Mame: Is this possible?

[patm95]

Hi all.  Purchased Big Box to use on my HTPC and loving it.  I am considering building a bartop arcade using Mame, which will use a 4/8 way switching joystick and 3 buttons.  Is there a way to sort which games use 4 way, 8 way and up to 3 buttons using Mame or Launchbox/Big Box?  Or is there an easy way to sort the Roms that I am not aware of.  Thank you.

[Jookie]

There's a tool called RomLister that you can use along with a bunch of data files (along with mame itself) to create lists of games with different configurations.  Some of the data files I found weren't updated in awhile, but it can give you an approximation of the controls.   The hardest part is really counting # of buttons for each game.  For instance a game like San Francisco Rush was listed as 14 buttons...which technically isn't 100% accurate (or needed really).

RomLister's data can be searched with various requirements like 'list only games with a 4-way stick'.  The xml itself has a notion of a 'constant name' but also a 'control name'.  As an example, a game with an 8-way stick has a input constant name of "joy8way".  In my searches however that constant name covered standard 8-way stick games, 8 way top fire button stick games, and 8-way rotary stick games (think Heavy Barrel).

Here's an partial example of the xml with the constant name and control name.  Altogether it describes an analog flight stick with 2 buttons on it.So I went through my list and tried to get a handle on the control breakdown.  Here's what I came up with.  Again, it's not 100% accurate, but it gave me something to starts as a base w/ my control layout decisions.

Constant Name search:

Control name search (some I didn't check since I was getting tired of searching and many of these terms were easy to map to the constant names above):
As far as games with a # of buttons, here's what I came up with, along with a couple of game examples.  Please note that this count is entirely based on the xml so check things before you go make a 14 button panel as many times the buttons are really toggle switches and the like from the original arcade cab.  One other thing to note: This list is entirely based on a single player's input buttons, and doesn't include buttons for player start and the like.

14 buttons - 2 games: San Francisco Rush and Rush the Rock

9 buttons - 23 games: a bunch of matching/whack-a-mole games, a racing game or two, and music/rhythm games

8 buttons - 44 games: a couple of driving games again, a piano controller for tap-a-tune, and an arcade pinball game - Grand Cross

7 buttons - 60 games: Beatmania and Guitar Freak, Fisherman's bait, Spy Hunter 2

6 buttons - 310 games: Street Fighter II and later

5 buttons - 219 games: Mortal Kombat, Toobin'

4 buttons - 1045 games: All the SNK games, Elevator Action Returns

3 buttons - 1923 games: Altered Beast, Die Hard Arcade, Virtual Fighter 2

2 buttons - 3106 games: Too many to list really

1 button - 1858 games: Again, too many to list

0 buttons - 222 games: Frogger, Pac-Man, Robotron

 

 

[patm95]

Wow.  That is awesome.  Thank you!  So I take it you can use this list to somehow either have launchbox only see those games or export the games that we want to another folder?  Looks like I might have found myself a new project

[Jookie]

I haven't quite decided on how I'll use the info directly.  Maybe some sort of 3rd party addon that reads it (or a set of them) and then displays that info somewhere/somehow.