Controller not working with MaLa once game launches

[dgnr8]

I just downloaded MaLa & have been pleased with it's use as a Front End over MAME32. I got it all configured to match what I wanted; it recognizes my controller's buttons within the Options menu and I am able to scroll through & select games using the buttons I mapped.

HOWEVER, once a game actually starts, none of my controller buttons are recognized. If I hit Tab to open the menu & go in to the controls, none of my button presses are registered. If I switch over to MAME32, my same controller works great.

Is there something I need to do to get MaLa to recognize & use my controller once the games start? I am using a GPWiz to connect my controller to my PC via USB.

[loadman]

For a start don't use mame32 with a FE.  It sometimes has problems. 

Use command line mame. 

[dgnr8]

No worries, I'd read that and that isn't what I'm doing.

I've got 2 separate folders altogether on my PC; one has the command line MAME with MaLa and the other has MAME32. No ROMS, INIs, etc are shared between the two; they are separate in every way I can tell.

For comparison sake, I was simply saying that I know the problem isn't with my controller because (A) it works for scolling through & selecting the game and (B) the exact same game works fine if I launch it in MAME32.

[dgnr8]

With help from RandyT (thanks again) I got it working. Even though I had enabled the joystick for the MaLa GUI, it apparently was not enabled by default for mame launched by MaLa. When using MAME32 this is done by default so I didn't need to "configure" mame to use a joystick.

By going into the options and clicking "Configure" for my mame.exe, all I needed to do was enable the joystick in there under the Controller tab. Seems simple enough, not sure how I missed that but hopefully someone else searching the forums will come across this post and save them self the time I wasted.