Help Confirming this Mame Layout

AlphaBetaPie

I'm trying to get a good "neutral" Mame control configuration that will work well for 90% of my arcade games (then I can do core remapping for the handful that don't cooperate). I found the following info from both the official document and reddit that is supposed to be the best possible layout to start with:

Y X L
B A R

I have a six button controller, so I ran the input config in emulationstation and put that exact layout above on the top/bottom rows of my six button controller.

I wanted to use a game I knew to get a baseline. So I picked MK3/UMK3. With the following layout above, here is the result in-game:

High Punch | High Kick | Block
Low Punch | Low Kick | Run

Could someone with an arcade version of MK3/UMK3 (using the above layout) confirm this is how things should be? I find it a bit odd, as I would have assumed the block/run buttons would have been in the middle instead of pushed out to the end (which is how the machine is laid out and how the consoles always handle it).

WeirdH

@AlphaBetaPie It seems the most logical, ABXY (the 'face buttons' on a controller) getting mapped to the main attacks. For arcade games I usually google an image of the control panel and try to replicate that as best I can (sometimes not at all easy).

High Punch | High Kick | Block
Low Punch | Low Kick | Run

I remember having exactly the above configuration on MS-DOS back in the day when playing on a keyboard, because the original lay-out was a bit too spread out:

alt text

That said, on my cab I have it set up like you describe here:

...I would have assumed the block/run buttons would have been in the middle...

because that RUN-button has to go SOMEWHERE.

Depending on which core you use, it's varying degrees of easy to set up a custom remap to suit your preference.

dankcushions

i imagine the default layout was more sensible before this change to the inputs: https://github.com/libretro/mame2003-libretro/commit/4f3edaf3cec23ecc3d8296cf8259a89f59723fa1

(i always argued for such changes to be reversed out)

AlphaBetaPie

Update:

Thanks to all who gave info above. I have been able to get it pretty close to what I want, with one slight issue that persisits.

So Mame 2003 (the default for Retropie) seems to load everything pretty close to what most games would recognize using the YXL, BAR six-button config. However, I've found that if you try to use this same setup in Mame 2010 (which I use for a couple of games Mame 2003 won't play), it's completely off. So using core remapping, I force it to match what I know works in the 2003 emulator.

But now, instead of most games using the A/B combo for attack/jump in Mame 2010, I find they are off somewhere else. The attach or jump might be on A/B, but the rest of the important defaults are above on the X/Y or even L/R buttons.

Is that because Mame 2010 doesn't naturally move the important commands for most arcade games down to the usual spot (like Mame 2003 does)?

dankcushions

@AlphaBetaPie not sure, but mame2010 is a relatively immature core that has a bunch of missing/broken features, hence it’s not the default/recommend mame core. it’s not really had the attention of the recommend ones.