ultimarc servo stick switching

[tony.silveira]

hi all,

first, a huge thank you to daoldman.  i've been working offline with him trying to figure out why my servo stick wasn't switching with his excellent joychoose or controlchoose with my FE mala.  i think we've nailed it down to the versions of mame we are using.  he developed under and is running mame 103 whereas i'm running mame 144.  so, our mame.xml files are different.  using donkey kong (dkong) as an example, the xml for mame 103 calls "control="joy4way" whereas in 144, there are two variables called out, "control type="joy" and "ways="4".

i've intrigued daoldman with this problem but it's going to be a rewrite for him and i hate to keep bugging him.  so, my question to you all, has anyone gotten the servo stick to switch from 4 to 8 way with a newer version of mame and if so, how?

my initial thought is to create cfg's with romlister for all 4 way games.  then create a bat to open each of the cfg's in a folder and add the joytray command to each cfg and save.  i can't imagine trying to do this by hand nor do i even think the cfg files would allow the additional lines.

so, anyone been able to figure this out?

thanks everyone, especially daoldman

[DaOld Man]

Hey Tony.
I might have a fix. Ive got to go to work so I haven't done a lot of testing, so it may or may not work. However with the limited testing I have done, it appears to be working.
In Mala options.
Choose an older version of mame. (I used mamepp.exe from 2006)
Create an xml file using this version.
Now change the mame version to your newer one, (I experimented with mame V0.147b from 2012).
But do not create a new xml file this time.
Using the older xml file fixes the issue with control choose, but I don't know how it will effect mala's game collection techniques. (I don't have newer set of roms to test that.)
Hope this works, if it does it will be an easy fix. But I have found that there is not a lot in this world that is easy.

[greggooch]

Have you considered using LEDBlinky?  It supports the switching and it has worked flawlessly out of the box on both 144 and 148 for me.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2

[tony.silveira]

Hey Tony.
I might have a fix. Ive got to go to work so I haven't done a lot of testing, so it may or may not work. However with the limited testing I have done, it appears to be working.
In Mala options.
Choose an older version of mame. (I used mamepp.exe from 2006)
Create an xml file using this version.
Now change the mame version to your newer one, (I experimented with mame V0.147b from 2012).
But do not create a new xml file this time.
Using the older xml file fixes the issue with control choose, but I don't know how it will effect mala's game collection techniques. (I don't have newer set of roms to test that.)
Hope this works, if it does it will be an easy fix. But I have found that there is not a lot in this world that is easy.

it worked!  my "all" games list with no clones dropped by 1,200 titles though.

you're the best oldman!

[DaOld Man]

it worked!  my "all" games list with no clones dropped by 1,200 titles though.

you're the best oldman!

Im glad it's working for you, but the part about 1200 titles being dropped. Is this a good thing?
Please let me know if this works 100% for you, if so I will ost this as a fix for JoyChoose and ControlChoose.

[tony.silveira]

it worked!  my "all" games list with no clones dropped by 1,200 titles though.

you're the best oldman!

Im glad it's working for you, but the part about 1200 titles being dropped. Is this a good thing?
Please let me know if this works 100% for you, if so I will ost this as a fix for JoyChoose and ControlChoose.

i'd consider it a work around more than a fix.  my math was off, it's more like 800 titles.

of course an updated plug in would be great

thanks for everything oldman!

[DaOld Man]

You are welcome. Im thinking more on the line of creating a utility to change the xml file to read correctly, without messing with anything else in the file.