Be Excellent To Each Other

Once you've got it down to about 200 you're going to repackage it and upload them, right?

Anyone who wants any/all of the collection is welcome to it at any time, certainly you could strip out the laserdisc stuff which would get you down into USB stick territory. Some of the hard drive based games aren't entirely terrible though, for example the Killer Instincts have hard drive images associated with them but they're only a few hundred megabytes apiece.

Currently the most 'valuable' aspect of the collection (for me at least) is the myriad ini files which I've created along the way, so decent controls, analogue settings, autofire settings, high score files etc and of course the big one which is the favourites.ini. (God knows how many hours they represent, either way they all got backed up earlier this evening....)

An upload of the entire MAME folder less the laserdisc stuff would most likely be the feasible option, otherwise I'd be sifting through fuck knows how many folders pulling out the relevant files for each game on the final Favourites list, which would be very tedious.

Ahhhh this is just pure delight now, even though 704 games is still far too many for a 'Favourites' list, it's massively easier to browse through a list of 704 games and pick something I like or want to have a go at, than it is to blunder aimlessly through a list of 4366 games, most of which I know nothing about, trying to find something I want to play. (Which normally just ended up with me playing Chase HQ.)

I've created a custom folder in MAME called 'MegaFavourites' (as always, you need to manually edit an .ini file for something like this, you can't do it through the GUI), which I'll use to create my 'A Team' of games (so adding stuff to MegaFavourites, rather than deleting anything out of Favourites).

Also, from my Favourites list, I can get a very clear idea of which manufacturers have produced the games I tend to like, which gives me a further chance to go back to the main 4366 games list, and reappraise their games in case I missed something. (Although in the main it's all the names you'd expect really, but Capcom, Konami, Namco, Taito and Sega do particularly well, but there are niche companies like Cave and Psikyo whose shooters I love to pieces, and of course the likes of Atari, Irem, Data East etc have all got some really solid stuff out there.)

MAME and Hearthstone, nothing else is getting a look-in and hasn't done for weeks, normally Pinball Arcade grabs some of my games time too, but at the moment even that can't get a slot.

Fun gaming times for sure.

Erm, hello.

Can anyone remember when Zaphod was awesome and let us download MAME32 with all the games already on it? Well, I've come back to it and I want to play some old games again. I was using the keyboard before but I want to use my Xbone pad on it.

In Options, the Default Options is greyed out for some reason...

...so using my noggin, I thought I'd use Joy2Key but apparently Joy2Key hates Mame so it doesn't work.

I checked to see whether it's the config file but the Mame I downloaded doesn't have a config file, so, erm, I don't know what I'm talking about.

Any ideas anyone to help a brother out so I can play Rolling Thunder with a pad?

I'd need to redownload it and get it into a VM to check but it should be as simple as enabling joystick support in the main menu (where you select the game) , starting up what you want to play and hitting <tab> on the game - selecting the control options and then setting them for your pad

Let me check

Okay so for me - i dont need to do anything else

In windows 10 - connect joystick and let it detect it (i'm using my DS4)

Start up MAME

Start up the game

Press <tab>

Using the arrows go down to Input (this game)
Go down to the various controls and press return on each one you want to setup and then press the direction on the joystick or the button you want to use
Press <tab> again to come out

There shouldn't be any need to configure it on a game-by-game basis for standard controls. Mine defaults to what you'd expect on the pad (up/down/left/right and buttons 1-6 on any game are defaulted to the pad's analogue stick and face + shoulder buttons), it's only customisation beyond that I have to do individually.

I'll have a look at how mine is set up when I get home, although I'm on MAMEPLUS I do have MAME32 as well.

The first thing I'd check is making sure the pad is recognised and working normally in Windows, as Windows-MAMEs just pick it up from there.

Well done guys, they were some great, thoughtful answers.

This is what I was going to suggest as I'm sure I remember having a similar problem with a generic USB pad a few years ago. Windows wasn't recognising it but as soon as that was sorted, I rebooted MAME and it appeared in the default options for all games. Something like a tick box with "use game controller" in it.

So I tried Zaphod's idea first...

