Another note.
It seems the XML file Mala creates for the new versions of mame are listing the controls differently from how they used to do it.
This has effectively broke control choose and joychoose for newer versions of mame as of now.
Im trying to work out something, but we shall see.
This will still work on older versions of mame. (Im using mamepp from 2006, Im not sure which version changes, would be interested to know from you guys if you have had any experiences with this.)
I may download each version form 2006 till now to see when it actually changed.
Latest version of mala has been tested, and the problem is still there.
I dropped LoadMan a pm to see if he could possible help out by looking into fixing this in the mala software, but I know he is busy and this wont be on his top priority list.
Im thinking re-writing control choose to get the control type from the xml file itself, but it may take a while.
I just tried to setup joychoose on v.146 and it's not working.
Is joychoose getting the info from the Mala gamelist? It just says "joy" under the rom metadata. It should say "joy4way", correct?
Using tools from the Mala subforum, I could manually edit the 4-way games in the gamelist and have joychoose default to 8-way the rest of the time.
The gamelist also has "4-way Joystick" under what's extracted from controls.ini
Not sure how consistent the naming is in controls.ini, but could you point your plugin toward that instead?
I think controls.ini was missing when I originally built the gamelists, so that's not going to bail me out.
EDIT: Answered some of my own questions.
Using mlgconverter.exe included with the download at the bottom of this post:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,101104.0.htmlI was able to convert the .mlg file to an ini file, change
inputControl=joy
to
inputControl=joy4way
convert back to .mlg file and the plugin works fine.
Using the options in joychoose, it automatically switches back to 8-way when the 4-way game exits.
Now I just have to make a list of all 4-way games and change them all, lol.
Of course, if I hadn't already made my lists, the easier way would be to make a batch file or script to modify mame.xml
replacing every occurrence of
<control type="joy" ways="4"/>
with
<control type="joy4way"/>
Then refresh the all games list. That
should work to get the proper info in Mala's metadata.