AdvMAME digital joystick acceleration

Alturis

After moving my pi3 retropie setup into an arcade unit with digital joysticks (only able to send an on/off signal in each of the 4 directions) I am working on trying to restore some basic playability for some of the analog input games I had installed previously.

Taking something like Star Wars (1983) for an example:

Looking at the AdvMame docs (http://www.advancemame.it/doc-advmame#8.9.5) there are options you can adjust related to analog input (though it doesnt seem to spell them out just mentions that they exist)

8.9.8 input_setting[*]
Selects some additional settings for analog inputs. These settings can be modified using the "Analog Config" menu present if the game has analog controls.
input_setting[NAME] SETTING

So I played around with that for a while trying to set the sensitivity and digital speed to lower values. But it seems that no value I put in there will make any difference at all. If the stick is pressed in any direction it will immediately jump all the way to the furthest analog extent.

input_map[p1_stickx] auto
input_map[p1_sticky] auto

input_map[p1_up] joystick_digital[16c0_05e1,0,1,1]
input_map[p1_down] joystick_digital[16c0_05e1,0,1,0]
input_map[p1_left] joystick_digital[16c0_05e1,0,0,1]
input_map[p1_right] joystick_digital[16c0_05e1,0,0,0]

starwars/input_setting[p1_sticky] keydelta:1,centerdelta:30,sensitivity:10,reverse:0
starwars/input_setting[p1_stickx] keydelta:1,centerdelta:30,sensitivity:10,reverse:0

I guess I was just wondering if playing analog games with a digital stick is something I am just going to have to write off, or if I might be overlooking something.

Edit: I think the issue may be that the input_setting entries for analog options may only apply to an actual analog input and are just ignored for a digital input.

mediamogul

@alturis said in AdvMAME digital joystick acceleration:

I guess I was just wondering if playing analog games with a digital stick is something I am just going to have to write off, or if I might be overlooking something.

I don't think you're overlooking anything, but I also don't think you have to write off all the games as unplayable either. Some games are indeed painful and even arguably impossible to play without analog control, but many are just inconvenient. For example, 'Centipede' and 'Missile Command' are definitely more difficult to control and you'll likely never be able to set a world record, but they're still highly playable.

As for setting the config values, it sounds like you're doing this by editing the advmame.rc file directly. I would recommend that you alter these settings in-game through the config menu so that you can see how the changes affect game play by immediate comparison.

Alturis

@mediamogul said in AdvMAME digital joystick acceleration:

I would recommend that you alter these settings in-game through the config menu so that you can see how the changes affect game play by immediate comparison.

Yeah, that is what I was doing. I was just reflecting what the end results were when saved to the advmame.rc for clarity.

mediamogul

@alturis

Gotchya. Unfortunately, there's only so much that can be done to emulate an analog control scheme with digital controls. It's really a testiment to MAME's versatility (and by extension AdvanceMAME) that it's possible at all. I can say that setting the sensitivity and acceleration have a greater impact on some games than others.

Alturis

I guess I was hoping that there might be some way to set it up so that when the stick is ON in a certain direction, instead of it jumping to the max value, it accelerated from 0 to the max value based on some setting.

mediamogul

@alturis

To my knowledge you can't, but I haven't put a lots of time into experimenting either. Acceleration, for example, seems to only affect the max speed. If you continue to test and find out something different, I'd be very interested.