Phantom buttons in NBA jam (and others)

[Goines]

I'm having a problem with some stuck/phantom keys happening while playing some games.  Basically, when playing busy 4 player games (nba jam, open ice, etc) with 3 buttons going for 4 players, inevitably someone's button (usually player 1 or 4) will stop responding, and at times one of the buttons will just keep firing.  The most common repro of this is a player will automatically pass when given the ball, or just try stealing without anyone around.  It's as if the '3rd button' is being pushed even when it's not.

We've played other games like rampage and not had this problem, although i don't think rampage stress tests the controller as much as nba jam.

I've got 4 player wired up using the standard mame controls, using an i-pac4, under Maximus Arcade and currently mame32ui, running on xp.

Has anyone had similar problems with keys, or have any suggestions?

Thanks

[severdhed]

my friend had similar problems when he first got his Ipac...it seems as if there was some overlap on the controls in mame.  we ended up reprogramming the ipac to a custom keyset, and remapping everythign in mame.  it took a little time, but once it was done, there were no problems anymore

[Goines]

Yes, the ipac does have some overlapping buttons (p1 5-8 and p2 5-8), but we aren't using those, which is why this is weird.  I think I'll see about remapping them anyway, to avoid someone else inadvertently pushing the button.  The weird thing here is that the buttons used in these games aren't the overlapping ones. 

Maybe reprogramming the board with no overlaps will help, but hasn't anyone else seen this issue?

I have sticky keys disabled and all, but i'm worried that some key combination is being treated weird by windows and causing it to start.  The games will work great for say 2 quarters, but then the last 2 quarters of the game will get messed up.

[arzoo]

I had the same problem with NBA Jam but as I recall it was resolved by turning off all the XP accessibility options.

[Goines]

Thanks for the suggestion; I was hoping that some how this got re-enabled and was the cause, but it wasn't.   I already had the accessibility stuff disabled.

I think i'm going to reprogram the IPAC with different, fully independent (no dup maps) keys, and give that a try, but i don't think it's going to fix the underlying problem.

[Kordova]

I know this thread has been dead a while but I was having the same problem. Remapping all controls for the game seemed to have fixed the problem.