MAME Game Cheat Sheets? - Noob

[dlambermont]

Hi - first post. I've fiddled with MAME off and on (mostly off) for the past 10 years or so, but am now looking at building a cabinet to put in my recently finished rec room.  I just bought an X-Arcade tankstick to play with while I get the rest of the planning done.

One of the problems I always had with MAME before was trying to keep track of controls for a particular game. I know you can hit TAB to get a list of controls for a game, but that's kind of a pain. Was wondering if anyone had come up with a "cheat sheet" way of keeping track of controls. I suppose something as low tech as 3x5 index cards would work, but I'm sure someone has come up with a more elegant solution?

I'm guessing this is a total noob question, but I searched and didn't see anything. Maybe I'm just not using the right magic words.

[aldub516]

well, the same buttons on your keyboard will always correspond to the same keys.. So no matter what game youre playing, button 1 will always act as button one. Depending on the game is obviously how many buttons used. You can take a second to just test each button and see what it does. A game like 1949 will simply have shoot and bomb, where mortal kombat will have hp, lp etc. Give it a quick spin and see what buttons work. Most games were pretty "consistent" in button setups, so usually a shoot button, or bomb button, high and low punches are generally set up properly and would do well in a 6 button set up.. so most games should feel natural after a few minutes of getting used to the buttons.  If youre talking about game specific buttons, such as knowing what button is high punch, low punch before you play,  your best bet would be a front end of some sort. I particularly use gameex, and it has options that not only can show you the original control panel, but before launching a game, will display a button layout and what each button does. Generally as you use the tab menu to set buttons to your likings youll probably remember most as you play them.  Im not 100% on what your asking but i hope that touched upon it in some way.

[n3wt0n]

If you use Mame and LED Blinky with RGB buttons you can have the active buttons shown. Also, I know in some front ends (via LED Blinky I believe) when you choose a game you can have the controls spoken out loud as LED on the corresponding button flashes.

I'm not sure if anyone has gotten it to work really well but I have seen projects that have had small screens in the control panel or admin area. I am assuming they were put there to display controls but I'm not 100% on that one. Hopefully someone with more experience in this area could chime in with info about how the display got its info or if they had to make each individual card etc.

Good Luck

[aldub516]

^ yes that as well. I have led buttons and they do indeed light up for buttons used. Your either asking how do you figure out which physical buttons are used, in which case it's always 1-6 respectively. So the first to would always be button one and two. The other question would be which buttons actually do what. In that case as I said I believe there is a way to Pop up a diagram in front ends, but I don't think the adjust for you changing buttons. As I said just play a game and it should take you more than a few seconds to figure out what buttons are what. You can make a little cheat sheet but if you're gonna play a game more than once I'm sure you'll remember buttons..

[dlambermont]

Thanks for the ideas. Yes, I'm looking for a way to keep track of what controls do what. For example, I launched a golf game yesterday. After pressing tab, I could see that buttons 1 through 6, the track ball and joystick did SOMETHING, but I never did figure out what.

I found gamefaqs.com yesterday, which is incomplete, but does have some great information on many of the original arcade machines. For the games that have FAQs, they list the controls for that particular machine. I may start there, start making up cards for the games that I plan to play. I have also been trying out some of the impressive bezel art that is available, might try to overlay a small box with the controls list on some of those and see if I can get it to look OK.

The only front end I've tried so far is Maximus Arcade, because the tankstick came with a license. I don't see any way to display anything for it. It would be cool if there was a hot key sequence to popup a visual aid mid game. Anyway, I think I've found a project :-)

[PL1]

Several possibilities you may want to look into:

1. Using Hypermap to display controls during pause as mentioned here.

2. CPWizard.

3. Marquee Magician.


Scott