thanks man, appreciate the insight. i turned off multimouse but still the same behavior. if i try to assign the screen touch to a button, nothing happens. yet within the mame control set up screen, i can see the yellowish selection bar move up and down depending on where i am touching.
touchscreen works fine in windows also, this has me stumped. i even used the mame controllerconfig file to assign a static mouse number to the touchscreen. if i run mame in verbose, i can see that the screen is assigned the mouse number i gave it.
it seems mame is only seeing the x y coordinates as i can see that selection moving but it isn’t seeing a mouse button press.