Magical Spot cocktail

[paigeoliver]

This one is going to be for sale, one BYOAC member have heavily expressed interest in it, so he will get first shot. If he backs out, then it will be available to the first person to come up with the money to pay.

This is going to use 4-way joysticks when it is done.

[BobbyG66]

Any details? Don't leave us hanging like that...

[paigeoliver]

Any details? Don't leave us hanging like that...

Ok, it will be

Celeron 400 (more than enough for what it will run).
I-Pac
Ms. Pac/Galaga replacement sticks,
14" VGA monitor decased and mounted to the original monitor frame/rails.
MSDOS
Gamelauncher.
The game list will consist ONLY of games that are vertical, support cocktail mode, and will control correctly with a 4-way joystick and single button (which is 60-80 unique titles I believe, I haven't checked to get the exact number yet). No clones installed except for a couple of exceptions (which will largely be installed instead of the originals, which can be done by putting the files for both the original and clone inside a single archive with the name of the clone game).

Examples of substitutions/clones worth doing (which you may also want to implement on your own machine).

Pac-Man instead of Puck-Man
Both Rapid fire and standard Galaga
Centuri version of Pleiades rather than the Tehkan version (Centuri version lets you fire multiple shots, while the Tehkan version was one shot at a time, Centuri version is also what most US gamers will have originally played).
Stern version of "The End" which is much more playable than the "original" version.

[Acids]

and will control correctly with a 4-way joystick and single button (which is 60-80 unique titles I believe, I haven't checked to get the exact number yet).

This may not be the place to ask ( and sorry if its not )   But how does one go about finding out how may buttons a game requires. Or even better, a way to create a list...??

[paigeoliver]

There is the sortinfo.exe tool, which is a decent beginning, although it seems to include as much bad information as good.

I have also heard something about a controls.dat project, but I am unsure of all the details on that.

Long ago I manually sorted most of the roms. One of the trickiest things is figuring out which of the games had 4-way sticks and which had 8-way. Klov is often wrong about this, as is Mame documentation. It often comes down to researching the title, and test play, as some games that you THINK would be 4-way (Amazing Maze for example) are 8-way, while games like Bloxeed and Xybots use 4-ways, even though you would have suspected 8-ways (the Xybots software actually supports 8-ways, and never knew they shipped with 4-ways until I played a real machine).