non-standard key mapping w/ I-PAC / J-PAC

[krick]

I had two MAME key assignment related problems this weekend...

1) I was playing Mortal Kombat and something I did caused windows accessibility features to kick in.  I think it was either "StickyKeys" or "FilterKeys".  Fixed by disabling in control panel.

2) I was trying to play a 2 player game of Street Fighter 2 and button 5 & 6 on player 2 didn't work.  Fixed by mapping keys in MAME.

These two events got me thinking about how the keys are currently assigned in MAME and whether I should be thinking about coming up with my own key

I know that the I-PAC and J-PAC use an encoder that prevents key ghosting but a potential problem I see is that the default mame assignments use "special" keys like shift, ctrl, and alt.  I think these keys should probably be avoided.

In my cabinet, I'm currently using a J-PAC for players 1 & 2.  I also have an I-PAC2 that I plan to cascade off the J-PAC for players 3 & 4.

Since I have to reprogram the I-PAC, I was thinking that maybe I should take the opportunity to reprogram the J-PAC as well to avoid some of the "special" keys mentioned above.

I am planning for my final control panel to look something like this...

P1: joystick + 7 or 8 buttons + trackball + spinner
P2: joystick + 7 or 8 buttons + trackball + spinner
P3: joystick + 4 buttons
P4: joystick + 4 buttons

Am I going to have enough keys left over after I reserve start 1-4, coin 1-4, and all the MAME fuction keys?

I'm sure other people have been down this road already.  I'm hoping to benefit from their experience in this area.

If someone out there has already done this, I'd be curious to hear about your mapping and reasons why did it the way you did.

...
Krick

[Tiger-Heli]

>I know that the I-PAC and J-PAC use an encoder that prevents key >ghosting but a potential problem I see is that the default mame >assignments use "special" keys like shift, ctrl, and alt.  I think these >keys should probably be avoided.

Interesting question.  I think MAME currently has Alt combinations (Like Alt-Enter, Alt-Space) disabled, but not sure when this was added.

>Since I have to reprogram the I-PAC, I was thinking that maybe I >should take the opportunity to reprogram the J-PAC as well to avoid >some of the "special" keys mentioned above.

You'll need to re-program at some point, because the I-PAC default for P2 buttons 5-8 are the MAME defauts for P3 joystick.

>Am I going to have enough keys left over after I reserve start 1-4, >coin 1-4, and all the MAME fuction keys?

Depends what you mean by "ALL" the MAME function keys.  MAME uses F2-F12 for some functions, P (Pause), Esc, Tab, Tilde, T (Tilt), 9, 0, -, =, PgUp, PgDown, and some more obscure ones.  If you include all of these, you probably won't have enough inputs.

[Tiger-Heli]

Interesting question.  I think MAME currently has Alt combinations (Like Alt-Enter, Alt-Space) disabled, but not sure when this was added.

Found it, this is disabled in the win.ini file of the mame ctrl.ini files options.

[krick]

So, I take it from the deafening response that nobody is using custom key mappings.

[microwrx]

Doesn't look like it.

I'm in the process of rewiring my 4 player JAMMA cab for use with MAME.  Same as you I have a J-Pac taking care of player 1 & 2 but have a Mini-Pac instead of I-Pac for players 3 & 4.  I will have to program the Mini-Pac but have no intension of touching the J-Pac as it works just fine with the deafult settings.  The I-Pac I used for my last cab also worked fine without having to play with it either.

At the end of the day it's your cab but I haven't had any issues with the default setup (touch wood) so won't be changing it.

[cdbrown]

I remapped all my controls on the IPAC4 and then set up a ctrlr folder called mine (C:\mame\ctrlr\mine).  I copied the std.ini file (within the ctrlr folder) into the mine folder and renamed it to default.ini (C:\mame\ctrlr\mine\default.ini).  I then remapped all the controls and tried to avoid ctrl, alt, shift as best possible.  For specific games where I want the layout different to mame default (ie SF, MK) I created mk.ini or sf.ini or neogeo.ini and set the control layout for that.