How to get older MAME to remember analog control settings?

[angryred]

Over the weekend my MAME machine was finally born (only building the control panel remains).  I'm using MAME32 0.84u2; I've used it for years and it plays pretty much all the games I want.  I'm running an ArcadeVGA hooked to a horizontal Wells-Gardner monitor.

After going through several games and playing around with the resolutions, I remembered I had a GT Force steering wheel (for Gran Turismo 3 on the PS2) tucked away, so I got it out and hooked it to my MAME machine, and it works great.  I started going through all the driving games and adding them to my favorites list (they hadn't been there before since I had been using only keyboard and joystick on my PC setup).

Then I ran into my problem; while it was a simple matter to go into the Tab menu, tweak the analog settings and end up with just the right control feel, the settings would not remain when I exited the game.  All the controller assignments-- buttons, what wheel/pedal does what-- were saved fine, but the analog settings reverted to default values.  I dropped the joystick dead zone (in MAME32) as low as I could, but it's still not enough to overcome the low values of the default analog settings.

Example - Spy Hunter controls perfectly when I go into Tab Menu/Analog Controls and set Paddle Sensitivity to 100%. Exiting the game resets this value to 40%, which creates a huge dead zone in the center of the wheel that greatly affects reaction time.

I did some searching in these forums, and while I found some discussions of this topic, I couldn't quite understand exactly what it was I needed to do.  As best as I can tell, I need to manually edit a .cfg or a .ini file-- but I don't know which one, and I don't know what syntax to use anyway.  The spyhunt.cfg in v0.84u2 is all incomprehensible symbol text, for example.

What I did learn from these forums is that later MAME versions better facilitate these functions. I was loath to upgrade to a more recent MAME, simpy because I wanted to avoid all the rom fixing that goes along with it, especially when moving between versions 4 years apart.  But I went ahead and gave MAMEUI (mame ver 127) a try.  Naturally, a third of my ROMS were suddenly useless, but Spy Hunter remained and I went to work.

The analog settings saved properly and I thought I had solved my problem (long list of other ROMs to be fixed put aside).  But when I started tweaking other games, I realized that the new MAMEUI was not playing as nice with my ArcadeVGA as MAME32 v0.84u2 had been.

The primary problem was with side borders in vertical games-- while in v0.84u2 I could either double the native horizontal resolution or, as a last resort, set to desktop resolution (640x480) and employ hardware stretching to create the proper side borders, most of the time in the new MAMEUI these methods did not work. Usually I ended up with horizontally stretched vertical games (filling the screen), and since I was using the same display settings as in v0.84u2, I couldn't fathom why I was getting these results.

So I would like to do one of two things; either 1) figure out how to make v0.84u2 remember analog control settings, or 2) figure out how to make v127 tweak my display the way v0.84u2 does.  I'd *prefer* the first option, as that avoids a massive ROM update, but I'm open to all sorts of advice. Anything that keeps me from having to tweak settings every time I start up a particular game will be most welcome information. Thanks in advance to any who can help.

[jharris]

I think the MAME graphics engine change was somewhere around version 105. If you are considering changing MAME versions you could start from 85 and go from there. Another good idea is to check MAWS for your favorite driving game and see what was the last MAME version it was worked on. If it's higher than 84 then you have a good reason to upgrade (and a version to shoot for).

[angryred]

I figured out what i was doing wrong in my graphics settings (in v127), and things are working great, including the steering wheel. Thanks for the advice.