To mouse or not to mouse? That is the question...

[jasonbar]

Howdy-

Silly (probably) question:

I'm halfway through getting my hardware all set up in my cabinet & figuring out my admin buttons & doing cable management (if I had a nickel for every cable tie & harness-guide I used...), & I have 1 quick question.


I'm using a heavily-modified SlikStik Quad (purchased about 1.5 years ago, before they had big problems...), and they have the big Happ trackball in the middle & 2 of the "mouse buttons" (left & right click, I presume) are player 2's 1st 2 buttons.

So, if I keep this wiring as-is, I'll need to enable the mouse in my mame.ini, for any game that used P2 buttons 1 or 2, right?

Will I expect to see any performance hit by having the mouse enabled vs. just using keyboard keystrokes for all my buttons?  I've already done all of my testing/sorting/performance-checking w/ mouse disabled, on my test bench.  Because I'm in "limbo" right now, I can't do much testing & would love to get the wiring squared away while I still have easy access, before I button everything up...

Is there some limit to how many keystrokes a keyboard/MAME can register at once, so it's actually better to have 2 of P2's be mouse clicks instead of keystrokes?

Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill? 


I can easily swap the wiring of those 2 "mouse" buttons with 2 of the "pinball" buttons (which go into the IPAC as keyboard keys) on the side of the panel, out of the way, since only I should be ever using mouse clicks, just during maintenance--normal users should never need to "mouse click" on anything.


Thanks--I'm getting so close I can almost taste the it!!   
-Jason

[Minwah]

Yes mouse would need to be enabled to use mouse buttons in Mame.

In theory there is a slight performance hit when enabling mouse as well as keyboard, but in practice I think this is un-noticable.

I do remember (years ago) reading some stuff about mouse buttons not being as good as keys (ie can't repeatly press them as fast or something), but I can't remember whether that was more of an interface problem.  I don't know if there is still such a problem, but would be interested to find out...