Admin Buttons?

[Jack Burton]

I have my cab set up so that the admin buttons only work when the shift button is held down.  The shift button by itself does nothing.

So I have

Shift
menu/tab
pause/menu confirm(enter)
escape

I have dedicated coin and start buttons also. for each player.

I am not that worried about kids messing my cab up.  If I ever had really small children over who I though would mess things up I would just quickly unlatch the control panel and disconnect those buttons. 

I guess I could also save an alternate config file that has those buttons mapped only to keyboard functions if I wanted too.

[Jack Burton]

On my panel to prevent accidental exiting, I wired up my two exit buttons in series.  This way both have to be held down to send a signal to my computer.  I spaced one on each side so on two player games when I am kicking my friends butts, they can't just hit the exit without me hitting it too.

Lol nice idea. 

Man, I gotta second this.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Just wanted to share what I do which you may want to consider (if you have room to do so on your panel):   

On my panel (not quite finished building it yet) I have an Asteroids layout, that will double as Admin buttons when the shift button is pressed (left flipper will be shift)  See pic below.  The Asteroids layout is located in the top center of the panel and consists of 5 buttons that control your ship in the game:  left, right, hyper space, thrust and fire.  While the shift button is pressed, the buttons become: exit game, launch game, favorites, back button (using Maximus Arcade the back button lets you choose which emu you want to play) and reset game.

I have dedicated "1 - 4 player" buttons with credit buttons (lit in the appropriate color for each player) and two "pause" buttons (one on each side of the panel on top - black).  I don't consider these admin buttons.

P.S. - My front end is "Maximus Arcade" which I believe supports a screensaver during any inactivity which should include pausing (I have to verify this).  You can configure how long the time out period is in the config area in Maximus Arcade.  I set mine for 20 minutes.  Anyone who pauses longer than that kind of deserves for it to kick out of the game and go to the demo mode (which is how my screensaver is configured - it loads a random game out of the list and demos it for 4 minutes each).

Since I was still working on the control panel, I wasn't sure how I want to label the admin buttons yet.  I was thinking I can have something like:  Left / Menu Back; Right / Launch Game; Hyper Space / Exit Game; Thrust / Favorite; Fire / Reset Game.  I would have the Asteroids commands in Red text and the Admin buttons in White Bold Text.  (not sure on colors of text yet).

Either that or I can have something mounted on the inside of the glass/plexi with admin instructions.

Either way, the whole point of this is that the admin buttons would double as an Asteroid layout.

~ DeLuSioNaL

[CrazyKongFan]

I have an old gutted Robotron cabinet that had been converted to a Final Fight that I MAME'd. I have the following buttons: ESC, TAB, P on the control panel, in addition to the 2 joysticks, 3 buttons per player and the PL 1 and 2 buttons. On the front of the cabinet, I utilized a couple of lock bar bolt holes to put in 2 push buttons for coin 1 and 2 (one of the coin mechs works too, so I have it wired in parallel to coin 2). Also inside the coin door, where the test switch is, I have it wired up for service and reset (F2 and F3). I hacked a keyboard to make the encoder, so the buttons are regular keys, one joystick functions as the arrow keys, one button is control, another is enter. I can pretty much do whatever I need to shut down the PC and navigate thru MAME32's interface with this setup. You can access the Windows start button (bottom left corner of the screen) with ESC and control, which lets you shut down the PC.