Touch Screen Insert Coin & Start Buttons

[mithandir]

I have a narrow touch screen kiosk that I am converting to a mame cab/jukebox. The cabinet is wide enough to fit a 1 player cp with 6 buttons but doesn't really have room for anything more.  I also want to forgo an actual coin door since I do not want to cut a hole in  this sweet kiosk. Can anyone tell me if there is a program that will allow me to map buttons by touching a particular region on the screen?  The settings in GameEx claim to be able to do this, but I have found no evidence of anyone being able to get this to work.  It would be great if there is a program out there that would do this that is compatible with mame.  It would be even better if there a program that would let me overlay the screen with insert coin and start buttons that would be invisible until the screen is touched.  If anyone knows of anything like this please let me know.  Thanks in advance.

[ballboff]

I think GameEx is probably your only hope mate to be honest.  It does say that touchscreen mode can be configured to certain controls, but only on the default templates.  Other than that I'm sure there are touch screen jukebox applications knocking about, but if you want it to be a gaming machine then your options are going to be limited I reckon. 

There is also something called simpletouch fe, but I'm not sure how well you can configure it and you've then still got the issue that if you connect this frontend to mame, mame still doesn't have the touch facility you want.

If I were you I would just set your mame configuration to "free-play" and alleviate the need for inserting a coin.

[BadMouth]

Touch Buddy might work.  http://touch-buddy.com/forums/faq/18-master-faq.html

I don't remember ever seeing it used on the same screen that the game is on, but the touch sensor part of the screen is a separate device from the monitor anyway so I see no reason it wouldn't work.

[Howard_Casto]

Mame has supported clickable artwork for a while now, but it's not going to disappear when you move away from it. 

Mame doesn't support simulated keypresses so regardless of what solution you find, it isn't going to work on mame anyway, unless you do it some convoluted way like using ppjoy to send simulated joystick presses and even then your chance of success is limited because all emulators are fullscreen directx applications.  Anytime you click outside of a fullscreen dx app, it minimizes or worse. 

I haven't heard of this touch buddy, it might work around that judging by the application, but again, if it's simulating keypresses then it won't work anyway. 


Long story short, add a start button and coin button.  You have room regardless of what you say because I've seen people cram a 6 button layout with micro coin/start on a cocktail control panel.  You don't have to use full-sized buttons for coin and start because they aren't gameplay buttons.  Heck they don't even have to be on the control panel. 

[Malenko]

or use shifted buttons like start +button 1 = coin