lr-mame2003 Marble Madness with DualShock 4 analog stick?

bland328

I'm fairly new to RetroPie and MAME, but I do grasp the differences between absolute and relative controllers, and how an analog stick is dissimilar to a trackball.

That said, I imagine (though maybe I'm wrong!) an effective way to play Marble Madness under lr-mame2003 with a DualShock 4 controller would be to map an analog stick (or, while I'm at it, both analog sticks) in such a way that pushing one a little in a given direction emulates spinning a trackball slowly in that direction, and pushing one a lot in a given direction emulates spinning a trackball rapidly in that direction.

Perhaps I'm merely inexperienced enough with RetroPie and MAME at this point that I can't determine the right search terms, but I haven't been able to find anyone else discussing anything like this.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Do I need to make the PS4 analog stick data look like mouse input somehow, so that I can then map that to trackball input? I'm open to switching to another flavor of MAME, if it helps.

Thanks very much!

mediamogul

@bland328 said in lr-mame2003 Marble Madness with DualShock 4 analog stick?:

I imagine... an effective way... would be to map an analog stick... in such a way that pushing one a little in a given direction emulates spinning a trackball slowly in that direction, and pushing one a lot in a given direction emulates spinning a trackball rapidly in that direction.

This is how I have my my controls set in AdvanceMame and the game plays beautifully with that level of control. There, I have my thumbsticks mapped to mouse movement, but there might be an easier way in lr-mame2003. @caver01 recently stated that anaolg controls have recently changed in that core and are yet undocumented, so he'd definitely be the one to ask. If you do end up having to map mouse movement to your controller, a guide tailored to RetroPie can be found here.

caver01

@mediamogul and @bland328 The RetroArch updates for analog control ARE documented, but those updates appear here in the wiki, and these changes have not been moved over into the "pretty" version of the docs linked in the menus of this website. I think @herb_fargus has to migrate updates manually which is probably a PITA if updates don't follow certain style standards.

mediamogul

@caver01 said in lr-mame2003 Marble Madness with DualShock 4 analog stick?:

The RetroArch updates for analog control ARE documented... and these changes have not been moved over into the "pretty" version of the docs

Ah, good to know. I've been curious as to what the changes are.

dankcushions

as far as i know there is no way of mapping analog sticks to spinner/mouse controls in mame2003. it would be cool, yes.

mediamogul

@dankcushions

Wouldn't mapping mouse movement to the stick with an external mapping solution do the job, same as AdvanceMame?

Edit: nm, it looks like you meant natively.

dankcushions

@mediamogul oh, sure yeah if there's some external tool that can map an analogue input to a mouse one then yeah, i guess that should work!

bland328

Thanks for the responses, all! So, my understanding of the situation at this point is that my options are:

a) Use AdvanceMame instead, or
b) Use lr-mame2003 with some external tool that turns DualShock 4 analog stick activity into mouse movement

I hope I have that straight. I'll report back on what does/doesn't work!

mediamogul

@bland328

Actually, in both cases you'd need an external tool. I use xboxdrv, as outlined in the guide I linked to above. Having analog movement available on the stick comes in handy for everything from 'Marble Madness' to 'Spy Hunter'. It's especially nice in 'Centipede', where you're normally all over the place much too quickly with digital controls.