ipac key jamming?

[Lactose]

At Quakecon this guy dragged a nice mame cabinet in and now I'm interested in building one. As I understand it he was using ipac to handle the input. A problem I noticed was that sometimes you would send button input without pressing a button. It seemed more frequent if the other player was holding multiple buttons down (for example Balrog's turn punch in SF2). Is this a common problem with ipac? Is there a way around this?

Thanks!

[Tiger-Heli]

I don't think it's a common problem with the I-PAC.  It would be common with a matrix-based encoder, such as an older keyboard hack or a TOKN KB 16 encoder.

See http://www.mameworld.net/tigerheli/encoder/index.htm for a summary of your options.

[SOAPboy]

You 100% sure it was a IPAC?

Im running an IPAC and we play alot of SF games on it.. and nobody ever has key jamming issues..

[Lactose]

Yeah it was IPAC, it used the "hold player 1 start and press jab to get coins" mechanic and other telltale signs of ipac.

Test your machine: Try holding all 6 player 1 buttons and then moving the player 1 joystick randomly and see if player 2 is effected at all. See if all player 2's buttons and joystick directions respond properly.

[88mph]

Another possibility is that whoever put the cab together has the buttons and keys poorly mapped.  If I were seeing problems like that with an IPAC (and I never have yet) I would probably try remapping some keys.. i.e. move away from keys like cntrl, shift, and function keys and use regular letter keys.  Windows in particular retains some pretty arcane keyboard combos that few people know about, so certain combinations of keypresses can cause odd things to happen.  My advice would be to remap..

-88mph 

[Veinman]

I've been encountering strange things on my cab when 3 or 4 people play. Particularly in a game like TMNT, occasionally it will be as if someone hit control alt delete and a windows prompt would interrupt us.

The thing is, I had previously made sure that NO keys were mapped to Delete. I've since gone so far as to make sure no keys are using Control or Alt as well. I'll be doing another test to see if it helps.

I poured over the IPAC configuration utility and found no reference to any controls using Delete, so I have no idea how or why Windows was doing this (XP Pro if you are curious).

Is there a way in the IPAC utility to print your current setup? I found no way to do that, and it sure would be handy.

edit- I'm running mame .96. I have seen references to the win.ini file that should help with these issues, but they haven't helped me. I'll have to make sure I even have that file.

[SOAPboy]

Yeah it was IPAC, it used the "hold player 1 start and press jab to get coins" mechanic and other telltale signs of ipac.

Test your machine: Try holding all 6 player 1 buttons and then moving the player 1 joystick randomly and see if player 2 is effected at all. See if all player 2's buttons and joystick directions respond properly.

Did that the day i built the panel.. never EVER had that issue.. 

[Cuba]

I've been encountering strange things on my cab when 3 or 4 people play. Particularly in a game like TMNT, occasionally it will be as if someone hit control alt delete and a windows prompt would interrupt us.

Do you have the "toggle full screen" key combination disabled?

Ive built 2 arcade machines, both using Ipac4 and ive seen similar problems with both. It was much more noticeable in 4 player games like NBA Jam or TMNT. Sometimes player 4 might move/punch/jump without player 4 touching the key. When the keys are tested individually, everything is functioning properly. But if the other players are playing intensively then it manifests itself.  Even in 2 players games I would occasionally see the problem. In street fighter type games, if 2 players are fighting very intensely, I would hear the coin button being fired and the credits would increase, sometimes quite a bit.

I wanted to eliminated some possibilities, so I did some testing.  My arcade machine also runs the PC version of Guilty Gear XX Reloaded.  But the keys cannot be mapped to the arrow keys.  I had to create a completely different ipac config for GGXX, which maps the keys to letters and numbers, no special keys of anykind. My coin button now became my pause button. In real intense fighting we would sometime get random pausing.......

So I had determined that it wasnt mame. And I sincerely doubt that I had 2 busted Ipacs. (BTW: I hope no one takes this as 'ipac bashing', its a great product.) I still dont know why it happens, maybe its a windows thing, i really dont know.

[Veinman]

Would the fullscreen toggle be Alt + Enter? I don't think I was using Enter at all, and I'm now not using Alt.

I'll just have to try to test, but it's embarrassing when it happens and is all but impossible to test by myself. I had thought I fixed it before, since I loaded up TMNT and just pounded on keys as best I could alone, but that just doesn't cut it.

I had previously also seen this in 2 players on Marvel vs Capcom, so maybe it really isn't a key assignment issue.

[Tiger-Heli]

Would the fullscreen toggle be Alt + Enter?

Should be.

[Veinman]

In this thread http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=21837.0 they discuss the ctrlr/win.ini file taking care of various windows shortcuts. I don't have that file. Anyone know where to get it?

[Tiger-Heli]

Here's a cut-and-paste of mine - not sure what versions it works with, though:

# Windows custom input configuration file

UI_CONFIGURE            "KEYCODE_TAB ! KEYCODE_LALT ! KEYCODE_RALT"

# OSD Input 1 is defined as "Toggle fullscreen"
OSD_1                   "KEYCODE_LALT KEYCODE_ENTER"

[Veinman]

so all of that would go in a file in ctrlr called win.ini?

Is that first statement saying that tab and alt will be ignored?

[Tiger-Heli]

so all of that would go in a file in ctrlr called win.ini?

Yes.

Is that first statement saying that tab and alt will be ignored?

I think that is saying the the TAB menu is brought up by the TAB key without the Alt key, but not sure.