Cocktail Cab Questions

[markronz]

Hey everyone-
   A friend of mine is thinking about converting his cocktail cab into a MAME cab.   I told him that I'd be willing to help, but I do not yet have any experience working with Cocktail cabs yet.  I just have a very general question on how MAME works with Cocktail cabs.

Can you set MAME to flip the game's picture over to player 2 for every game (with alternating game play) or does it only work for games that were originally released on a cocktail cabinet? 

What about games like Ms Pacman, which only originally had one set of controls, do players 1 and 2 both have to alternate sitting in the same seat, on the same side of the cocktail cab then?

How do you tell mame when to rotate games for specific games, but not others?  Is this hard to set up?

I now understand why a lot of people choose to make "3 sided cocktails cabs"...

Thanks for the help!

[piecesof8]

"True" cocktail flipping only works for games that originally supported that feature, though MAME does offer a "cocktail" video option that splits the screen into two displays (one facing each player). You asked about Ms Pacman - that's one that supports cocktail flipping (as does Pacman). To turn it on, you go into the dipswitch settings in the MAME menu and set the cabinet type to cocktail (this is a per-game setting).

[MAME TIME]

You might want to make the decision if you want a hor or vert position monitor to play certain games, and also keep in mind that games that offer the cocktail flipping option in mame,doesn't necessary offer the flipping controls. the second player will often at times use the player one controls ala thunder bike for instance, im not sure if you can go in and setup the second player buttons for those games, i never tried. The one big pain is going through the games and setting up those options.check my youtube chan, i can help you out

[NOP]

also keep in mind that games that offer the cocktail flipping option in mame,doesn't necessary offer the flipping controls. the second player will often at times use the player one controls ala thunder bike for instance,

that sounds like a bug in mame to me, and should be reported to the devs.  It doesn't make any sense that the screen would flip but the controls not change to a 2nd set.  How in the world would that work on real hardware?

I've got a few hundred cocktail friendly games on my cocktail machine and they all do what you'd expect with regard to flipping screens and switching controls at the same time.  I went through 'em all by hand to check, which was actually a lot of fun if you have enough beer on hand.

[ahofle]

also keep in mind that games that offer the cocktail flipping option in mame,doesn't necessary offer the flipping controls. the second player will often at times use the player one controls ala thunder bike for instance,

that sounds like a bug in mame to me, and should be reported to the devs.  It doesn't make any sense that the screen would flip but the controls not change to a 2nd set.  How in the world would that work on real hardware?

I'm guessing both controls would connect to the same input port, in addition to some switch which would only allow one at a time to control the player?

[NoBullMAME]

Wire both controls separately.

Most games that were released with cocktail flipping (all the popular ones like Pac-man, Dig Dug, Centipede, etc) also support it in MAME (but no all). These games should automatically use the default MAME controls for player 2 when put into flipping mode.

I don't know of any games with flipping that don't use the player 2 controls properly (except ones that come with the warning about not supporting flipping), but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some. If you have that problem, just set your IPAC to reprogram every time you start and exit that game; you'll set the player 2 controls to the same config as player 1, then reprogram them back to normal when the game exits. There's a couple ways to do this, but I think the easiest with with a batch file. The IPAC utility can be ran from DOS by feeding it the name of the config file you want. Then run the game using the MAME command line function. The batch file will freeze while the game is running. When you exit the game the batch file will resume and you can reprogram the controls back.

Here's an example batch file (though you wouldn't use this for Star Fire):


cd\
cd "program files"
cd "winIPAC"
WinIPAC.exe c:\program files\winipac\allp1.ipc

cd\
cd "MAM32"
MAME32.exe c:\MAME32\ROMS\starfire.zip

cd\
cd "program files"
cd "winIPAC"
WinIPAC.exe c:\program files\winipac\defult.ipc

The above also works great if you are trying to play old PC games on your arcade (like old PC versions of arcade games) that don't allow you to reassign the controls. Just copy the text into a new text file, change the parameters, save and then rename to whatever.bat

[MAME TIME]

or you can reprogram the buttons just for that game, gives you the options to set the buttons in general and also for that game