Cocktail Mode

[daeven]

I've been out of the hobby for about a year and I'm just getting back in.  One of my big challenges is setting up cocktail mode as default for any game that supports it.

I spent a lot of time going through games one by one changing dip-switch settings for cocktail mode.  Is there an emulator hack or config files that have been built to make this easier?

[NOP]

Sorry, no advice for you, just wanted to say that IMO, that was part of the fun of setting up my machine-testing out each ROM individually, and while in there, setting the cocktail dipswitch and resetting it wasn't that big of a deal. 

Did you have a list of ROMs to start with, that you knew supported cocktail, or are you going through every single ROM in the entire collection and trying to find all the cocktail ones?

If you're going through the whole set, then yeah, that would be a pain in the cheeks.

[daeven]

I had my list of games I knew about, but I wanted to go through all the games looking for any good cocktail-mode games I didn't know about.  Is there a filter for vertical cocktail mode games?

[u_rebelscum]

There's a filter of mame's listxml for working cocktail games over on the mame.net forum.  You'd need to add the vertical part, and the filter doesn't catch games that were cocktail only, but it's a start.

[NOP]

or use my (or others) lil utility:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=55636.0

This is what I used to filter out only the games that met my criteria: vertical, cocktail, 1 button, 4way or 8way.

Worked fairly well, and dug out some crazy games that I'd never even heard of.

The rest of the "work" is playtesting! 

-jeff!

[Tilzs]

If you use advance mame, you can set a dipswitch flag (cocktail in this case) which will turn on the cocktail switch for all games that support that feature.

[daeven]

If you use advance mame, you can set a dipswitch flag (cocktail in this case) which will turn on the cocktail switch for all games that support that feature.

This is exactly what I was hoping for.  I have a vertical cocktail cabinet set up with AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMENU from a bit over a year ago.  I'm looking for documentation on this, but if you have any info that can point me in the right direction, I would appreciate it!

[Spartan]

I wrote a  circa MAME .55 that parses the driver files and makes cocktail mode the default mode.

Well, I wrote it in C using lex & yacc and have since lost the source code, but it more or less still works.  Once the tool runs, you have to run 2 global search and replace regular expressions, but it does the trick (oh and remove the check in main that validates default dip switch settings)

Anyhow, once all of the drivers are changed, compile MAME and your cocktail table is off to the races!

Get the software here:

http://www.municade.com/municade/software/

(You're welcome!)