New and have question...

[crazybiker]

Hey gang,

I'm a mentor for a FIRST Robotics team, and given this years' game theme being focused around the old 8 bit arcade games, I thought it might be fun to go ahead and build a MAME cabinet system to put in our team pit for competitions. 

To that end, I've picked up a X-Arcade Tankstick unit, X-arcade's coin door mechanism, a RasPi, and a 27" monitor. I have ideas on how to do the cabinet, but before I do the woodworking, I want to get the software and electronics all working.

I've loaded the latest RetroPie onto the Pi 3, loaded a bunch of roms in. But I'm confused on a number of things that I was hoping folks could point me towards solutions...

I used the Xarcade2Jstick stuff and was able to configure both sticks.

1) To properly use Xarcade2Jstick it seems to need lr-mame2003 but I only see MAME4ALL and lr-mame2000 showing up as options to run the roms. How do you get lr-mame2003 to show up to be selectable as the Emulator to use? My understanding was that it already installed in the RetroPie distribution but I could be wrong.

2) I have some Roms that don't seem to work properly on lr-mame2000 but do on MAME4ALL, but with MAME4ALL I couldn't make it recognize the buttons on the Tankstick for a coin nor could I escape out of the currently running game without using a keyboard. (lr-mame2000 seems to let me hold SELECT for coin and SELECT+START to escape out...)

3) With the Xarcade, how the heck do you get the 2nd pinball buttons to work? They don't see to be recognized.

4) What's the whole thing about the MACRO mode during configuration? What does it do? How do you configure to use it? I always select YES but I have no idea what it does.

5) How does one hook up the coin slot to pins on the RasPi and configure the software to control the credits? I'd prefer not to waste a button on the X-Arcade Tankstick if I can avoid it.


What else should I be looking at to do this? We only have a couple weeks before our first competition event and I'd like to get this all going and get a cabinet built in time for the first week of competition.

Thanks!

[Ian]

I am not a fan of X-Arcade anything.... although it may seem to be an easy way to get a nice control panel, it ends up always giving people headaches. I wish you would have come here first before you bought anything. We could have warned you and supported you to build your own control panel. It's easy, and it usually gets recognized as a keyboard, which then seamlessly interacts with mame. But since I have not played with an X-Arcade control panel in 8 years I can't help. Sorry.

[crazybiker]

Ok, I figured out how to get LR-mame2003 working (just needed to move my ROMs to the /arcade folder). That's largely gotten me around issue #1 and #2... Still could use some help with #3-5 though.

[Titchgamer]

Regarding 3 have you checked its working and wired up correctly with a multi meter?

Ime no lover of x arcade stuff and I dont think many on here are.
As said above builing your own from scratch would of been much better.

If its is hooked up and working properly is it recognised by the pi at all?
Also check what controller config is set up in your emulators back end. You may be running at its capacity.

As for 4&5 cant help there sorry.

[DeLuSioNal29]

I believe the X-Arcade needs the drivers to be installed in order to get it FULLY working with Retropie.  By default it's detected as a keyboard but things like the flipper buttons won't work properly on X-Arcade's proprietary hardware.  ETA Prime  on Youtube did a fantastic job documenting the process.  Follow his step by step tutorial and you should be all set.

!X-arcade Tankstick RetroPie Setup And Configuration Arcade Stick With Trackball

Good Luck!

DeL