Mini-pac - configuring left and right mouse buttons for extra functions?

[ryguy]

Hi, I've used a mini-pac to wire up all my controls.  I've got the usual buttons along with a trackball and two admin buttons.  I've wired the admin buttons up to the left and right mouse button wires that come as part of the trackball connection.  This has been useful to navigate through windows, but I cannot find a way to use the mini-pac programmer to recognise and assign these two buttons to admin  functions as well e.g. pause the game and escape.  It doesn't seem to recognise them at all.

I can wire them in as separate buttons as I have 2 spare wires, but then I lose the functionality of having the mouse buttons, which were useful.

Any ideas anybody?

Many thanks,

 

[jw2000uk]

Hi, I've used a mini-pac to wire up all my controls.  I've got the usual buttons along with a trackball and two admin buttons.  I've wired the admin buttons up to the left and right mouse button wires that come as part of the trackball connection.  This has been useful to navigate through windows, but I cannot find a way to use the mini-pac programmer to recognise and assign these two buttons to admin  functions as well e.g. pause the game and escape.  It doesn't seem to recognise them at all.

I can wire them in as separate buttons as I have 2 spare wires, but then I lose the functionality of having the mouse buttons, which were useful.

Any ideas anybody?

Many thanks,

 

Hi m8,I have the same problem,although it doesn't affect me as i have enough connections for the other buttons also.

So my left and right mouse,does only that,and is not seen in mame.


have u not got any other connections left on the mini-pac.

If u plugged them in the sw buttons etc then they would work as pause etc.

But then u might loose the right click and left click in windows.

[ryguy]

Yeah, I do have two connections left so can wire them up for pause, exit etc, it's just a pity losing the left/right mouse buttons, I was being greedy and wanted both!!  There must be some way of doing it - although I suppose if I load immediately into a front end, I may not need the mouse buttons.
Cheers for helping though

[ahofle]

So you want one button to simultaneously press the letter P on your keyboard and the left mouse button?  Wouldn't that cause issues navigating around Windows anyway?  For example in Explorer, pressing a letter scrolls the list to the first item starting with that letter.

You could always leave them as mouse buttons, and then go into MAME and change the default pause mapping to be 'mouse1' instead of 'P'.

[ryguy]

That sounds ideal - that's what I'd like.  Bit new to all of this, would that mean going into controls.ini and saying pause=mouse1 etc?

[ahofle]

Just start up a game and press tab, then go to 'input (general)'.  Then select 'user interface' and you'll see the mapping for Pause in there as well as 'UI Cancel'.

Just thought I'd mention in case you weren't aware that you can also use the minipac's "shift" mode to press P, ESC, or Enter (and several other common MAME 'admin' keys):
http://www.ultimarc.com/ipac2.html

[ryguy]

many thanks, I'll give it a go - but i do want to try and find a way of doing a permanent fix, presumably I may need to do this for each game.  Was going to use shift for some of the less common ones (like reset game), but wanted pause and exit game as non shift keys.   

[vizzinni]

I hard-wired the left mouse from the mini-pac to the 1P credit button (5).  So in Windows I'm pressing 5 and Left click.  I haven't had any problems using it sparingly.  I usually just single click to select and then press enter (using a shifted key) to launch, just to cut back on the extraneous key presses, but I probably don't have to.  There is a beep from windows every time though.

[ahofle]

many thanks, I'll give it a go - but i do want to try and find a way of doing a permanent fix, presumably I may need to do this for each game. 

You'll only have to do it once, not for each game. 
Although I think the best solution is to use the shifted Minipac keys personally unless you are set on having dedicated admin buttons.

[ryguy]

 
All sorted!  Thanks for all your help.  Had to add 'trackball_device mouse' into my mame command line, as the mouse buttons weren't being picked up on the config menu.  My two admin buttons are now left and right mouse buttons under windows, and pause and exit game when in a game!  I've also used the shift function to add game reset and page up and page down to speed going through the menu system.
Now all works perfectly (apart from the trackball sticking a lot which is another story!)
Many thanks,
Ryguy

[ryguy]

 
Euphoria short lived, that only works for games with trackballs, I assume games where this isn't enabled as standard i.e. almost all of them, mouse buttons aren't recognised so no pause, exit game etc.  Didn't think it worthwhile activating the mouse for all those non-trackball games.
Decided to give up.  Using GameEx anyway and will have autostart from turning on computer so shouldn't need any mouse buttons once I'm all set up.  So have wired up the 2 admin buttons to my 2 spare wires, no mouse buttons anymore but have uncomplicated admin functions. 
If anybody has any bright ideas, please tell me

[ahofle]

Did you enable mouse input for all games (not just the trackball and spinner ones)?

[ryguy]

Changed it now so now no mouse buttons.  Used '-trackball_device mouse' in the command line and that's it - most trackball games work ok apart from cabal and combat school - the trackball version of the roms simply won't load - not sure why 

Update - now these work too, needed to ensure they aren't filtered through the 'best clone' function on gamex and made sure the parent rom was there too.