Mame Hi/Lo Gear Shifter Question.

[jimmy2x2x]

As far as I can see, the Mame controls for Hi/Lo gear shifting is always mapped to a single input.

I have a problem in that Im not always sure what gear Im in!

How does an arcade shifter work, is it a momentary switch like in mame, or latch type

i.e. Open = lo gear / closed = hi gear

Does anyone else have issues with this?

How do you map the gear, to a normal button?

Thanks

[Howard_Casto]

In mame it's generally setup as a toggle switch (one press switches it from hi to low or low to hi respectively).  On a real arcade machine it's generally a single switch.... the switch is constantly held down by the shifter when it's in the hi position and constantly off when in low.  Since it's hard for traditional controllers to deal with such a switch it was changed in mame.

On the later versions of mame, there is a hi/low artwork graphic built in and it shows up for most game automatically.  That's how you can tell.  If it doesn't show up, go into the video options when playing the game and it should be in there... unless they haven't gotten around to adding it for that game yet.

[jimmy2x2x]

ah!

Surely this should be a toggle, ie you would have a change gear button (like you do now), but also a change gear type, latch or momentary.

Momentary would work as it does now, alternating the gear each press

Latch would always be high gear when held down, then you could build a control for it!

EDIT: or a 3rd option to have 2 momentary switches, one for hi, one for lo - this method would allow a joystick to be used as a selector.

All seems a little odd to me, considering the wealth of options mame offers...

[Howard_Casto]

You can build a control right now, you just need to always put the shifter in the correct position before starting the game.  Then you have a switch at both shifter positions connected to the same input.  Since mame doesn't have a key repeat the hi/low position will be toggled each time you shift, so as long as the shifter starts in the same mode the game does it will always be in sync.

[jimmy2x2x]

That would be possible, but its a bit of a fudge.