can i modify nplayers? easy/hard?

[danny_galaga]

ok, i've finally figured out that the nplayers.ini file goes in ultrastyle, not multiplayer.ini which is for mame32. i'm getting damn close to installing it in my cocktail cab now! but, there's a small anomaly. there aren't enough variations described. my main problem is that i have a small number of games on the cab that arent 'cocktail'. the nplayer file though describes (for example) both pang and space duel as 2p simultaneous. which is true, but obviously on a cocktail only space duel is really simultaneous, since the second player would have to play his pang character upside down.
so how hard would it be for me to insert another description? something like '2p competitive' or whatever? i had a fiddle in that file and changed a description which (as i kinda guessed) couldn't be read and defaults to the 'unplayable' description.
any thoughts? im no programmer so if it becomes REALLY difficult for me to do, well i wouldn't ask anyone else to do it either as it wouldn't be very useful in many situations...
but i'm feeling adventurous with this stuff, so try me  

[Minwah]

How about you get in contact with the nplayers author(s) and ask them to add another category?  I was contacted by the author before, seemed like a nice chap - couldn't hurt to make the suggestion...

Edit: sp

[danny_galaga]

yep, good idea. thanks. i'll have a think about what i need exactly before i contact them of course  

[SirPoonga]

There isn't anything really wrong.  What cocktail means, my guess, is the game does screen flipping for cocktail modes. space Duel, though it was in a cocktail table, it did not need screen flipping.

Does pang go in cocktails.  It is 2p sim.  If there was a cocktail version of it, it probably was same side like joust.

I am not particular about this file.  controls.dat does this and more

[danny_galaga]

yeah, it's only a few games that will cause confusion on my cocktail cab. another good example is the simpsons. 2p simultaneous it is, but on my cocktail the second player will have to play upside down. same with raiden, moonwalker and escape from the planet of the robot monsters. i like them too much not to have them on the cab  
as i say, it's not something that would be very useful to that many people.
at the moment on mame32 i use a colour code in the icon pics. the default for a working game is green, so i made that signify 2p alternating cocktail. then i went through and added different coloured icons for the variations. blue signifies 2p simultaneous cocktail. yellow is alternating upright and orange (or ochre) is simutaneous 2p upright.
the query about nplayers almost was an academic exercise since my cab runs win98. ultrastyle needs dotnetfx- which needs ie 5.01 or greater. do you know how hard it is to update that without an internet connection? sheesh. what a drama. but i think ive got it sorted now. found ie6 for win98 on winmx  

edit: ok. ie is updated. but when i try to create the listinfo file it says 'unhandled exception occured in this application'. i have no idea what that means except that im way over my head. so i guess it was an academic excercise after all. oh well, back to the icons  

[SirPoonga]

The funny thing is, if nplayers.ini, you can derive 95% of it from mame.  There are some oddball exceptions.

[Howard_Casto]

The funny thing is, if nplayers.ini, you can derive 95% of it from mame.  There are some oddball exceptions.

Yeah... there's this wacky formula that I came up with taking into account listinfo's player info (number of players, which btw is about the only accurate control data in mame), the dipswitches and the age of the game that gives you the data nplayers.ini has with something like 99% accuracy.  But even with that being said... the nplayers specific data isn't particularly useful.  You can get cocktail data and the number of players straight from the listinfo easily.  Weather a game is simultanious of not is sorta a moot point as 90% of the mame cabs out there have at least a 2 player panel.  (So there's no need for sorting)

I appreciate all of the hard work the creators of that ini file went through, but it almost seems like they started doing it without even researching what mame can output.  imho it's a waste of dedicated volunteers to have them working on such a redundant bit of data.

And I'm not making light of their work in any way.  But even the hardest work can't make a bad idea good.