Enumerated controls

[SavannahLion]

Has anyone actually sat down and figured out the different control types there are? ie, 4-way, 8-way, rotating, analog, 2-way horizontal, 2-way vertical, trigger, flight stick, 360 steering wheel, dual joystick controls, track ball, etc. N buttons?

I thnk the information I want is in the MAME XML, I'm just wondering if someone has already gone through the trouble of extracting and enumerating the information.

I'm sure this question has been asked and answered, but the search daemon went on vacation.

[Tiger-Heli]

You could likely get it from controls.dat - http://fe.donkeyfly.com/controls/controls.php

Biggest obstacle is unique controls - for example, the bicycle in Prop Cycle.  That is a control type, but only that game uses it.

[NOP]

For more data, I built a program that merges together mame's -listxml output along with controls.dat (controls.xml to be exact) and adds in catver.ini data as well.  You get one big ole xml file that now has all of mame's info, but with better control information.

you'll find it here:
http://www.waste.org/~winkles/ROMLister/mmm.html

You might find romlister of use as well-you can output a csv file that has the rom description and all the controls it uses.  Import that into excel see what shakes out.

-jeff!

[SavannahLion]

You could likely get it from controls.dat - http://fe.donkeyfly.com/controls/controls.php

Biggest obstacle is unique controls - for example, the bicycle in Prop Cycle.  That is a control type, but only that game uses it.

That's actually fine, I'm trying to figure out how many different controls there are, including one-offs. I'm running an experiment with a bit of software.

[SavannahLion]

For the purposes of the experiment, the controls.xml file sufficed.

Statistically, there are 49 distinct control schemes listed in the file.

Some are essentially repeats for my purpose.

Others are uninteresting.

There is a vast number of unique controls that are missing, but due to their rarity, the solution I've come up with for handling them is acceptable.

I'll let you know the results of my experiment later.

[bfauska]

TEASE.  What are you up to?

[SavannahLion]

TEASE.  What are you up to?

I'd love to share right now, but I don't want anybody telling me that I can't do this or that or telling me that I should use something else instead. Plus money is kind of short (again  ) so I can't push the experiments as fast as I would like.

None of it probably matters anyways. It's extraordinarily difficult to concentrate on anything more complex than toasting a slice of bread.

[Kremmit]

[Tiger-Heli]

I'd love to share right now, but I don't want anybody telling me that I can't do this or that or telling me that I should use something else instead.

Hey, u can't do that, u shud do sometin else instead!!!

Seriously, it's your project, do what you want regardless of what the rest of us think.  (Except it's kinda humbling if the forum tells you it won't work and you try it anyway and find out they were right!).