...didn't work.

So I connected and calibrated the xbone pad as per AE/TheVision. All done.

Then tried Zaphod's idea again. Still no joy.

Restarted. Opened and closed Mame. And all that shit. Nothing. Nadda. Zilch.

Any other ideas homies? I ain't going to ever get to play Rolling Thunder except on the crappy stupid keyboard, like a loser.

I also need to check if B.Rap boys is on there. And E-Swat too. I fancy looking at that again.

What's the exact version of MAME32 that you're running?

Help > About

This one right here. As I said before, good old Zaphod uploaded it a few years back.

In typical Beex fashion, I'm going to recommend something you didn't know you wanted.

Have you thought of getting one of those USB Saturn pads off eBay? They're very good and they're bound to work.

Now I think about it, I believe I had problems with an older version of Mame and getting a controller to work. This was fixed by upgrading my version of Mame.

That really is an ancient version of MAME, I'm not sure if an XBox One pad will work with that out of the box as it were.

Just as a test, why not download a new version of MAME and a ROM or two and see if it works, that'll sort out whether or not it's the elderly nature of your MAME build that's the issue.

I've just done exactly that. Great minds and all.

Then the batteries ran out on my pad... hnnngh.

I've got batteries!

And now it works. Well, I had to copy all the Roms into the roms folder, but even I could figure that out. Thanks all.

Only, it doesn't work apparently, because a fair few games with roms that work in Mame32 don't work in Mame64. Seriously, PC Gamers, who do you get get anything done with all this farting about? When can you just find the time to sit down, play a fucking game without any hassle and complain about the frame rates!? Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

The ROM sets change over time, as a lot of older dumps were imperfect, or MAME used hacks to get them working that were resolved in later versions of MAME, and so on - it's nothing to do with PC, it's entirely a MAME thing. Most of the time there's absolutely no difference to how the game looks or runs in MAME itself across ROM and/or MAME revisions, but under the hood the emulation is more accurate, which is the MAME team's declared mission - being able to play old games using MAME is almost like a secondary consideration for them, which is why other people have to write nice frontends to make it usable.

Basically, if MAME doesn't get the exact ROM it's expecting, it won't run it.

Generally speaking you want to 'freeze' your version of MAME with a known working set of ROMs, which is what you've got there but unfortunately it's too old to support XBox One pads.

If you send me a 500GB portable hard drive in the post, I'll send it back to you with a 100% complete and working 0.164 version of MAME, including all laserdisc and HDD based games and other such delights. (And for example, if I took the Rolling Thunder ROM from my MAME collection on PC, and FTP-ed it over to my old chipped XBox which is running a really old version of MAME, it most likely wouldn't run on the XBox either, because it's a MAME thing.)

Hearthly kindly copied his MAME roms to a hard drive I sent him last week. I had a mess with them all over the weekend and I've fallen in love with arcade gaming once more!

It’s amazing. I can sit at work and get bored with a task after a few short minutes but put me in front of MAME then I’ll happily spend over an hour trying to get Virtua Racing to work with a Playstation NeGcon.

It doesn’t work with the Jogcon by the way.

But anyway, MAME is great.

Jnr has been complaining about being bored because she's finished her Minecraft expansion, so we're angling around for other games for her to play, I decided to crack out MAME on the media centre PC (which is actually Mrs Hearthly's old gaming PC), to see if she fancied some oldschool arcade gaming action.

Turns out 55 inch Virtua Racing with your arse parked on the couch is really good fun!

I mean, really, all three current gen consoles sat there, and I'm playing a 27 year old Sega racing game in MAME......

That's glorious. I love Virtua Racing.

It's coming out on the Switch soon with something crazy like 8 player split screen and possibly online support. I can't wait.

Can’t wait to play 8-player split-screen in tabletop mode!

Tonight was a Sega and Konami night, it's so easy to fall back in love with these games after just a minute or two, Magical Sound Shower never ceases to be amazing.

Also, the soundtrack for Thunder Cross II never gets old.

Apparantly next week virtua racing is out on the switch in japan.. lets see how the oort is

Cloudy I expect.