my cab isn't as kid proof as I thought

[big daddy]

I just recently got my first cab in working order.  I've been playing it for about 1-2 months and never really had any issues with it myself.

This past weekend I had some family over for the holidays and had a few 13 and under kids playing on the cab (who pretty much freaked when they saw it, btw).  I don't know what those kids were doing, but it kept locking up, getting HPs crash screen displayed, losing focus of my frontend, etc.

I never had any of those problems!  It amazes me that kids can find all the right buttons to push to screw things up!     Every 30 minutes they'd come in and tell me it was messed up.  I'd have to open the cab to get my keyboard out and cntrl-alt-delete to end tasks or reboot.  Sometimes I'd see multiple copies of my frontend running (not sure how they did that?!?) or the mame.exe would be taking up massive memory, etc. 

Guess I have to play around with it somemore now to figure out why it wasn't holding up to the beating they were giving it

[lokki]

You may want to reconfigure the keyboard mappings for some of the Keys since some key combinations cause weird issues like this.

some of the Keys I can think of remapping include (don't use)
ALT
CTRL

Some one had posted a recommended key mappings he had for his CAB a while ago but can't seem to find it
And possibly disable the shift key (depending on the encoder) I use the shift key as dedicated key (vs using the ultimarc default of player 2) since it is too easy for people to hit while someone else is playing causing unexpected behaviour. (user dies and wants to continue hits the player 2 key while player 1 is playing)

[paigeoliver]

I delivered a Mame cabinet last night. I got it set up, loaded up Junior Pac-Man and the little girl attempting to play found the secret key combination to get back to the menu INSTANTLY.

Kids tend to hit everything at once, and crap. If your setup isn't ready for that (and starts activating stickykeys and various other keyboard tricks), then your system can go down.

[subzero23]

For my friend's machines we'd keep running into problems, not just with mame but with things like NES... one button would make it go into pause-induced slow motion and was unescapable, we'd call it the "Death button".. so I came back the next day and reconfigured the Ipac to buttons that NO emulator we had used.

[elvis]

I found the same thing with my girlfriend.  I thought my cab was bulletproof, and then she starts mashing keys all over the place and activating secret shifted-key sequences on my iPac.

When I get the time I'll grab the iPac software and remove all of the shifted key sequences.  I've got a keyboard in the system, so there's no need for me to even have them loaded into the iPac, as they only cause frustration.

It takes a layman to push up-left + START 20 times in one sitting.

[jfunk]

Had the same problem this weekend.  Playing TMNT..  Having a 3rd player on the player 3 position (4-player panel) caused the system to jump out of MAME.  Hooked up a keyboard and CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up list of programs, and MAME was still running, just not responding..

As near as I can figure, it was ALT-ENTER that did it (P1 Button2 & P3 Button3) although I don't think TNMT uses button 3..  But my cousing is a button masher 

Unfortunately, it's not my panel, so I can't test (it's now 4 hours away) but I've asked my bro to let me know what's up...

I think it stopped responding since I was using MAMEWAH rather than explorer as a shell..  jump it from full-screen to windowed mode and who knows what should happen without explorer 

Wish I knew of all of the little windows 'alt' shortcuts..  Don't want to remap the alt key because it's used by default in the 4 emulators I have running on the machine 

Oh, well...

[subzero23]

mame has the WORST defaults

[DYNAGOD]

mame has the WORST defaults

no, theyre just extremely intuitive,
so intuitive in fact that a 4 year old can figure it out

commence button mash testing!!

[SirPeale]

Yup, I thought I had one of my cabs all set.  I set my four year old to playing it.  Literally, one minute later..."daddy!  It's locked up!"

Went downstairs to find somehow he'd found a key combo to pause Mame.  What he'd been doing is when he lost he'd still be holding the joystick down, or whatever, and hitting the P1 start button to start back up.  No matter how hard I tried to break him of that habit he'd still do it.

[Chris]

I never had any of these problems when my cabinet ran DOS... when I wint to Windows, I had to change a bunch of keys, which is a pain on a KB hack.  I still have one button mapped to CTRL, since I had a game on the cab hardwired to use it as a fire button... I should take that out...

[paigeoliver]

Shifted inputs are simply not child safe and not girl safe. Unless the shift button is hidden.

[LordDamo]

I use a keywiz, and ive never really had this problem, except for the damn sticky keys. Im using win 2k.
Does anyone know how to remove this from the system? Ive got it disabled in the win crtl panel. But every now and then it wants to pop up and crash my game by taking window focus, right in the middle of a killer game of r-type after Ive been pounding the f#*% out of P1 button 1.
The shazam key is well away from the player controls so no accidental shifted functions are ever pushed.

[Ton80]

I use a keywiz, and ive never really had this problem, except for the damn sticky keys. Im using win 2k.
Does anyone know how to remove this from the system? Ive got it disabled in the win crtl panel. But every now and then it wants to pop up and crash my game by taking window focus, right in the middle of a killer game of r-type after Ive been pounding the f#*% out of P1 button 1.

 Go into accessibility options, next to sticky keys, click settings, uncheck box that says 'use shortcut'. this is for win xp, not sure if 2k is same or not.

Ton80

[Raven..]

