Cocktail software considerations...

[Jakobud]

My friend wants me to build him a cocktail machine.  He wants the traditionaly controls on the end, but also wants two players side by side, mounted on the side of the machine (for two player simultaneous games).  I would probably buy a d9200 or something to put in this thing.  It would be mounted so that from the ends of the machine, you would be looking at the vertical orientation of the monitor.  And from the side controls, you would be looking at the horizontal orientation.

From a software/FE point of view, what things should I consider with this setup?

 How many games support cocktail mode?  

How do I tell Mame to rotate and turn on cocktail mode for certain games and leave others normal?  Like if I choose Street Fighter 2, I'd want everything unaltered so that you sit at the side controls to play this game since it's a horizontal game.  But if you choose Dig Dug, I would want Mame to rotate the screen and turn on cocktail mode. Is this difficult to do?  Would this just require seperate lists or something in an FE?  

How many Mame games DON'T support cocktail mode, but need it for a cocktail setup?

[Blakey]

I have almost finished a cocktail as you describe.

So far I'm running Mame32, so I select games horizontally, and then move to the end if it's a vertical game. Aside from running one FE for vert games (like vertiwah) and one for horiz, I don't know what you can do to avoid that.

To make the screen flip, you'll need to hit Tab when you enter the game and set the dip switch for it (if supported). There's no automated way AFAIK.

To make the games appear the right way to the right controls, there's an option in Mame32 to fix it. I discovered it by accident after choosing no rotation and then starting to set individual games' rotation (non rotated pacman is 180

[Jakobud]

cocktail mode is not automated?  There isn't a commandline switch for it??

[whammoed]

Cocktail mode is a dip switch in the games that have it.  In advancemame you can hit the "/" key to flip the games that don't have cocktail mode support.

[Jakobud]

That really sucks that something like cocktail mode is something you have to switch by pressing TAB and going and finding it for each game.  This means that every time you switch to a new version of Mame, the CFG's most likely won't be reusable and you will have to do it over again for every game!  Lame...

[Tilzs]

In advance mame there is a config option that you can set to set the cocktail dipswitch for games that support it. Not all games support cocktail and for those games you can press the / to flip the screen manually.

It works out pretty slick in advance mame