Setting Up In-Game Controls for SlikStik Controller

[JonathanEngr]

Hi, all.  New user to BigBox here.

I have a 4-player SlikStik cabinet from back in the day, and I have always used Hyperspin as my front end.  I decided to switch over to BB for many reasons, and thus-far I'm very impressed.  However, I do need a little assistance setting up my controls with BB.

For those not familiar with the SlikStik controller, it uses an IPAC device that basically maps keyboard keys to the joysticks and button on the control panel.  My particular control panel has the following:

Joysticks for players 1, 2, 3 and 4, seven buttons for each player (28 in total), a "player" button for each player (player 1, player 2, etc.), a coin button for each player, two pause buttons, pinball buttons on the side, dedicated hyperspace buttons, a flight stick, spinner (for tempest, etc), a dedicated 4-ways stick for pacman, etc., and a trackball.  Lots going on with this controller.  I've attached a picture to help with the description.

I have made my way to the keyboard mappings area in BB.  That all works very well.  However, what I can't seem to find is the mapping for the controller *in-game*.  Essentially--setting it up so each player has different controls in-game.  Is that something I still have to set up inside of MAME, or is that function automated within LaunchBox/BigBox?  Thanks! 

[JoeViking245]

39 minutes ago, JonathanEngr said:

Is that something I still have to set up inside of MAME

Yes.  As user friendly as LaunchBox and BigBox are, you will still need to set up the controls for each of your emulators individually, via the emulators themselves. 

Since you had MAME setup before, you should still be able to use the same one.  Or, if you created a custom controller configuration file (located in /MAME/ctrlr/your_custom_file.cfg), you should be able to transfer that over to a new MAME install.  You'll need to tell the 'new' MAME to use that config file. 

[JonathanEngr]

Joe--Thanks!  I haven't tinkered with system settings in probably 7 or 8 years, but it's slowly coming back to me.

I went into the MAME directory created by LaunchBox when setting up MAME automatically.  I always used MAMEUI in my setups and inside of that software I could actually go into the settings and choose my controller (I have the slikstikquad controller config file).  Doing this automatically set the controller variable in mame.ini to the slikstikquad.  However... in the ini directory in the MAME setup by LaunchBox there is no mame.ini file.  How do I set up the default controller without this?  Should I download MAMEUI to do this?  Is it still available for v251 of MAME?  The version of MAME I was using before was (I think) v110.

[JonathanEngr]

Sorry to double-post, but I think I found the solution.  MAMEUI automatically created the mame.ini file, but you can also create it with "regular" MAME by browsing to the MAME folder via the command line utility and typing "mame -createconfig".  This creates the mame.ini file, and inside of this file is where you can set the default controller configuration file.  I *think* you then need to copy that file to the ini directory within MAME (or at least that's where it was located in my old setup).  I'm going to give it a shot and see if it works.

[JoeViking245]

You can look in your mame.ini file to be sure, but I believe when it's created, the line "inipath" looks like

inipath     .;ini;ini/presets

where the first dot is the root folder (probably where your found mame.ini). Then the ini folder, then the /ini/presets/ folder.  Essentially, you can place it in any of those 3 locations.  For me, keeping it in the ini folder is the cleanest.

But overall, sounds like you-got-this.