Slow MAME button response - HELP

[arcadeboy0000]

My buttons are not responding fast enough with continuous rapid presses in MAME. I think this is a software problem because I can open up notepad and rapidly press a button and get very fast response for each button press. But in Galaga and such games, it will not fire every time I hit the button, it is like 2 times per second only! I have an i-pac keyboard encoder, but do not think this is a hardware problem becuase I get the correct response while im in notepad. What could this be? It is killing me that I cannot play galaga correctly! I tried using different versions of Mame also, but the problem persists in all of them. I am not sure why this is happening. The game is running smoothly otherwise as it is not choppy. Any suggestions?

[elvis]

Which key have you got mapped as your "shift" key on the I-Pac?

When reprogramming my I-Pac, I accidentally made the shift key one of my fire buttons (it defaults to 1P start, or "1").  Whichever key is set to the shift key will only respond when the set button is RELEASED.  In real world terms, this makes it quite unresponsive as a fire button.

The easy way to check is to open a game, and press and hold the suspect button for a few seconds, and the release it.  If it fires only after you release, you need to reprogram your I-Pac to set the shift button to something else that won't interfere with gameplay.

[arcadeboy0000]

My shift key was set to be another button, but not any of the fire buttons..

[SirPeale]

...in Galaga and such games, it will not fire every time I hit the button, it is like 2 times per second only!

This sounds like correct game behaviour for Galaga to me.  It only fires every keypress on the 'fast shoot' version of Galaga, IIRC.

[arcadeboy0000]

Which is the fast shoot version? I dont remember playing galaga where the shots were as slow as this.

[SirPeale]

It used to be a ROM hack, but now it's included in the cheats.

Make sure you have the cheats.dat file, and enable cheats and the fast shooting.