CPViewer: hide joystick arrows

[papaschtroumpf]

I have been playing with Johnny5 and CPViewer/cpvw and they both have their own quirks, so I haven't decided which one to use permanently yet.
One of the things I have not been able to do in either is hide the arrows around the joystick: I only want 4 arrows in a 4 way game, 2 in a 2 way game, and 8 in an 8-way game. I also use an omnistick which is switchable 4/8 way, so I want to display the position of the switch. See this picture from Tiger-Heli's site that illustrates it:




I read Tiger-Heli's Johnny5 tutorial (great job) and I know it's possible to do in johnny5 although I haven't gotten it to work yet (I think because my lof file is not called default.lof, so I specify it on the command line, which overrides the loffilter.txt, but it's just a guess, I need to play with it some more).

Tiger-Heli's tutorial seemed to imply that the same functionnality existed in CPViewer but I can't figure out how to do it. Is it really possible? How do I do it?

This feature could be a make it or break it thing for me. Unfortunately Johnny requries you to type ESC to dismiss the viewer, which I don't like, at least if I choose the "launch before the game" method.

[jcrouse]

For CPViewer/CPVW you should create your own background image so it reflects your CP.

John

[papaschtroumpf]

For CPViewer/CPVW you should create your own background image so it reflects your CP.

I think it means the asnwer is no then.

The arrows I'm talking about are not printed on the CP, I want them to be dynamically added/removed just like the text labels. In the example aqbove, there are only two arrows because the game only uses 2 joystick directions, but pacman would have 4 arrows and Qbert would have 4 diagonal arrows.

One way to think of it would be image labels, although that's not how Johnny5 handles them (instead, it loads a different background picture for each joystick style).

The other reason it's important to me is because my joystick is switchable on the fly, the gray curved line above the joystick that is blue on one end indicates which direction the joystick mode selector needs to be in. In the example above, it's on the left to indicate that the joystick will work best when switched to the left (4 way mode).

[Howard_Casto]

Who's been telling you that johnny requries you to press escape to exit the viewer?

You can remap that to any key that you like.  Your question on another thread was if j5 allowed you to remap in a situation that pressing any key would exit (as in "press any key to continue"), which it won't. 

[Tiger-Heli]

Who's been telling you that johnny requries you to press escape to exit the viewer?

You can remap that to any key that you like.  Your question on another thread was if j5 allowed you to remap in a situation that pressing any key would exit (as in "press any key to continue"), which it won't. 

I should have known this, but I didn't pick it up from the other thread.  Thanks for clarifying.

[Tiger-Heli]

I read Tiger-Heli's Johnny5 tutorial (great job) and I know it's possible to do in johnny5 although I haven't gotten it to work yet (I think because my lof file is not called default.lof, so I specify it on the command line, which overrides the loffilter.txt, but it's just a guess, I need to play with it some more).

This is exactly what I do with Johnny5 for exactly the reasons you specified.  And yes, I think specifying a -lof on the command line would defeat it.  Any reason you can't rename it as default.lof

(Also, good news coming in your "non-MAME thread). . .

Tiger-Heli's tutorial seemed to imply that the same functionnality existed in CPViewer but I can't figure out how to do it. Is it really possible? How do I do it?

I don't think I meant to imply that    I know that when Johnny5 was not working in Win98, I was trying to get this to work with CPViewer, and I think jcrouse said it wouldn't.  What I think you could do is create different backgrounds (same as in Johnny5), but manually specify the 4-way or 8-way background, rather than having the viewer pull the data from controls.ini.  (But this is more work than I would want to do!)

[papaschtroumpf]

Who's been telling you that johnny requries you to press escape to exit the viewer?

You can remap that to any key that you like.  Your question on another thread was if j5 allowed you to remap in a situation that pressing any key would exit (as in "press any key to continue"), which it won't. 

You're right, that's what I meant. My problem is with having to press a specific key, rather than any key. The exit key in johnny5 is remappable as you point out.

[papaschtroumpf]

I read Tiger-Heli's Johnny5 tutorial (great job) and I know it's possible to do in johnny5 although I haven't gotten it to work yet (I think because my lof file is not called default.lof, so I specify it on the command line, which overrides the loffilter.txt, but it's just a guess, I need to play with it some more).

This is exactly what I do with Johnny5 for exactly the reasons you specified.  And yes, I think specifying a -lof on the command line would defeat it.  Any reason you can't rename it as default.lof

Yes, I renamed my layout to "default.ini" and it works as advertized. I don't care what the default is named but I was hoping to use different default backgrounds for mame vs PC games, so I had created two lof files with different backgrounds and was specifying them on the command line. Getting the joystick arrows right is more important to me, so I guess I will use only one layout for both PC Games and MAME games.

[Tiger-Heli]

Getting the joystick arrows right is more important to me, so I guess I will use only one layout for both PC Games and MAME games.

Or have a copy of Johnny5 in c:\johnny5mame\ and another copy in c:\johnny5pcgames with different default.lof files and backgrounds . . .