Sharing controls on 2 instances of mame

[TZC]

Hello everyone long time lurker and procrastinator here.  I hope to get any experience with running 2 instances of mame on one pc.

I have a strong computer and was considering a dual screen 2 player setup. My idea is that dual vertical screens could either show the same output- one for each player, one large screen spread over both-  or two different games running at once. 

I wondered if the two player controls in the second instance of mame could be configured  to act as the one player controls while both were running, effectively giving 2 one player cabs. 

I don't have any controls or mame even set up at the moment to experiment and wondered if anyone knows if that's possible, or if it'll mess up. Thanks for any opinion

[Malenko]

i think they'd fight for focus, probably better to have 2 PCs for 2 MAMEs.

[severdhed]

There are a few problems with this...

I'm not sure how youd get Windows to launch two full screen applications at the same time on two different monitors.

Configuring the second mame's controls is easy, but if player 2 inserts a coin and presses start to play pacman, and player 1 is playing tmnt, suddenly p2's character will become active and start moving around, preventing p1 from advancing.

Also, sound would be an issue...you would either have audio from only the first one launched, or both of them at the same time, which would be annoying.

You would be better off using two computers. The second side could be on a kvm switch to switch between a mirrored screen of pc1 and pc2. Depending on the encoder you used, the kvm should be able to switch the controls between both computers as well.

[TZC]

Thanks for the replies.

Well I was hoping to use the same controls while keeping the cab/s small, I suppose I'd better accept buying everything twice or just go with one.

Just checking if anyone knew of anything that would help make it possible, thanks again