Issues with Mortal Kombat II controls in new MAME

[atog]

I went to play some MKII on my cab last night and found that all of my controls must have gotten overwritten at some point, and the game is back to the default configuration.

Now if any of you have played MKII on your cabinet, you may know of how much of a pain it is to set up the first time.  

My cabinet has a pretty standard Street Fighter button config, as in:

1 2 3
4 5 6

For Mortal Kombat, I like to have 1 high punch, 2 block, 3 high kick, 4 low punch, 5 empty, 6 low kick.  The problem is that for some reason by default, MK is set up all wrong, PLUS it has 2 button 3's in the config menu for some insane reason.

So last night I was reconfiguring it, and I managed to get player 2 set up fine, but nothing I could do would make buttons 1,2 and 3 on my player 1 side work in the game.  By default by ipac maps 1,2 and 3 to non letter keys, alts and ctrl and such, and MK just wasn't having none of that last night.

Have any of you guys tried it lately?  I am wondering what was going on last night, it was frustrating.

[atog]

I have been messing around with the config some more and I see that the default config for all games in the MAME menu is mouse button 0, 1 and 2 for p1 buttons 1, 2 and 3.  This works great for all games, but the specific button config for MK is seeing those buttons as alt, shift, ctrl instead of mouse buttons and somehow this is messing it up.

Anybody know if there is a way to set controls for a specific game without going through the in game MAME (tab) menu?  Like if I could just go into the mame folder and edit mk2.cfg or something like that?  

[SirPoonga]

the ctrlr fils, look in the doc and ctrlr directory of mame.

[u_rebelscum]

the ctrlr fils, look in the doc and ctrlr directory of mame.

Definitely, use ctrlr files.  

[mantra]ctrlr files, ctrlr files[/mantra]

Read docs/ctrlr.txt and look at http://www.mameworld.net/easyemu/mamecontrolini.htm

[Jakobud]

Yup. ctrlr files.  Once you start using those you will never go back.  You won't have to setup controls for all your games with every new build of mame.

[SirPoonga]

Plus FEs will start using ctrlr files as they start using controls.dat as that is the easiest way to get a person's config.

[Howard_Casto]

Actually it's the only way as each config file generated by mame is unique to the game it was made for and thus, it's next to impossible to parse.  That and it's binary data.  

[Jakobud]

How come the Mame devs keep so many mame files binary instead of ascii?  I'm not a great programmer so I wouldn't know where to start if I wanted to parse the cfg's or nvram or hi score files....

[Howard_Casto]

Well I think it's so people won't go mucking about in them.  Since an improperly read config file could casue sever problems, especially since dipswitch settings are in there too.  


Btw parsing binary isn't impossible, it's just difficult... you need to know the type of data that was converted to binary (in this case ascii text) and then you open the file as binary and convert it to string.  The good news is most visual studio languages allow you to do this via built in functions.  The bad news is straight C and other, non-m$ languages don't.  

So the binary isn't an issue, the issue is the non-standard file formats.  It seems that the mame devs would have had enough foresight to keep the dipswitch settings and high scores seperate from the control settings, which have nothing to do with the actual emulation.  

On the one hand it's great to see something like ctrlr files finally in mame, but on the other hand it should have been a higher priority and in there a lot sooner.