Crush

The box i used for housing is this (the large one): http://www.teko.it/en/products/family/PU/series/pult-36

I would like to build an Arcade Cabinet, but as many of you already know it is not easy to build one if you don't have your own workshop and you are also married... So i decided to avoid a divorce and just built a few arcade controllers for use with MAME - the good thing is that you can place one controller next to another and use the controls from both, so all combinations of control devices are possible. They all use components from Ultimarc (Ultrasticks, Minipacs, SpinTrak, U-Trak, arcade buttons). The boxes come from an electronics shop. I designed all art in Photoshop and the button/joystick layouts in Illustrator. A good friend made all the required holes on the plexi covering the top, as i don't have the required equipment. DUAL CONTROLLER (mainly for Crazy Climber type games) PINBALL CONTROLLER (mainly for Visual Pinball and MAME Pinball games) SINGLE ANALOG CONTROLLER (for the majority of games - some like to use the buttons on the left, others on the right) SPINNER/WHEEL + FLIGHTSTICK CONTROLLER (for racing games and games using a spinner) TRACKBALL CONTROLLER (i am a huge fan of Missile Command - i know it has too many buttons but it is also used for MahJong games)

First of all you can go to FCEUX, Config -> Map Hotkeys and change the keys (for example you can set ESC to exit the emulator). The AHK script to exit the emu is simple: ; Exit 4Joy17:: SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {ESC} Return You have to change the 4Joy17 (which means forth joystick, button 17) to your own joystick (for example 1Joy5, meaning that when you press the button number 5 on your Joystick 1 the script will send ESC to FCEUX) To figure out the number of joysticks and buttons use this online tool: http://html5gamepad.com/ Keep in mind that the button numbers reported by the tool may be actually off by one, for example button 2 might actually be button 1 - you have to experiment a little here.

That means that you can now use merged MAME sets without any problems... Thanks for this!

Be careful with this: if they are two disks and you see them as one 16TB HD, it means that they are in a Raid 0 configuration. Failure of one disk means that you will probably lose data on both...

Instead of paying monthly fees for a backup service, buy an external USB3 Hard Drive - they are cheap now so you can even go for a 8TB external HD at a reasonable price. Download the free DSynchronize http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/ It allows you to sync one or two-way any folder on your PC with another folder anywhere (even network shares) and it is really fast as it updates only changed/new files after the first backup. You can also schedule backups so you don't have to remember to make them. I use it to backup my Launchbox, Retroarch and Prepar3D (flight simulator 190GB folder) to my NAS.

Part of the script looks like this: ;Display Help Info 4joy16:: WinUAE("EVT SPC_TOGGLEFULLSCREEN 1") MsgBox,,INFO,END+(1 to 0): insert disks 1-10 from swapper [SHIFT+END+(1 to 0) for disks 11-20]`nCTRL+F12: Fullscreen/Windowed`nEND+PRTSCR: Screenshot`nF12: Settings`nPAUSE: Pause`nALT+F4: Quit`nPAUSE+END: Wrap`nEND+(F1 to F4): Swap disk in DFO to DF3 WinUAE("EVT SPC_TOGGLEFULLSCREEN 1") return Line 1 comment Line 2 maps the script to button 16 - controller 4 Line 3 sends command to WinUAE to toggle to window mode - in most emulators you just have to Send ALT+Enter instead Line 4 displays a MessageBox with useful info. You could open your image here instead of displaying the MsgBox Line 5 reverts WinUAE to fullscreen

You can assign a controller button to an AHK script which goes into window mode, displays your image, waits for mouse click and then reverts to fullscreen. I use a script like this to display a MessageBox with the most common keyboard shortcuts when i run Amiga games with WinUAE.

Custom Command Line Parameters bypass the entire Command Line you setup in the emu, so you have to enter all the parameters again.

Why not use an Autohotkey script to close Demul? Here's mine: 4Joy17:: { Process, Close, {{{StartupEXE}}} } When i press Button 17 on my Controller 4 Demul quits.

You don't pass the rom name correctly. Do you use the batch file through Launchbox (instead of the emu)?

Your syntax must be like this: start "" "D:\Emu\TOOLS\JoyToKey\Joytokey.exe" "D:\Emu\TOOLS\JoyToKey\Active Soccer 2 (NOX).cfg" The "" after start can't be omited - they define the title of your batch window which in my case is empty

Try the Start command to run your .exe files in the batch file: https://ss64.com/nt/start.html

The platforms are not hardcoded. That means that you can create any type of platform you want. For example you could name your PSP platform as "Sony Portable" instead of "Sony PSP". Just make sure that you select the correct default platform when scraping.

