how to maintaint device ids??? (losing trackball and spinner settings)

[aldub516]

So ive done my best to never unplug or switch around my inputs on my pc. I keep the ipac plugged in always, and never turn on the pc unless i have my mouse/keyboard usb plugged into the same port.. Im not seeing mame isnt reading my trackball and spinner.. they were set to mouse 1 x.. Now they are coming up as mouse x 2. What can i do to stop my devices from switching ids randomly and messing up my whole set up

[lamprey]

Do you mean in MAME or some other emulator?

[bulbousbeard]

I know what you mean. Unfortunately, this will happen in Windows. Every time you reboot, there's the potential for Windows to assign a different device ID to an HID.

There's really no way around this besides having only one mouse even plugged into the system (if that's possible). Even if you were to do something like get the "name" of the device and try to use that, it wouldn't help you, because if you had multiple devices of the same type connected to your PC, there would be no way to distinguish which one was which.

[lamprey]

I haven't tried the ControllerRemap Utility myself, yet. But, it might be of help to you. Basically, all controllers have  GUID and you can use that to re-map the IDs to stay consistent:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=108767.0

[aldub516]

The analog controls are only needed for mame.. and thank you for the brutal honestly lol. Although i understand why the problem exists, it seems kind of incredibly inconvenient for the arcade builder. So for someone that has an arcade set up where it will get a lot of use, be it  a game room, or kids room, or even (tsk tsk) commercially, it is absolutely common for them to have to remap the analog buttons frequently? That seems like a huge setback to me in a way. I will investigate. Sorry for the novel. From what i read, the problem arises when different devices are disconnected, reconnected, and moved around in orders and such.. If i were to ALWAYS keep the same things plugged in, in the same ports, and never added anything or changed anything, would the pc read the ports in the same order everytime? Or its it really random? For instance, As far as controllers, i have 1 usb plug thing for my wireless keyboard mouse, and the usb to the ipac... thats it for controllers. If i kept those two in the same position and never changed, would the devices load the same? Do pcs read ports in order or just basically like "hey im gonna send a test out to the devices and see who gets back to me first" I guess theres only so many analog games that my friend will always want to play, but it definitely takes away from the experience when you boot up tempest, and have to tab out and reassign a bunch of analog controls. I can see him making a mess in settings

ps.. ive uploaded a picture of my ipac setting screen.. I never mapped the trackball or spinner section through the program, because they automatically read as analog controls and just work when i set them in mame settings... Would there be a benefit to assigning the controls in the ipac software? Or does it not matter, since they still both get recognized by windows anyway


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