How to hook up Moon Patrol dual fire/jump controls for MAME use

[Fast351]

So I have my Moon Patrol replica control panel almost ready to wire.  I started thinking about how I want to wire it though, and I have a question that hopefully someone can answer.

Picture for reference for those of you who don't know exactly what the layout looks like:



I can obviously hook the left and right hand jump/fire controls up in parallel, and everything would work out of the box for two button games.  My wife is a lefty, I don't have that handicap so having both sets of buttons working for Moon Patrol and all the 1/2 button games is important.

But then I am leaving a few classics on the table.  Asteroids is an example.  It uses thrust, fire and shields.  Obviously having those buttons on the opposites sides of the joystick is less than ideal, but at least I could play the games. 

Now, if I DON'T wire them in parallel, and wire them to say player 1 buttons 1-4, I need to set up the controls for any game that doesn't use buttons 3 and 4 to mirror them, and split them when it does use them.

How can I do that easily?  I really don't want to set the controls up for each game in MAME. 

I am using MaLa as my front end if that helps.  I notice it has a controls section, but I've never done anything with it.

[Le Chuck]

There was a utility that could help with that, batch writing configs for games with two buttons to assign 1 and 3 to input 1 and 2 and 4 to input 4 - that kind of thing but I can't remember the name of it.  Perhaps someone else can swoop in with the assist.  While it is a PITA to set up each game individually it really doesn't take that long if you have a reasonable list of games. 

[JDFan]

While it is a PITA to set up each game individually it really doesn't take that long if you have a reasonable list of games.

Seeing that the joystick is 2 way there aren't really going to be that many games to set up - so shouldn't really take that long to do individually.

[Fast351]

That's not my control panel, I was just trying to show the button layout.  Mine is an 8 way stick.