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'Calvin & Hobbes (2)'

28 x 36,5cm, backer board 4mm, Calvin & Hobbes 4mm.

Not really a problem but more of a curiosity, why does GroovyMAME (0.289) say there's a problem with the game E.D.F.: Earth Defence Force (edf), while mainline Mame says, using the same ROM, that the ROM is fine?

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edf.mcu WRONG LENGTH (expected: 00001000 found: 00004000)
edf.mcu NO GOOD DUMP KNOWN
WARNING: the machine might not run correctly.
No such warning on regular Mame.

Thanks guys for digging up the info. It looks like I have to listen to RandyT and upgrade to something else. 

I recently got my cabinet out of storage after a long period of renovating the basement and was very happy to see my 12yo getting hooked on Street Fighter even though my cabinet only has four buttons per player.

This is no longer my biggest issue though. After having a blast, finally playing for a week, my cabinet TV broke down with a highvoltage problem (flyback, transistors or both).    I'll try to make the effort to fix it but it is getting really hard to source parts for CRT:s these days.

Keep in mind that MDF, while flat, dense, heavy and easy to paint, isn't necessarily that strong and also doesn't like liquids. Moreover, MDF doesn't hold screws well at all. So particle board is probably fine for this application and you would have to be extremely rough to break the joystick out of the mounting. Passing bolts all the way through into wood or strips of plywood isn't a bad idea. A metal plate seems like massive overkill - not to mention potentially heavy.

Older TVs dealt with it by using Y-delay "black box" solutions which, afaik, are cascaded multistage RLC (resistor-inductor-capacitor) filters based on a T or Pi topology. It doesn't affect the H-sync if done after signal separation, but before feeding it back into the demodulation matrix with chroma.

Makes my head spin. Would be nice to come up with a simple, low-cost solution. Obviously the China TV designers decided it didn't matter enough to worry about it.

Does anyone remember these button? Is there anywhere to get a hold on a few of them?

To be honest, those were some of the worst buttons ever conceived.  I put them on my first cabinet close to 3 decades ago, didn't like them then either, even as a neophyte with microswitch based buttons.

Be kind to yourself and upgrade.  If it's click you are after, there are many kinds of switches out there, with whatever amount of force and/or click you would be after.  The difference would be in smoothness of actuation and lack of wear on the actuator. Microswitches don't fail often and swapping them is trivial where the button is concerned, even if they do.

RE: HAPP

I guess that explains why they stopped answering my emails a few months ago.  But to be honest, I'm not surprised.  They fell victim to the same problem as many a company.  To cut costs, most of their arcade parts manufacturing moved to China.  Eventually, they started selling clones directly.  And you can't really blame HAPP for doing so, because it would have happened anyway.  I'm sure the downturn in expendable income didn't help either.  Such is the world now it seems.  The problem for the consumer is that when the original producer goes away, so does a lot of the less popular parts that people might still want/need...like the pushbuttons being sought by the OP.

Unfortunately, that's one of the real side effects from consumers chasing only low-cost.  The options become more limited.

Hi,

I am trying to set up a coctail cab using Batocera.  Primarily going to use MAME on it but would also like to set up some C64 games as well.

I have an IPAC in there which from the looks of it is a legacy ps/2 version (see attached picture).

I can set up the controls to work in the front end menu and also to work in MAME but I am having problems getting the emulator to exit back to the front end.  I can use alt + F4 on an attached keyboard but it will not work from the ipac connected control panel using select + start.

IS it possible on the version of the ipac I have to configure it so that one of the buttons outputs F4 so I can then use a button combination on the control panel to exit?

Alternatively, does anyone know why the start + select is not working and what i can do to overcome the issue?

Thanks 

Ok then..

From the command line, for GroovyMAME specifically:-

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mame sf2 -keyboardprovider dinput
and

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mame sf2 -keyboardprovider win32
both worked.

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mame sf2
did not, keyboard not detected.

Using mainline MAME  0.289 I did not need to add/specify -keyboardprovider at all, or change anything in ini, it just worked.

I changed my mame.ini in my GroovyMAME folder to have "keyboardprovider dinput" set (instead of Auto) and things are now all working so clearly changing that setting from the menu within MAME doesn't seem to work or persist for me not sure why.

Happy now I can use the light up keyboard for those late night nostalgia sessions, thanks for the assist.

I see what you mean now using component, it's so minor to me though it's not even an issue. My only problem with the NTSC decoding is the chroma offset. I thought about the possibility of adding a delay line to luma as well, but that would negatively affect alignment of h-sync.

Could you confirm -keyboardprovider dinput and -keyboardprovider win32 don't work either?

Yeah they didn't work either, unless that setting doesn't apply until you quit and re-enter?

Of course, try it from command line always:

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mame sf2 -keyboardprovider dinput