3 and 4 on the sides (vertical - opposite eachother). Each player has a joystick, 3-6 buttons and start-type buttons wired-up to an iPac4.

So far, I can only get Player 1 controls to work on the horizontal side. Player 2's controls don't seem to have effect, and Player 3 and 4 don't either. Ideally, I'd like Player 1/2 to play horizontal games at the front, and Player 3/4 to play vertical games like 1942. Screen auto-rotating, etc. as appropriate

I've looked at the Controller Configuration settings for MALA, and tried specifying "Set 1", "Set 2" for the various sides of the cabinet, but still doesn't work.

Anyone got basic steps as to what I need to do?

Do I need to configure anything specific in MAME itself? I'm using MAME 0_132.

Then, is there something "tricky" in MALA I need to get this behaviour working?

MALA/MAME seems to work, but as if I only have 1 set of player controls.

Regards

Gene

[loadman]

MaLa does not change what controls MAME

[GeneSPIDA]

OK, but if I've got a 3-sided cocktail table, what should I be looking at to configure it to switch between running vertical and horizontal games, and using either the front set of controls or side set?

If it's not MALA, is it MAME and something such as the controls.ini file?

I'm just trying to get pointed in the right direction by someone who's done this.

Gene

[NOP]

i'm a bit crusty with the newer mala stuff and it has been a couple years since i set up my machine, but I think the high-level view of what you're trying to do is this:

in mala, you're going to need 2 separate lists (.mlg files).  One for horizontal games and one for vertical games.  To make it more complicated, your vertical list is also going to need to have only games that support cocktail mode (screen flipping between player 1 and 2)

Then you have to configure the controls config/layout config in mala so that when the different sticks are moved, that mala switches lists and rotates the layout.  This is likely to be the toughest part.

Finally, after getting each player's position to be able to launch games, you will likely have to use MAME's TAB menu to configure the controls for each player.  In particular, your vertical list will have to be totally changed to map game player 1 over to hardware controls player 3.  It may even be easier to have mala pop out to two different copies of MAME in 2 different folders, so you could globally override the controllers settings for the vertical side instead of doing them one at a time.  Might be easier to think about it that way too.

[64bitcraft]

An different fix for the controls would be to reprogram the ipac to a different control configuration for the emulator or game you're running. You can point MaLa to the winIpac.exe in the controller-->encoder tab, then set it to load the profile you want.

Regarding rotating the window, I don't have any solutions yet.  I'm struggling with that myself at the moment.