***SOLVED!***Daphne key assingments not "sticking" when launching w/ MaLa

[jasonbar]

Howdy-

I've got a few different MAMEs & Daphne (version 0.101.22, plus an older one when I run Cliff Hanger) on my cabinet, all controlled with the MaLa front end.

Most games use a pretty standard input control mapping, but I tried doing something a little different for Interstellar & ran into a little problem.

I went into Daphne Loader v2.1.48 & remapped "up" & "down" to be left & right on a secondary joystick, since those controls seem to twist your ship left & right (I suppose the original arcade stick was a twisty-flavored one...).  I believe that the rest of the game setups could all be the same (though I have other control preferences that I'd like to use on a few other games...).  I have an 8-way stick & a 4-way stick that I wish to use, depending on the game, but using the primary & secondary key assignments lets me cover all those games with both sticks OK.

Looking at the command line that Daphne Loader sends to launch Daphne, I saw that it's not specifying key assignments in the launch command, so I figured that the commands are "embedded" in an ini file or something for each game.  The thing is, I can't find such an ini file...

However, after I ran Interstellar from my MaLa launch (which duplicates exactly the command line that Daphne Loader uses), I ran Dragon's Lair & noticed that the up & down commands were still mapped how they were for Interstellar...

So, best as I can tell (in my programmer novice layman's terms), Daphne Loader assigns keys & those keys will "stick" until Daphne Loader runs another game with different key assignments.  If I launch multiple Daphne games (with different key assignments), they'll all use whatever key assignments were associated w/ the *last* game that Daphne Loader ran.

Is this assessment correct?  If not, how do the key assignments get passed to Daphne?

If so, is there a way to override this & send the key assignments in my command line from MaLa or otherwise "attach" key assignments to each game so that they're preserved when launching from MaLa?


Thank you very much,
-Jason

[jasonbar]

Matt Ownby, author of Daphne, helped me out at the Daphne forums: https://www.daphne-emu.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2668


Long story short: every time DaphneLoader launches Daphne, it rewrites the dapinput.ini file in the Daphne directory, based on key assignments made in the dialog boxes in DaphneLoader.

So, since I wanted about 4-5 different control layouts for the various laser disk games, I set the controls in DaphneLoader, launched Daphne, quit Daphne, then copied the dapinput.ini file to another name: dapinput_flightstick.ini, dapinput_gpworld.ini, dapinput_cartoon.ini, dapinput_interstellar.ini, etc.  So, I have 5 or so variations on the dapinput.ini file in my Daphne directory.

Then, since I've got a big fat mame.bat file that's launched from MaLa, per SGT's awesome guide (http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=68419.0;all), it was a simple matter of adding 1 more line before each laser game's launch line in the bat file.  This line was something along the lines of:

if "%2" == "Dragon's_Lair" copy /y dapinput_cartoon.ini dapinput.ini

(of course, your variable, rom name, & directories are dependent upon how you've set up your computer).  In my case, I had to use the /y argument because I was copying over an existing file & needed to override the don't-accidentally-delete-an-existing-file safety.


Hooray!

Thanks,
-Jason

[Bloodwyn]

Thanks a ton for that info Jason. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure this out as well.

Bloodwyn

[jasonbar]

I'm happy to contribute when I actually have something valuable to contribute, instead of just leeching off the experts here!   

Glad somebody found this handy!

-Jason