4 Spinners / Which MAME

[bhille]

Ok, I'm throughly confused    I have read about MAME, MAME32, Advance MAME, Analog MAME, and I just don't get it.  Here's what I'd like.  In the end, I would like to get interchangable control panels with one of them being a 4 spinner control panel (for multi player driving games).  I would use an Opti-Pac to go with it, but which version of MAME?  I think Analog MAME is what I want if I go windows...right?  What about DOS?  Thanks for any help you can provide.

Brian

[SirPoonga]

Ok, I'm throughly confused

[bhille]

Oh, okay.  I get it.  Sounds like Windows is where I need to be then.  I would have like to go with DOS, but I'm just finding more and more limitations.  Too bad, because I think that DOS would have been faster/better.

Games I wanted to play (I guess it's a 3 player, not 4) was games like Super Sprint (unless that would work with joysticks instead of spinners??).

Brian

[u_rebelscum]

Oh, okay.  I get it.  Sounds like Windows is where I need to be then.  I would have like to go with DOS, but I'm just finding more and more limitations.  Too bad, because I think that DOS would have been faster/better.

Games I wanted to play (I guess it's a 3 player, not 4) was games like Super Sprint (unless that would work with joysticks instead of spinners??).

Brian

What SirPoonga said, plus a little more.

EMU+ used to save .cfg files that the current mame could also read, but I heard this stopped working with v.58.  You could set up the spinners' settings in EMU+ and then use the .cfg file EMU+ made, in (d)mame up to version .57.  So you can set up the spinner settings in the .cfg files with EMU+, but can play those games with up to mame version .57 and still have the EMU+ settings work.

An other detail: with EMU+ or Analog+, the spinners could be be set up like so: spinner1 = mouse1 X axis, s2 = m1 Y axis, s3 = mouse2 X axis, s4 = m2 Y axis.  (EMU+ could only handle two mice.)  But with Analog+, if the spinners are on separate USB ports in Win98/ME, you don't need to change anything, as Analog+ is set up to handle 4 independent mice with mouse # = player #.  So Analog+ can do either way.

What 4 spinner games?

Others off top of my head:

Demolition Derby and Sprint4 (both cocktail).
Both Offroad versions and SuperSprint used 3.

There has to be a couple more, but not too many.

(unless that would work with joysticks instead of spinners??)

No they wouldn't very well.  There's a reason these games used spinners, and it's because they are top down viewed games.  If they worked with joysticks, even analog ones, when the car is heading up, a right on the stick will turn the car right, but if the car is moving down on the screen, a right on the joystick will move the car to the left of the screen.

[enemyace]

Analog mame will not work win win2k/XP because of limitation M$ put in those OSes.  

So XP doesn't support more than one mouse? Man, that sucks. u_rebelscum, do you see any kind of workaround that might work? Or are you keeping Analogmame a Win98 only application for the foreseeable future? Can someone elaborate on the situation with XP?

[u_rebelscum]

So XP doesn't support more than one mouse? Man, that sucks. u_rebelscum, do you see any kind of workaround that might work? Or are you keeping Analogmame a Win98 only application for the foreseeable future? Can someone elaborate on the situation with XP?

Win NT/2000/XP combine all mouse data before letting any applications see the mouse data.  So while you can plug more than one mouse into an XP computer, all applications, including mame, will see only one mouse.  This because all mouse drivers in XP family are kernal drivers, while in win98/Me the USB mouse drivers were not kernal drivers.

MS has stated (in newsgroup: microsoft.public.win32.programmer.directx.input) that:

• this "feature" is intentional,
• MS occasionally gets requests for adding support for multiple mice -> applications,
• does not think there is any reason to add it,
• but will think about adding it anyway.

All PR fluff; XP don't got it now, and can't do it now, so MS is trying to call it a "feature".

Now, the best fix would be for MS to change it's kernel code and add support multiple mice data reading by applications, like it did add to win98/Me when directX 8.0 came out.  But it's a much bigger change to XP than it was to directX, and we are talking about MS, here.  I say bombard MS with intellegent requests for this with the differences between support for: more than one device and support for applications to use more than one device clearly stated.  (And as long as mame is not mentioned, since MS is releasing some "classic arcade hits for the PC" emulations, and MS seems to hate open source.)

The only other semi-doable workaround I can see in the near future is for someone to write joystick drivers for the different mice so that winXP sees the mice as joysticks, and treats them like joysticks: with multiple support.  This would mean the mouse would not be see in the windows desktop, or windows applications.  (I have never written a windows driver.)

A (IMO) non-doable workaround is to write some "filter" drivers and re-write mame to be able to read from these filters, as the data will not be seen with directX.  Also, I am not sure if the filter drivers will be able to grap the data before all the mouse data are combined.   Again, I have never written a windows driver.

I could be wrong about the "solutions", but the first paragraph & list are true.

[ErikRuud]

Joystick emulation of spinners is possible and already supported.  Left on the joystick if read as spinnig left and Right is read as spinning right.  

Now while this works, it is often inferior to real spinners, because there is no way to spin faster or slower.  It is as if the spinner could only spin at one speed.

[u_rebelscum]

Joystick emulation of spinners is possible and already supported.  Left on the joystick if read as spinnig left and Right is read as spinning right.

Yes, but I am referring to making a spinner pass spinner data, but windows would think it was a joystick.  Spin the spinner clockwise, and the car turns right & depends on how fast you spin the spinner.  This would take a very simple addition to mame's code.  The hard part, IMO, would be to write drivers to get winXP & directX to think the mice are joysticks, when they aren't.  

Now while this works, it is often inferior to real spinners, because there is no way to spin faster or slower.  It is as if the spinner could only spin at one speed.

True, but there are simple hacks to get the analog joysticks to get different "spin" speeds in mame.