Mame and rotary controls

[Hoagie_one]

How does Mame deal with rotary controls?  Does it only use two buttons to rotate left and rotate right or will it accept all 12 positions from a rotary switch and know what to do with them?

What im asking is, do i need to buy a druins interface or will it work if i have enough inputs on my encoder?

Thanks

[Tiger-Heli]

MAME requires Druin's interface.

MAME Analog Plus does not and works better, except I think Ikari doesn't work right, and it hasn't been updated in a while.

[SirPoonga]

Yes, for mechanical rotory games mame uses two buttons to rotate.

[Lilwolf]

not really.

mame uses a dial/analog.

but two keys can be converted to a analog.

So with druins you need to time each click and try to match the speed of the key->analog... Then the analog back to the original 12 keys.. And hope they are the same.

The troubles are

1) you can loose a turn here / there if not set right (or get double if you set it too high)

2) each click takes a set amount of time.  So no super fast moves left or right.

[Hoagie_one]

I wonder why the mame authors didnt go for acuracy in emulation.  they should hvae options to default to the 12 position rotary controls or whatnot

[Lilwolf]

They wanted to be able to play it with a mouse. 

Why they don't take 90% of analog+ mames input hooks for the real controller is a good question though.

The mouse -> 12 should be the option. 

[Lilwolf]

Also take note...

analog+ mame also works great with REAL L's and R's... no time needed.  This worked pretty good with my MK64 since you could set the time for each tick.  But once I got them all connected directly... I could feel a HUGE difference even from that.  If you want to go from looking up to 3 to the left to 3 back really really quick...

[u_rebelscum]

They wanted to be able to play it with a mouse. 

Why they don't take 90% of analog+ mames input hooks for the real controller is a good question though.

MameDevs didn't like the having input cheats, or multiple inputs w/ one the real input & the rest hacks.  New policy: only one PC input per game input.  (BTW, this isn't that much a change, in that before it was just "highly prefered" instead of a rule.)

In most cases, this is fine: no more half working input cheats (example: one joystick cheat for dual stick game), no more having both a 8-way joystick input & an analog joystick input for originally was an analog stick to please 8-way digital stick users.  IE: clean up the code & game documentation.  (Add that the PC/OS limit what, and in what form, inputs are passed to mame.)

This means, well, only one PC input per game input.    This makes it against mameDevs' policy to have both an "original" input and a "playable" input in the driver for inputs like 720, rotaries, ect.  And as much as mame is for documenting the hardware, it's very hard to document handling inputs for something 99% of the rest of the world doesn't have (like the 720 controller).  So mame sometimes documents the original inputs by simulating them instead of requiring the user to use one. 

Personally, I'd prefer at least including the abilty to use original controllers.  But I know having what looks like different inputs in mame actually just be different ways of emulating/simulating an unusual control generates a lot of questions.