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Is it possible to auto define keys to play Spectrum games via Mame?


uptown47

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Hi there,

I have a cabinet that I've built and Mame is working brilliantly through Hyperspin (along with a few others... Future Pinball, Daphne etc).

I would love to play some old spectrum games that I bought years ago. I tried to play Atic Atac the other day and, apart from having to use the keyboard to press "0" to start, the rest of the game played well with the joystick and buttons on the cab.

However, I then tried to play Jetpac and it wouldn't work at all.

Is there a way to set up the games so that I can play them through the cabinet.

How do other people do it?

Is it possible to over-ride a games set keys and change them so they reflect the "keys" that my joystick and buttons mimic?

Thank you for any help you can give me on this. I'm loving a bit of retro gaming and this would really top it off.

Cheers

:-)

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First off I've never used mame for spectrum, I use Spectaculator but it sounds interesting. I guess you would hit tab and try to do a per game config then either change them or find out what they are and then use a keymapper for that game. A

A lot of games used the Kempston interface and then additional keys to start and select options. Jet Pac was quite an early game and my not haave been keyboard only.

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Hi gigapig,

Thanks for the response. Do you use Spectaculator with Hyperspin?

If so, is it possible to redefine the keys with this to suit the cabinet joystick config etc?

I didn't realise that if you hit TAB you could change the keys and it would game specific?

I did wonder about trying to de-compile the game rom and then hard code the key changes in there so it would use the cabinet keys but I've no idea if this is possible and how hard it would be to do?

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I've never emulated the Spectrum either, but MAME allows key configurations to be saved per machine. Since the Spectrum qualifies as a machine, you would be able to define a single set of keys for all Spectrum games. The same goes for NES, SNES, Genesis, MSX, etc. I use MAME for almost all my emulation needs. :)

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10 minutes ago, uptown47 said:

Is that all just done through pressing TAB on the individual game or done another way?

 

If you do it via the TAB on an individual machine it will create a cfg (text) file for that machine containing the changes. MAME will do that for any machine you play, even if you don't change anything. That cfg file can also be manually edited if you want.

 

Alternatively you could create a control file that contains separate key definitions for the Spectrum. The HotRodSE control file can be used as an example; it uses a separate key definition for the NeoGeo system.

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1 hour ago, phulshof said:

I've never emulated the Spectrum either, but MAME allows key configurations to be saved per machine. Since the Spectrum qualifies as a machine, you would be able to define a single set of keys for all Spectrum games. The same goes for NES, SNES, Genesis, MSX, etc. I use MAME for almost all my emulation needs. :)

I've never managed to get any other system to run on the newer mame, only on the old mess.

Does it require different ROMS like the software list ones?

 

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15 minutes ago, gigapig said:

I've never managed to get any other system to run on the newer mame, only on the old mess.

Does it require different ROMS like the software list ones?

 

In general? No. Just the BIOS files for the system. The only exceptions are files were special hardware is involved. As an example: certain MSX cartridges contained special memory mappers that MAME needs to be aware of, and that part runs through the software list hash files. For NES, SNES, etc. I simply use the same rom set that HyperSpin does.

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