New Idea Hardware.dat (controls.dat reversed) feedback wanted

[Tiger-Heli]

This may not be the right forum for this, so if one of the admins wants to kindly move it where it belongs . . .  

I am thinking about starting a new project, no time limit, and no definite format, yet.  The idea is to list the controls used in actual arcade games (and maybe this is actually done in controls.dat, or intended to be done in controls.dat)    Here's an example (from memory in some cases )

Controls.dat does not list Outrun yet, but if it did, it would list something like this (might not be exact format):

P1NumButtons=4
P1Controls=270 Steering Wheel+Analog stick X | High-Low Shifter+P1_BUTTON3+P1_BUTTON4|Pedal (Analog)+button+P1_BUTTON1|Pedal (Analog)+button+P1_BUTTON2
P1_BUTTON1=Accelerate
P1_BUTTON2=Brake
P1_BUTTON3=Lo
P1_BUTTON4=Hi
AD_Stick_X=Left
AD_Stick_X_EXT=Right

This would be fine except that MAME does not correctly emulate the hardware of this game.  What I am proposing is a file (or entries to history.dat) similar to this (without the "I thinks")

CONTROLS:
Wheel   270 degree pot-based steering wheel with force feedback shaker motor (360 optical wheel support available via dipswitches) (I think)
Shifter   dual microswitch hi-lo shifter with spring return-to-center (I think)
Pedals (2) Gas - analog pot based, Brake - analog pot based.  Dual axis.

Questions  

1) What is the level of interest in this project?

2) What format would you like to see it in - a separate file, entries to history.dat, other?

3)  I think it would be neat if there were a Wizard like SirPoonga set up for controls.dat, but I don't know how to make one.  Thoughts?

4)  Has anyone done anything similar to this previously?  I don't need to re-invent the wheel.

5)  Any suggestions on sources of info for the project?  Here are my thoughts:  

Sortinfo and the information in MAME is woefully inadequate.  KLOV is slightly better, but not much.  The original game manuals can sometimes be used - if you can read the schematics or parts breakdowns.  The best source would be people who own the game, preferable an original and not a conversion which might not be accurate.

This is where I see the problems:  

Buttons - I'm not going to get into leaf or microswitch buttons - have to draw the line somewhere.

Joysticks -  Again, probably not going to the leaf or microswitch level of detail, but even 8-way or 4-way presents some difficulty as you typically can't see if the game's joystick has a restrictor plate, and they are wired identically.

Wheels - Difficult to tell from a front view if a wheel is 360 or 270 - I thought Urebel had a list somewhere, but can't find it.

Shifters - Usually easy enough to tell if a shifter is hi-lo or 4 position, etc., but hard to tell if single or dual microswich, if wired NC or NO, if spring loaded to center or to HI or to LO, etc.

Pedals - difficult to tell if digital (button or switch) or analog (pot).  If both gas and brake are pot, difficult to tell if wired single axis or dual axis.

Guns - I think almost all pistol type games used lightguns.  However, for the pedestal type games, it's difficult to tell if it's a positional joystick or lightgun, and whether it has any type of recoil mechanism, etc.  Ideas?

This is a new concept, and I'm not sure I've thought it out completely, so any feedback is welcome!

[Witchboard]

This is going to be a time consuming difficult project.  But, if you would like to do it I'm sure everyone will be appreciative.  Are you going to make an excel file then export it to a txt file.  I'm pretty ignorant to a majority of what you said.

[Popcorrin]

I think this would be great.  It would be alot of work.  If you could get a few people involved it would seem less daunting.

[Jakobud]

Sounds like a LOT of work to track down the proper controller types for every game.

Why would this be a dat file? Would a FE use it somehow?

[Tiger-Heli]

Why would this be a dat file? Would a FE use it somehow?

Wouldn't need to be?  It's already included in history.dat, though, just not very complete info.

[cdbrown]

I'm not sure about the other contributors to the controls.dat project, but I make a note of the exact controls in the miscellaneous info when making a submission.  I also note that the driver needs to be fixed

[b3atmania]

Great idea! Please format the list as XML as it is human readable, easy to format into something else and has plenty of available components for processing in frontend implementations.

I can help with creating a XML vocabulary for this. Let me know!

[GoPodular.com]

Reviving an old topic here, but I was wondering if this went anywhere?