Game-specific control settings

[malkneil]

I apologize if this has been covered somewhere else, but I've looked around pretty exhaustively and have yet to find the silver bullet that will help me do what I have in mind. 

To bring you up to speed, I've built a cocktail-style cabinet with joysticks on each end, as well as two next to each other on the side (for two player simultaneous action).  I have the 2-input IPAC which is wired up double (that is, the 1P IPAC is wired to both the side and end player 1, same for the 2P side of the IPAC).  It's a good setup all in all, but has one shortcoming, vertically displayed games that are 2-player simultaneous.  Since I only have one joystick on each end there's no good way for two people to play, say something like 1943, cooperatively from one end of the cocktail cabinet.

What I want to do is permanently hook up a USB joystick that can optionally serve as the second player controls for vertical games that are simultaneous.  It would seem I'd need to create custom controller files for games that I wanted to set up like this.  I've found a little bit of information on the BYOACWiki page:

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Ctrlr_file

I've played around with them but they seem pretty enigmatic to me.  The names of the xml elements (or their attributes) seem to change depending upon the game.  I've written Java code to mine game attributes from the web in an attempt to programatically create custom config files for 2P-simutaneous-vertical games, but the biggest stumbling block seems to be finding out how to write the control config files (ctrlr files?) so that they're recognized by each game.  It seems when I try to write one for a game and start the game up they're not honored and even written over upon game exit.

Has anyone tried to do something like this before.  Any suggestions (including a better way to do this altogether) would be certainly welcomed.

Regards,

Malkneil