Four-sided cocktail, incorrect rotation

[Justin Z]

So I've set MaLa to change its orientation with Mame, which obviously is a great feature for us cocktail owners.  However, my cocktail is four-sided.  That means that depending on the game, I have rotation in all four directions.  For example, one of my vertical control panels has a four-way stick; the other vertical panel has an eight-way stick.  One of my horizontal controls has a trackball and spinner; the other has two joysticks.

Unfortunately, MaLa ignores vertical flipped and horizontal flipped, so basically, if I play a game like Ms. Pac Man which I have set in Mame to rotate 90 degrees clockwise so that I can use the four-way stick, when I come back to MaLa the screen is rotated 90 degrees COUNTER-clockwise.  Same with if I play a game like NBA Jam, with the two joysticks.  MaLa will be oriented horizontally, but facing away from that side of the table.

I have a limited number of inputs, shared between all sides of the table, so I cannot use the controller configuration to automatically rotate MaLa as a solution.  Is there a way to actually get it to pay full attention to Mame's rotation setting, beyond just horizontal/vertical?

Thanks.

Edit: I'm perfectly willing to do this by game if necessary (I've only got 168 games, so it'd be a lot of work, but not unmanageable).  I tried editing mame.xml--changed the rotation value under mspacman from 90 to 270--but this had no effect, and when I ask to see the metadata in MaLa it still just lists "vertical," not "vertical-flipped" or something like that.

[BadMouth]

MALA transfers info from the xml to the gamelists when they are created,
so you must refresh your main gamelist, then delete and re-add each game to your smaller gamelists for this change to carry through.

I hope that includes the rotation data because I'm depending on it for the next cab. 

[BadMouth]

Thinking about this a bit more, it might just be that MALA only has the ability to have two orientations.
It does the same thing whether a game is 90 or 270.
Like you said, it ignores the flipped.

If your video card changes the screen orientation by pressing CTRL+ALT+arrow key, an autohotkey script could be made to flip the orientation.
That is, if you haven't disabled the feature due to CTRL and ALT being used in MAME.
Whichever arrow key you use determines with direction UP is.

[Justin Z]

Okay, I will test.  I had refreshed the game list, but not removed and re-added.  We'll see what happens.

If not, can you give me more information about the auto hotkey script?  I will check and see if my video card supports it.  My fear would be, it would then cause MAME to be re-flipped, since MAME would be flipping properly, and this would double it up.

[BadMouth]

A lot of video cards do it with their included software, but if not, there is also a free program called irotate that you can try (the video card still must support it). 

See if that works first, and if it does then we'll figure out how to go about triggering the proper rotation.
At that point, it would probably be best to post in the software forum to get help from the autohotkey and batch file masters who might not visit the mala forum that often.

I've done something similar using irotate and autohotkey to play vertical shmups on an emulator that didn't rotate the picture,
but my old scripts are sloppy cut and past jobs.   
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=106477.0
Look at that to get an idea, but like I said, they're old and sloppy and there are simpler ways of going about most of the things in that script.

The big hurdles will be knowing when to rotate.  The good thing is that it doesn't hurt to tell it to rotate to a position the picture is already in.
Don't think of it as telling the computer to flip the picture, but telling it which side of your table should be UP.
I think the scripts will come easier that way.

[Justin Z]

I removed mspacman from my game list and re-added, ensuring that the rotation value in mame.xml was "270."  No effect, still rotated to the "90" side.

I have not tried iRotate yet but wanted to give you this update (finally).

[BadMouth]

I removed mspacman from my game list and re-added, ensuring that the rotation value in mame.xml was "270."  No effect, still rotated to the "90" side.

I have not tried iRotate yet but wanted to give you this update (finally).

Thanks for the update.  If iRotate works, we can make this work using a batch file and autohotkey script.

I'm not sure how much of a hassle it would be to add 270 & 360 degree rotation to Mala itself.