Arcade Shifters and MAME...

[Mappy37]

I've got a good start on a MAME driving cabinet, however I've realized there are some challenges in getting a shifter to work properly with MAME.
I'm using a Happ 4 way shifter. It always has a switch depressed (except if you put it right in the center).

I realize in games like SpyHunter, that MAME emulates the shifter with just one key press to toggle between hi and lo, unlike the true Spyhunter hardware that would set it to high or low based upon whether the microswitch is depressed or not. A simple solution seems to be to map all the switches in my 4 way shifter to be a shift keypress, however it gets a little tricker. It seems MAME remembers the position of the shifter when you exit. Thus in order for thowing the shifter downward to be a shift to hi, and upward a shift to low, I have to re-enter Spyhunter with the shifter in the same hi or low position as when I last exited.

If I could just get MAME to always start Spyhunter in low, I could solve the problem somwhat by always making sure the shifter was in the low position before starting Spyhunter.

I've read several othe posts concerning shifters, but did not see anyone mention the issue with MAME remembering the shifter. Am I missing something here? Anybody have any other ideas on a good way to attack this?

I tried write-protecting the spyhunter nvram file, but MAME still seems to remember the shifters previous position. Anyone know how to make MAME always default to hi or low?

Any news on if MAME will provide more options for emulating shifters in future versions?

Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. TIA.

[Minwah]

You can alter the source code to make 'real' shifters work better for some games - take a look at the polepos source, it has comments and code to use for the original shifter.

Also: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=48981.0