Thank you for your reply. Sorry my explanation was pretty bad.
My 6 button setups are at the center of my control panel. To the left and right of those joysticks are two 4 button setups. Naturally I'll configure my mame general input with the two 6 button setups as player 1 and 2 for fighting games and etc. With that general setup a lot of 4 player games have an assigned character/life bar to a specific player. For example, player one in tmnt is Leonardo, all the way to the left on the control panel. With my setup, Leo's life bar is all the way to the left but is controlled by the middle left joystick.
I'm probably being to crazy about this. Normally I just go into a game I'm about to play and edit the config but I'm putting something together for a friend that probably won't be able to do that.
Thanks again for the info. I'll look into further.