Changing the Default Keys

[Bill Mote]

I built a 4-player cabinet for my kids (and me).  It's the only Christmas present they're still playing with.

I have noticed though that when they play 3 and 4 player games there is some keyboard combination they're pressing that gets them back into windows.  The game is still running in the background.  You just can't get back to it.  Fortunately, I extended the PCs power button to the side of the cabinet with an arcade button.  So, they just press the button and XP does an orderly shutdown.  Then another press and it comes back up in the MameWAH interface.  Still, that sucks when you're playing a game and you have to start over.

As such, I've remapped all the keys so there are no conflicts.  Player 3 stick controls used to bump into player 2 buttons.  Not that the 2 would ever be used at the same time in a game, but that doesn't stop people from hitting them by accident!  Anyway, I also removed the use of all the "system" keys: CTRL, ATL, SHIFT, etc.  Every control on my panel has a unique non-system key associated with it.  I did leave ESC mapped to my "EXIT" key, "ENTER" mapped to my "SELECT" key and TAB mapped to my "MENU" key, but those buttons are across the top of my panel and out of harms way.

After the remapping I entered the Mame menu and the "general controls" section after that.  I've reset all the controls to match their new mappings.

Does anyone see a downside to this?

[SirPoonga]

That's cool.  Most people change the controls from default just because of that.  What interface are you using?  Make sure you don't have any "shift" combinations.  Like if using the ipac make sure what you have setup as the shift key and what shifted functions are work.  Ipac's default is player 1 start as the shift key, player 2's start shifted function is esc.  Though you would have had to do a custom mapping to do what you said.  So this is hopefully a non-issue for you.

[Bill Mote]

We built 5 cabinets around the IPAC/4.  I had forgotten about the "shift" functions.  I'll have to look into that and see.  I guess it's possible that P1 died and was trying to re-enter the game while everyone else was button mashing.  That could have caused some "shifted" key sequence I didn't account for and it would also speak to the rarity of the problem.

Thanks!

[Tiger-Heli]

Would almost bet money your initial problem was ALT (P1B2) and ENTER (P3B3) which MAME equates to "UI toggle fullscreen" or something similar, and you could have just disabled that, but what you did is fine, just a little overkill, IMHO.

[Howard_Casto]

This is why I don't reccomend the mapping of the alt key nor do I reccomend dedicated menu buttons. 

Kids are button crazy, if they see a button, they'll press it. 

Also the alt-enter combination isn't just a mame shortcut, it's a windows shortcut.  If an app is coded properly alt-enter is supposed to minimize it from fullscreen.  Also on many apps alt-x or alt-f4 closes the application all together.  Luckily this isn't supported in mame, but considering x is probably your button #5 it's not a bad bet that if you have some pc games or other emulators on your machine, having alt on it is gonna cause problems. And of course ctrl+alt+button causes all sorts of maddness.

So the ultimate solution is to remap the "alt" key to something less damaging.  Ctrl and enter don't seem to really effect anything though so they are ok.  It should be noted though that a very very slim amount of games (usually java or flash based ones) use ctrl-F to toggle fullscreen.  Considering the f key is used for the player 2 joystick it might be a safe bet to remap them both while you are at it. 


Gotta remember, mame was created when most games (and mame) ran in pure dos mode.  At that time the ctrl and alt keys didn't cause conflicts because you weren't even in windows.  They defaults are really outdated.  If you look at a modern keyboard, the ctrl and alt keys aren't even the optimum keys for button 1 and 2 as the stupid windows key is in-between them. 

[Bill Mote]

Well, I've already re-mapped them all.  I'll post my mapping when I get a chance.  I've used only A-Z, 0-9, and the other non-shifted characters on the keyboard: []\;',./-=

I have 4 "admin" buttons across the top of the panel: ESC, TAB, ENTER, and P

I eliminated the use of CTRL, ALT, SHIFT, SPACE, etc.  I have no keys overlapping and there are 1 or 2 more keys available for use.

I don't know if I mentioned that I have 7 buttons on players 1 and 2 and 4 buttons on players 3 and 4.

dot

[Howard_Casto]

In that case, something odd is probably going on.  The system doesn't have anything running in the background does it?  Some windows applications are "bossy" and set focus to themselves when they want to alert you or something. 

[Bill Mote]

No.  We've gotten out of sequence.  My problem was happening before the key remappings.  Not after

dot