H and V in rotating mame mala machine.

[Ropi Jo]

My mame / mala machine rotates for H and V games. Some games we prefer to play horizontal, even though they are vertical games.... Paddle Mania for example.

Please can somebody (probably DaOldMan) tell me what I need to edit to instruct Mala that this game is H, not V.

Thank you.

PBJ need not troll this thread.

[Zebidee]

With notepad, create and save a [romname].ini file for the game, and place it in the INI folder. For that game, Mame will use any settings in that to override anything in mame.ini

I guess the setting you want is:  -norotate

For more info & options, look up "core rotation options"

[BadMouth]

It's been a looooong time.  Hopefully Da Old Man will come along and set you straight.

If not, here is what I remember which may be outdated or incorrect:
IIRC I had to modify mame.xml and then refresh the all games list in Mala.
If the game was present in another list, I had to delete it and add it back from the all games list in order for it to have the updated info.
I really hope there is another way because mame.xml has become too huge to work with in notepad.
I tried to look at it to refresh my memory of what setting to change, but it wasn't loading for me.

Looking at an old folder, it appears that I also used mlgconverter.exe (comes with the mala gamelist editor) to convert the gamelist to an ini file and then convert it back to mlg after changes were made.
That looks to be the easier route if it works.
Attached some batch files that I used to convert the gamelist named "classics".  These are just examples.  Path and gamelist name will need changed and the extension will need changed to .bat.
Like I said, it's been many years since I messed with this stuff.

EDIT: After you convert the gamelist to an ini file it becomes readable and there is a line for "videoOrientation=horizontal"

[Ropi Jo]

Thank you fellas. I'll have a go at this after work tomorrow.

I did look at the xml earlier and found Paddle Mania but could not see anything that appeared to be related to orientation. I was looking for 'vertical'. Maybe I should have been looking for 'rotate' or something like that.

[Zebidee]

Notepad++ works much better for editing large files like mame.xml. It is free.

In mame.xml, rotation is shown in degrees. "0" or "180" = horizontal (normal/flipped), and "90" or "270" = vertical (right/left rotation).

[BadMouth]

In mame.xml, rotation is shown in degrees. "0" or "180" = horizontal (normal/flipped), and "90" or "270" = vertical (right/left rotation).

This.  This is what I was trying to verify when I couldn't get the xml open in notepad.  Remember that it will not change in Mala until you refresh the all games list and the change will not automatically flow to your other gamelists.  The game has to be deleted and added back to other lists.

Notepad++ works much better for editing large files like mame.xml. It is free.

Thanks.  Mame.xml opened right up in Notepad++

[Ropi Jo]

Thanks again. I did use notepad++ when doing the '0 games work-around' for newer mame with mala.

[DaOld Man]

Just now seeing this.
Mala does use the mame.xml file to get game info, if I recall correctly.
They changed the way the rotation was listed in the newer xml files, this is what "broke" my joychoose add-on, however I think I fixed that with controlchoose add-on. Although Im not 100% sure it did fix it.
I need to revisit this program because I was working on a way to bypass the xml commands to do what you want based on the command in controlchoose.
It seemed to me like everyone was moving away from mala, so i guess i dropped the ball.
Looks like what BadMouth and Zebidee suggest should work, let us know what you come up with.

[Ropi Jo]

Found the rotate in the xml and edited with notepad++. Simple after all.

Thank you all.