I've had people do the same things.  I don't even know how to access some of the screens they were pulling up with the control panel, and I've built 6 MAME cabs!  One idiot pulled up the player control configuration menu, and just kept on playing (meanwhile screwing things up royally!)

[LordDamo]

I use a keywiz, and ive never really had this problem, except for the damn sticky keys. Im using win 2k.
Does anyone know how to remove this from the system? Ive got it disabled in the win crtl panel. But every now and then it wants to pop up and crash my game by taking window focus, right in the middle of a killer game of r-type after Ive been pounding the f#*% out of P1 button 1.

Yep, its the same - thanks for that


 Go into accessibility options, next to sticky keys, click settings, uncheck box that says 'use shortcut'. this is for win xp, not sure if 2k is same or not.

Ton80

[TOK]

Glad I'm not the only one to experience this. I was dumb enough to put a regular button to power the system up on the panel. It was 10" away from the player one buttons on the opposite side of the panel from the normal 6 button layout, and I never thought for a second that it would be a problem. My 8 year old niece and brother in law were playing Mortal Kombat, and within 15 seconds she was hitting that button. Power switch is now inside the coin door, eventually going to get moved up to typical location on top of cabinet.

I've personally had problems with the shifted inputs while playing import shooters with a buddy. Things are going fast, and start buttons are hit frequently. Been dropped out of the game a couple of times by quickly reaching for one of the start buttons while the sticks are in motion. I'm going to do away with all shifted functions eventually.

 

[Chris]

I've personally had problems with the shifted inputs while playing import shooters with a buddy. Things are going fast, and start buttons are hit frequently. Been dropped out of the game a couple of times by quickly reaching for one of the start buttons while the sticks are in motion. I'm going to do away with all shifted functions eventually.

I have shifted functions, but the shift button is a separate button in the upper-left corner that is used for nothing else.  I used to have P1Start+P2Start mapped to Reset... wow, that was a mistake on fighting games!  Now the only shifted functions for the start buttons are P3Start and P4Start (for Track and Field, Hyper Sports, and (I believe) Trivial Pursuit).  Most of the other shifted functions are innocuous, like Screenshot or Show FPS.  Reset is shifted off the Exit button.

Pause is the big exception; it has three shifted functions in addition to its regular Pause function.  With the special Shift key in the upper left, it brings up the config menu; with the left pinball flipper it saves the game state, and with the right flipper it loads the game state.

--Chris

[Tiger-Heli]

One of the biggest problems is Alt-Enter - P1B2-P3B3, which MAME uses work "Toggle Window Mode"  open Tab-Inputs All Games, and set this to "NONE" and most problems go away (except shifted key issues).

[Onji]

while we're on the subject, does anyone know how to completely disable the shift function on an ipac?

[Matt Berry]

I can't remember if you can just not set a shift key or not. Worst case scenerio make sure you set all shifted keys the same as none shifted.

[elvis]

Over the weekend I'll be downloading the iPac programming software and having a fiddle to try and nuke all the shifted key sequences.  I'll let you know how it goes.

[1UP]

I can't remember if you can just not set a shift key or not. Worst case scenerio make sure you set all shifted keys the same as none shifted.

You could map it to a button that is not used (like button 7 or

I had the same problems when I brought my standalone frankenpanel to a family reunion over Thanksgiving.  I ran the same exact config on my cab when I had it at work, and with all the people who played it, it never had many problems once I disabled stickykeys.  Worked great for a couple months with some pretty rowdy adults playing it.

But at the reunion, as soon as a few 5-year-olds got ahold of the frankenpanel and started mashing every button on the board, it locked up in 10 seconds flat.  I spent the first couple hours going thru Emulaxian, disabling all the hotkeys and general debugging.  I also remapped the shift key to the dedicated exit button, which was far away from everything else.  Then I killed all the shifted functions on the I-pac.  Once I did that, it was pretty bulletproof for two solid days of playing.

BTW, the favorite game by far was Rampage.  Something about being able to play a monster that eats soldiers and knocks down buildings is really appealing to kids! 

[Bones]

I let a friend play Galaga on my PC while he was drunk. I swear I only left him for 5 minutes after showing him how to insert coin and start game. (mame32)

I came back to discover he had missed the "1" key and hit the "`" key. The moron was pushing everything in a drunken stupor trying to backtrack.

Long story short, all my controls are stuffed up. I have tried everything to reset to default but nothing is working. I even replaced the batteries in my controller thinking they may be the reason it was doing silly things. I am about to reinstall because I have given up after an hour of tweaking.

My lesson: Shift key will be VERY hidden on my cab & available admin buttons will be kept to a minimum.

The funniest thing is my 4 year old has been using mame32 for a couple of months and she has never stuffed it. I can now safely conclude that a 4 year old is smarter than a drunken adult.

[paigeoliver]

Delete the contents of the mame config folder and everything goes back to default.

[Bones]

Delete the contents of the mame config folder and everything goes back to default.

Yeah thanks for the tip but I already tried that. It's not the end of the world, by chance I backed up this folder (well most of it), just a month or two ago while trying to get the hang of some FE's.

It's really got me lost what

[xar256]

Wish I knew of all of the little windows 'alt' shortcuts..