Some guidance on remapping MAME controls from an Ultimarc IO?

[CookeGMP]

Hello everyone. I was wondering if someone could give me some guidance on the best way to remap my controls from my Ulitimarc Ultimate I/O to emulators such as Retroarch and Demul. By default the UI/O is set to standard MAME keyboard controls. Retroarch is just a ---smurfette--- to configure to those same controls, and Demul has some functions hard coded to key presses such as alt so that goofs with the configuration as well. I can't set the UI/O as a gamepad because it doesn't appear to support gamepad axis just buttons. It makes for sloppy sluggish control. I'm using Hyperspin as a frontend and Rocketlauncher as my launcher. I've set VJoy profiles for both the emulator and the system. I've set the preferred controllers under the keymapper setting for the system to only show my VJoy device. What keeps happening is only one player of VJoy passes through to the emulator AND which control passes through is somewhat random. Sometimes the left side will be player 1, sometimes it will be player 2. By disabling the UI/O game controller in device manager I can get that a little more consistent but as of yet I still can't get both player one and player two to come across to the emulator. Am I barking up the wrong tree by trying to use VJoy? Is there a better way I could be doing this? Thanks in advance for all of your help.

[what2be]

Not sure why your using vjoy and yes, the UI/O has a connector for both a trackball &spinner on it, with the trackball connector supporting x & y axis and the spinner doing x axis. It sounds like you want to use a xbox or similar controller with your frontend and for that you don't need vjoy or the UI/O, just a Microsoft usb wireless receiver and then go into demul and retroarch and set it up. I spent hours trying to read up on mapping keyboard keys to retroarch and it its possible but not easy. To be honest the best way is to just use the winipac software to set all your keyboard mappings to your arcade cab buttons & joysticks for mame and similar games and then use either xbox 360 controllers or usb gamepads for stuff like NES, SNES, N64, and the such.

[BadMouth]

I always swap out the first four default MAME keys (CTRL, ALT, SHIFT, SPACE IIRC) for something else (V,B,N,M).
I haven't run into any issues with the bracket keys [] on player 2's side.

I don't see a need for vjoy.

IMO, using these keys and then using x360kb for games that are designed for xbox360 controllers is the way to go.
You can find the x360kb files stikied in the software subforum.

Can't help you with all they Hyperspin/Hyperlaunch stuff.
I don't like my front end changing my mappings or settings.
It's just another layer of something to get screwed up.

I prefer to get the emulator working properly by itself and then just have the frontend launch it (and nothing else).