Menu keeps coming up in play

[HOTR6]

Well mostly when my kids play but sometimes when others play too. The menu to change the setting in a game....you have to hit tab to get it from a keyboard. It keeps popping up. So is there a set of keys that makes tab and they keep getting pressed? I have windows XP and am running Mamewah as my front end. I have an Ipac4 and an optipac. I would like to program the Ipac forsome other buttons I have for like esc and P and stuff so reprograming would not be bad, but I need to know what keys need to stay the same. Obviosly player 1 up down left and right are easy but what are the keystrokes for player 2 and then all the buttons. I don't want to go in there and mess all that up I just want to assign a few buttons.
Mostly I am concerned about the menu popping up cause in order to get out of it I have to get the keyboard out and hit enter.
Any help would be great.

[RetroACTIVE]

Check / remove default.cfg...

I had the same thing happen to me w/kids... when the menu popped up they "button mashed it" and changed the "TAB" menu key to various combinations of keys causing the settings window to appear unexpectedly during play....

[Doc Thirst]

I found the key programmer provide by ultimarc to be very simple to use.  This coupled with mame's "tab" menu should allow you for any programing you want.  There really isn't a key setting (I know of) that can't be altered.  Dive in and if all else fails...RetroACTIVE has the right idea.

[RetroACTIVE]

I found the key programmer provide by ultimarc to be very simple to use.

Yes!... I forgot to mention that I removed all buttons programmed for "TAB" key as well...

Haven't seen the problem since...

[HOTR6]

I programmed the buttons I wanted to with the notepad CTRL ALT P. Worked great! I a not sure where you are saying to check/remove default.cfg
Where do I find that and what does it do?
Thanks for the help.

[RetroACTIVE]

Default.cfg is located in the cfg sub-directory under mame and is used to define the default controller mappings for all games.  Individual games can re-assign their own settings and you can find them in the same cfg subdir too.

[HOTR6]

Is the cnfg file the same as the ini? I do not know how to get the ini. I know you need to type, mame -cc but I don't know from where. I tried it where it said "run" and from another window that I found in the mame folder but each time it said it could not find folder mame.
I don't know how to get the ini. I also need it so I can get my trackball to work.

[RetroACTIVE]

Is the cnfg file the same as the ini? I do not know how to get the ini. I know you need to type, mame -cc but I don't know from where. I tried it where it said "run" and from another window that I found in the mame folder but each time it said it could not find folder mame.
I don't know how to get the ini. I also need it so I can get my trackball to work.

ok... .ini is not the same as .cfg

"gamename".ini contains game specific settings that are normally part of mame.ini  These files have to be created by you individually.  They go in the same directory where mame.exe is located.  They are named after the game with a .ini extention.  Just about anything in mame.ini can be put into these files.  For example, some games may require the joystick while others don't... this is a good place to set those values... so in mame.ini you would have joystick 0 but say in a game like star wars, the starwars.ini file would have joystick 1.

.cfg is controller configuration ie. button assignments.  When you go into the setup menu for a game... and modify controller assignment, the game.cfg will be created in the cfg dir.  Typically these files are not modified manually but through the mame configuration menu.