The trick is to plug the controllers in certain USB ports, setup them and never remove them again because Windows will assign new ids. Mame has the ability to remember the controllers even if you remove them: http://docs.mamedev.org/advanced/devicemap.html I guess RA doesn't have this option.

You can get some manuals directly from Nintendo: https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Support/Game-Boy-Advance/Game-Boy-Advance-manual-and-additional-documents/Game-Boy-Advance-games-manuals/Game-Boy-Advance-games-manuals-928652.html

Glupen plays Pilotwings without the black box under yout glider...

Yes, these options don't work with merged sets. I think that the solution to merged sets would be a new "Merged" option in the importer that would analyze the zip contents of each zip you try to import, compare it with the listxml output from MAME and offer the user to select which of the included parent/clones he wants to import. (Of course it will be a pain if you try to import 2000 MAME roms at once!)

The use of Additional Apps doesn't depend on Launchbox or the parent MAME rom at all. All it does is run MAME with the parameter "gamex", so if you have a complete merged set you aren't going to have any problems because MAME knows where to look for bios, e.t.c files through its mame.ini. Now when you drag a merged rom into Launchbox i guess that it reads the name of the file and executes "mame filename", that's why only parents are currently recognized in merged sets. If you rename the merged rom as a clone, it will run the clone (i did a quick test renaming the merged Varth.7z to Varthb.7z and importing it. Launchbox loaded Varthb!)

You will lose a couple of GBs by using Split sets. I use Merged 183, import the roms i want and for a couple of them i wish to use a clone instead of a parent, i use Additional Apps to add the clone to the parent. For example Puckman is the parent imported set but i want to be able to play Pac-Man (a clone), so i define an Additional App to Puckman with target my mame exe and command line parameters "pacman".

Phoenix is a good 3DO emulator: http://www.arts-union.ru/node/23 It is in Russian but i can provide a rough translation file in English if anyone wants it.

All retroarch overlays are composed of at least two files: the background image (ex. Back.png) and a .cfg with the same name (ex. Back.cfg) You have to edit the .cfg to move/expand the image to the position you want on your monitor. A sample .cfg is: overlays = 1 overlay0_overlay = Back.png overlay0_full_screen = true overlay0_descs = 0 overlay0_rect = "0,0,1,1" With these settings the image will scale to cover your entire screen. The coordinates as seen in the last line of the .cfg are: top left (0,0) to bottom right (1,1) If your .cfg doesn't have this line, simply add it. So by editing the last line and changing the coordinates 0,0,1,1 you can move the image around. If for example i set it to -0.5,0,1,1 part of the image will move to the left and out of the screen. You have to experiment to get the correct values.

Sometimes the keypress happens so fast that the program is unable to catch it. In that case you use this (from my Retroarch AHK setup): ; Pause 4Joy20:: SetKeyDelay, -1, 110 Send {p} Return SetKeyDelay keeps the button pressed for 110ms so the prog has enough time to read it.

This is going to help to figure out your controller's buttons/axis: http://html5gamepad.com/ Some controllers are numbering buttons from 0 others from 1, so all your buttons reported from that site may be one higher or one lower when you use them to program with AHK. For example Button 20 i am using in my script is reported as Button 19 using http://html5gamepad.com/

Here's the Autohotkay script i use with Altirra and maps various functions (quit, warp, save state, ...) to joypad buttons: #NoEnv ; Change Disk 4Joy2:: Send !{enter} Sendinput {Ctrl Down} Sendinput {1} Sendinput {Ctrl Up} WinWait, Attach disk image WinWaitClose Send !{enter} Return ; Warp mode On/Off 4Joy15:: Send !{q} Return ; Load State 4Joy18:: Send !{enter} Sendinput {Alt Down} Sendinput {F} Sendinput {Alt Up} Send {Down 8} Send {Enter} WinWait, Load WinWaitClose Send !{enter} Return ; Save State 4Joy19:: Send !{enter} Sendinput {Alt Down} Sendinput {F} Sendinput {Alt Up} Send {Down 9} Send {Enter} WinWait, Save WinWaitClose Send !{enter} Return ; Pause 4Joy20:: Send {p} Return ; Exit 4Joy17:: Send {ESC} Return Note: Just replace all Joy references with your own joystick number and button number. For example: 4joy20 in my script is button 20 on Joystick 4 (i have four controllers connected)