MAME Randomly Exits While Playing Game

[clhug]

I think I've seen info about this but it's been a long time and I can't find anything about it by searching either Google, or these forums. I think I just can't think of correct search terms for it.

I've got a 4 player MAME cabinet running on Windows 7, and I use an I-PAC 4 as the interface (though I don't think I-PAC itself is anything to do with the issue).  I built it about 7 or 8 years ago.

When we are playing multi-player games, especially with a lot of frantic action, sometimes the game randomly exits back to Windows.  I can still see that MAME is running in the background, it's just lost focus.

If I recall, the cause is because in the frantic action, we end up hitting some key combination (since the I-PAC just mimics a keyboard) that Windows recognizes that performs some action in Windows that toggles us out of the game.

But I've never been able to identify the specific combination of joystick position and/or button presses that causes it.  When it happens, the game action is too frantic to identify exactly what moves/presses cause it.

Is this already documented somewhere that someone can point me to that perhaps tells me what specific keys I should remap for which joystick positions or buttons?  Or I do recall the cause incorrectly, and it's something else that someone can point me toward?

Thank you.

[PL1]

BadMouth has several good suggestions for dealing with the problematic "modifier" CTRL, ALT, Shift, and Space keys.  (check that the suggested keys aren't already used in your 4-player setup)

The first thing I do when setting up a new system is change the first four keys (CTRL, SHIFT, ALT, SPACE) then globally remap them in MAME.
IIRC, I change them to V,B,N,M (it's been a few years)

On the encoder, I replace the first four default MAME keys (Left Ctrl, Left Alt, Space, Shift) with z,x,c,v.
Do this, then remap those four keys globally in MAME before setting up any individual games.

Also, I'm guessing that you've already reprogrammed the overlapping P2/P3 keys, right?
(IPac-4 Player 2 Buttons 5-8 and Player 3 directional default keys both use I, K, J, and L)


Scott

[clhug]

BadMouth has several good suggestions for dealing with the problematic "modifier" CTRL, ALT, Shift, and Space keys.  (check that the suggested keys aren't already used in your 4-player setup)

The first thing I do when setting up a new system is change the first four keys (CTRL, SHIFT, ALT, SPACE) then globally remap them in MAME.
IIRC, I change them to V,B,N,M (it's been a few years)

On the encoder, I replace the first four default MAME keys (Left Ctrl, Left Alt, Space, Shift) with z,x,c,v.
Do this, then remap those four keys globally in MAME before setting up any individual games.

Thank you very much!  I see it now.  It also appears that a couple of my player 3 buttons are mapped to Right Ctrl and Right Shift too, so I will remap those as well.

Also, I'm guessing that you've already reprogrammed the overlapping P2/P3 keys, right?
(IPac-4 Player 2 Buttons 5-8 and Player 3 directional default keys both use I, K, J, and L)

HA!  No, actually I hadn't noticed that!  Oddly, I don't seem to ever have any issues with player 2 and player 3 interfering with each other in  3 or 4 player games, but maybe.  I'll have to do some explicit testing on it, and I'll be sure to remap one of them in any case.


So, new but related question.  With my I-PAC 4 and using the WinIPAC software, if I've lost my config file for WinIPAC, is there a way to redownload the existing config stored on the I-PAC board back into WinIPAC?  Or am I just going to have to start with a new default WinIPAC config and start from scratch?  The down side is that I do know I customized some stuff from the default, but cannot remember what.  It's been several years since I set it up originally.

Thanks again!