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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. :)