Joysticks works in mame32/mamewah - not mame

[wwwombat]

Just upgraded all of my roms to the MAME .120 set and therefore decided to install the 120 version of both MAME32 and MAME.

Joysticks (I use Ultimarc 360s) work for navigation in MAMEWAH and also work within games initiated by MAME32. Joystick setting is enabled and thus "joystick 1" appears in mame.ini.

MAME initiation through MAMEWAH doesn't see joystick. Does mame.exe still read mame.ini (in ini subdirectory) by default? Also tried altering emulator string to include -joystick and -rc strings without success.

Joysticks have always worked up to mame 119. Has something changed (can't find anything via searches). I don't want to roll back to 119 as I want to see the new "improvements" in mame and it's a hassle regressing roms.

Anyone think of anything else blindingly simple that I may have missed?

[Cananas]

Does mame.exe still read mame.ini (in ini subdirectory) by default?

AFAIK, by default, mame.ini must be in the same directory to be use by mame (not mame32).

[wwwombat]

An update... I made sure no other ini files for mame existed anywhere but the /ini folder of mame. I then focussed on a set of games not known to change between .119 and .120 (i.e. Frogger)

Quite simply put if I put back the .119 version of mame.exe then not only does mamewah let me select the game, but the left/right waggle for OK is honoured and the joystick works within the game.

If I overwrite mame.exe with the .120 version then mamewah still lets me select the game but the left/right OK doesn't work and the joystick doesn't work in the game.

HOWEVER... if I start mame.exe by double-clicking it under Windows Explorer and use its internal menu structure to select the game then the joystick for OK and within the game does work.

I then started fooling around with the mamewah command line. I currently have {nodosbox}{nosafelaunch}. Strangely I find that if I remove either both of them or just one of them then my joysticks start working again with mame .120. With both specified (which worked with .119) then my Ultimarc joysticks don't work.

I don't know why (perhaps Minwah (Mamewah's author) has a theory) but I'm at least somewhat functional again.