Some basic MaLa questions.

[jimmer]

After 12 months of playing mostly Defender and Robotron, with a bit of Galaxian and Frogger thrown in, yesterday I finally got round to trying my 17" LCD in vertical mode. And WOW, so much nicer for Galaga, Frogger  (I'll come to Galaxian later ).

So now I want to finish the job I started, rotatable screen with a front end.

So here are the noob questions:

Can I set it up so that different games call different versions of MAME with different settings ?

Will I need 2 MaLas, one for vertical and one for Horiziontal ? or does MaLa care of the rotating the games, and itself ? (I will manually rotate the screen for now, no servo yet)

Thanks

Oh yes, I said I'd come to Galaxian. I use integer scaling but Galaxian vertical resolution was tripled at some point to 768 and it doesn't work well on my 1280x1024 lcd. I'm going to look back at the earlier versions of Mame to how it plays and looks at 256x224.

[jimmer]

OK, I've found the stickies now
So different MAME versions is covered, if I can work it out.



As well as a rotatable screen, my cab will have swappable panels.
I'd like for users to see a gameslist tailored to the panel and screen orientation.

I've just started playing with Mala. Was thinking that if each gamelist can have a different picture, then I could just show a picture of the panel .?

I haven't worked out the orientation thing yet.

it looks like there is a lot of flexibilty, Someone steer me in the right direction please?

[jimmer]

OK, looks like this is gonna turn into my MaLa blog

I found the options/config menu   (right click the background )

So I have managed to enable my mala tree.

So my menu plan is:

MAME
   - Vertical
        - Panel A_v
        - Panel B_v
        - Panel C_v

   - Horizontal
        - Panel A_h
        - Panel B_h
        - Panel C_h


Just gotta work out if I can add a picture to the gamelist. I'm guessing I might be able to assign a different layout to each gamelist ?

[jimmer]

I like this MaLa thing now I've tried it.   It wasn't necessary when it was just me on the cabinet, but when lots of people started using it, it becomes necessary to steer them the right way and make sure they can't break/change things.

I've just got a fixed horizontal cab at the moment, so my menu tree is like this, a gamelist for each control panel:
- Defender_plus
- Robotron_plus
- Streetfighter
- Q*Bert_plus
- 4way (DK or Pacman theme?)
- Left_Right (Galaxian ?)

Each of the above gamelists will have it's own layout, which will match to the marquee and control panel. I've hacked about with a few downloaded layouts just to get it working. I can see me spending plenty of time in future improving things.

I've disabled exit for my players. And will have a hidden shift button to call up the menu with exit/shutdown on it.

I've pretty much got all I need for the moment.