mame control button assignment problems! 4 players is chaos!

[hulkster]

okay, i have a 4 player setup with a trackball.  7 buttons each for players 1 and 2.  and 4 buttons each for players 3 and 4.  heres the problem....i had some of my fraternity brothers over one night and they saw my cool cab and wanted to play 4 player ninja turtles, simpsons, etc.  so im all excited and we start playing, however...some of the buttons are mapped to like "alt" or "tab" or something so when say, player 4 is hitting his buttons (as you know in tmnt you just mash buttons a whole lot) and player 3 is mashing his buttons, well it was shrinking the screen (minimizing, maximizing...over and over again!)  argh!  so you can imagine my disgust with myself that it wasnt working flawlessly in my moment of triumph.  heres my question...is there some tried and true method for safely assigning the buttons so they wont conflict with each other?  i have an ipac4 and an optipac.  the ipac 4 is pretty much full.  i have a total of 38 inputs that could possibly be used at the same time.  thats joystick directions and button presses.  this is not counting the coin and start buttons.  i want my controls to work without conflict without too much crazy changing in mame if possible.  suggestions??

[Tiger-Heli]

okay, i have a 4 player setup with a trackball.  7 buttons each for players 1 and 2.  and 4 buttons each for players 3 and 4.  heres the problem....i had some of my fraternity brothers over one night and they saw my cool cab and wanted to play 4 player ninja turtles, simpsons, etc.  so im all excited and we start playing, however...some of the buttons are mapped to like "alt" or "tab" or something so when say, player 4 is hitting his buttons (as you know in tmnt you just mash buttons a whole lot) and player 3 is mashing his buttons, well it was shrinking the screen (minimizing, maximizing...over and over again!)  argh!  so you can imagine my disgust with myself that it wasnt working flawlessly in my moment of triumph.  heres my question...is there some tried and true method for safely assigning the buttons so they wont conflict with each other?  i have an ipac4 and an optipac.  the ipac 4 is pretty much full.  i have a total of 38 inputs that could possibly be used at the same time.  thats joystick directions and button presses.  this is not counting the coin and start buttons.  i want my controls to work without conflict without too much crazy changing in mame if possible.  suggestions??

The biggest conflict I have seen is Alt-Enter swapping between Full Screen and Window mode.

Start MAME in Full Screen (any Game) select Tab - Inputs All Games - Scroll down to "Window Mode" or something, and change the input to "None".  (double-click any key, I think).

I think once you change that, your problems will disappear.

[ErikRuud]

I recently had a similar problem.

The safest thing is to remap your controls so that you do not use any ctrl, alt or shift keys.

See this thread: http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=3;action=display;threadid=21539

[brained]

there's also some proggy that removes those keypress combinations from windows. So Alt-Enter, CTRL-ESC, whatever won't work. I think it's in the download area, try too look for it.

[Tiger-Heli]

there's also some proggy that removes those keypress combinations from windows. So Alt-Enter, CTRL-ESC, whatever won't work. I think it's in the download area, try too look for it.

Newer versions of MAME do this automatically from the \ctrlr\win.ini file.

Could be useful for other programs, though.

[hulkster]

great!  thanks for the tips...and the link!  now that i think about the windowed mode is the only real problem i had.  i just need to get 4 people over and test it by playing tmnt and pressing lots of buttons at once.  thanks again for the tips!  

[brained]

there's also some proggy that removes those keypress combinations from windows. So Alt-Enter, CTRL-ESC, whatever won't work. I think it's in the download area, try too look for it.

Newer versions of MAME do this automatically from the \ctrlr\win.ini file.

Could be useful for other programs, though.

Ohh!! I see,
I've haven't noticed
thanx

[Hooch]

I just ran into this problem last night.  I had some friends over and was swelling up with pride as they all gushed over the machine.  It was all great until we tried to play nba jam TE and it kept locking up after the screen would go black.  I could see their attention starting to shift to the XBOX and I started to panic.  I quickly assessed the situation and figured it had to be all the players at once hitting all those buttons.  I quickly looked at the key mapping and saw enter as player 3 button 3, I quickly rewired it to button 4 and remapped the button in NBA Jam.  I will eventually use software to remap the button instead of just losing an input, but it was a quick solution.

[GGKoul]

Another thing... make sure turn off Shifting on your IPAC.

As Hit Player 1 & Player 2 start at the same time exits you out of the game.