MAME and Players that take turns

[SIAtl]

Hi all -

So I've seen an issue that seems pretty apparent to me and I'm wondering if anyone has a solution.

If you have a pedestal or 3 sided cocktail and you are running a 2 player game like Space Invaders for instance and its time for player 2, he has to jump into player 1's spot.  Or I've seen some people set up Player 1 and Player 2 controls to both work and hope they don't screw with eachother.

I was thinking if you could make mame like cocktail mode in this situation where it switched to player 2's controls, but didn't flip the screen?   

Worst case a minor coding change to mame would have to be made with a new attribute made per game like 'Pedastal Mode'.

Thoughts?

 

[PL1]

I've seen some people set up Player 1 and Player 2 controls to both work and hope they don't screw with eachother.

This is your best/easiest bet to get the outcome you're looking for.

Map P1 and P2 stick/button to P1's inputs and hands off your controls during the other player's turn.

I was thinking if you could make mame like cocktail mode in this situation where it switched to player 2's controls, but didn't flip the screen?   

Friendly word of advice:
- Don't even try to pitch this to the MAMEDevs.  Guaranteed.  Hostile.  Reaction.
- It goes against the objective of the project -- documenting the original hardware/software.

Quick and dirty guess about what it would take to change SI "cocktail mode" to your "pedestal mode" in MAME:
- Know how to edit MAME source code.
- Study the SI cocktail schematics and theory of operation.
- Figure out how the video is flipped. (order of bits going into video RAM?)   
- Edit the MAME mw8080bw.cpp(?) driver source code to disable video flipping.
- Compile the modified MAME source code.


Scott

[SIAtl]

Thanks for the thoughts.  Sounds like I'll save myself a lot of grief...