need help with Mame save states without keyboard encoder...

[severdhed]

hey guys, i've been playing alot of games with my 2 year old lately...since he has a short attention span, we don't too often sit through an entire game though.  he mainly likes only a few games right now, and i am getting sick of playing the first 2 levels of these games over and over again.  so i started looking into using save states in mame so i can pick up where i left off.  the only problem now is that i cannot seem to get this to work without using the keyboard. 

i have two U360s on my panel, all of my buttons are either connected to the u360's harnesses, or are mouse buttons.  I have no keyboard encoder.  i managed to get shifted buttons set up for save and load state in mame, however it makes me select a slot whenever i save and load, which seems to require me to press a numeric key on the keyboard.  is there any way to force it to use slot 1 every time without being specified?  or is there some other way i can make this work easily?

thanks.

[Sir Headless VII]

Have you assigned all the shift keys? You could probably set one or two of the shifted keys to be what you need.

[severdhed]

no, i havent used up all of the shifted keys...but i don't see anywhere in the mame configuration to configure the inputs for the savestate slots.

[u_rebelscum]

no, i havent used up all of the shifted keys...but i don't see anywhere in the mame configuration to configure the inputs for the savestate slots.

You can't remap the slot names, since mame uses the key pressed as the slot name.  Mame can use any number or letter as the slot name, though.  So as long as the button is a letter or number (ie: not shift, ctrl, alt, space, or any of the punctuations), the buttons will work.   

[urbecrisch]

I turned on the automatic save state option in mame directly so whenever I load a game it will automatically load the save state or when I exit a game it will automatically save it.  This does not always work with every game since they are not all save state compatible.

[severdhed]

that would work, but it could be really annoying too.  if i am half way through a game of centipede or something and exit..if i want to start a new game, id have to wait till i lose all of the remaining lives and get a game over before i could start a new one....that is not really desirable.  i do have auto savestate enabled for space zap, since the hi score support doesnt work..but that is often frustrating when i launch it and it is in the middle of the really long final explosion

[Turnarcades]

that would work, but it could be really annoying too.  if i am half way through a game of centipede or something and exit..if i want to start a new game, id have to wait till i lose all of the remaining lives and get a game over before i could start a new one....that is not really desirable.  i do have auto savestate enabled for space zap, since the hi score support doesnt work..but that is often frustrating when i launch it and it is in the middle of the really long final explosion

Not really - you can use the 'reset game' option in the 'tab' meu to reset if you wish, or do as rebelscum suggested.