(update-FIXED) Trackball stopped working in MAME in launchbox and Bigbox Works fine outside of FE

[scenariol113]

My trackball in my cabinet is not working in MAME when launched thru launchbox OR bigbox.  It makes no sense and was working fine beforehand.  The trackball works just fine if I run MAME from my desktop.  The X and Y axis can not be read if I am using launchbox when I go into MAME settings from the Tab menu.

 

This has to be something in launchbox...I have no idea

 

any help would be appreciated...

Edited March 20, 2021 by scenariol113

[scenariol113]

Just to update.  I messed around for 2 hrs to no avail last night.  I needed to rest my brain and worked it out this am.  I do not know what or why this happened but for some reason the MAMEUI was not keeping my setting to allow/enable trackball/mice etc when I was executing it thru Launchbox.

If I would open the MAMEUI independent from Launchbox it all would work fine.

While in Launchbox I right click "centipede" for example and open MAME (not run the game just open MAME) then in the MAMEUI I right clicked the properties for centipede and in the controller tab and the mapping tabs the mouse was not checked and mouse was not enabled for "trackball".

I am trying to explain this coherently and I could be slightly off but that is the jist of what was going on.

I ask does launchbox have a separate file to store setting independent of the MAMEUI outside of Launchbox.  I dont think it does but that would explain the weird behavior.

It made no sense for the trackball to work in MAME and then open launchbox and play the same game (from the same MAME) and it would not read the trackball...that is ALWAYS the start of troubleshooting.  We will always be asked does the emulator and settings work "outside" of the frontend (in this case Launchbox/Bigbox).

I am happy that this is working now BUT I still would like to know what happened and why.  Especially if it is something that I have installed that is causing the problem.  In a few months I will forget how I fixed it...(the main purpose of this thread to archive)

anyway, thx for playing...

 

[neil9000]

8 minutes ago, scenariol113 said:

I am happy that this is working now BUT I still would like to know what happened and why.

This is a known issue with MAMEUI. The mame.ini should normally be in the root of the main mame folder, but MAMEUI moved it into the ini folder, this is fine when loading from within MAMEUI, but for some reason when they decided to move the ini (why they did this i have no idea as its completely needless) they didn't change the code for when launching games from the command-line, which is what all frontends do. So long story short, ini is in the ini folder and is found when launching through the UI, when launching from commandline it looks to the original and correct location of the root MAME folder and finds no ini.

Copy the mame.ini from the ini folder and paste it into the root MAME folder and it will then work from Launchbox/Bigbox. This is a MAMEUI issue and nothing we can do anything about. so to answer your question if Launchbox has its own file that is being read, no, no it doesnt, its just that MAMEUI cant find it's own ini file.

[scenariol113]

Thank you for the detailed explanation.  It makes sense now to me.  I am not running a command line version of MAME  (which I should be).   I chose MAMEUI out of laziness bc it is easier (for me) to play around with settings etc while I am testing games to put in my cabinet.

It was def weird bc I could use the trackball in other platforms in my Launchbox like Model 2 and 3 games with no probs. 

Thanks again

 

FV