Would this work?

[Dechene]

I want to make a mame controller for a friend who is going to be in hospital & then on bed rest for some time early next year.

I planned on using a hacked generic PC joystick, then installing a zippy joystick and probably 3 player buttons (plus small coin & start buttons) in a box and have it connect to his laptop via USB and be done with it.

But then I thought of improving it a bit...

So now my plan is to have a small usb hub inside the box, it will have an 4gb mem stick in it and the hacked controller usb will also plug into it.
Then I'm hoping that when I connect the single usb plug to the laptop, it will automatically boot up mala off of the stick and the joystick will be connected and setup as the default controller.

The main perk of doing it this way is that he will be able to plug it into his comp at home, take it to a mates house, etc etc.

I don't have a hub so I can't test it, but does it sound like it would work?

[matsadona]

I have been on the exact same track, but didn't make it through because of other reasons (large CHD files etc). I still believe it is feasible however.
There are plenty of different USB hubs, that doesn't require any external power supply.
And just a joystick and a USB drive doesn't need more than the standard 500mA anyway, so that would be just fine.

[Vigo]

The biggest problem I see is each computer would assign a different letter to the flash drive.

So when you have Mame on the flash drive, and the rom directory is designated to F:\mame\roms\ things could be screwed up when you bring it to someone else's house and the computer registers the drive as E instead of F. It would not be able to find the needed files in a non-existent F drive.

There might be some front ends out there can that load roms into mame from the drive on a relative basis rather than an exact drive specification, but I have no idea which.

You could also just assign the flash drive to a specific letter for each computer that it gets plugged into. Set the drive to an uncommon letter, like R. Then every time it gets plugged into a new computer, someone would just have to set that usb drive to be letter R before using Mame. A hassle, but it should still be easier than installing mame on every computer that it gets plugged into.

[matsadona]

Hm... maybe a BAT-file or script in the USB disk autostart that maps/mounts a RAM or logical drive with a specific drive letter and copy all MALA/MAME file there to overcome that problem? Then it could run on all computers...