@theissdev Thanks again for all your help

@mortalwombat said in How to config 8-way rotary joystick games? (Ikaris, Forgotten Worlds etc):

MAME 0.139u1/MAME4Droid ROM works using Mame2010

mame2010 is the port of MAME 0.139u1/MAME4Droid to libretro, so that's expected

@mortalwombat said in How to config 8-way rotary joystick games? (Ikaris, Forgotten Worlds etc):

Regarding Gondomania (gondo.zip, US version), the Mame 0.139u1/Mame4Droid version seems to work, allowing your character to rotate with the L/R buttons when using it on Mame2000 or Mame2010. However, this only seems to allow you to shoot your special weapons in these directions (knives, axes, etc).

I know emulation of this game had major emulation fixes recently (because its MCU was finally dumped in 2020, 22 years after the game was first wrongly "emulated" with the dumps available), but i don't know how broken it previously was since i never played it before that redump. Anyway, only MAME (current) and FBNeo will allow you to play this game as it was intended, using the dumps from 2020. Afaik, the main shoot is the one rotating.

Yes, the method to make two-handed "tank" controls work on a single 8-way joystick does not require any cheats, just a clever set of controls mapped to what is sometimes called a "tankstick". The mapping makes use of <CODE_NOT> logic where you are actually excluding certain input combinations. MAME lets you setup mappings like this by using a double-tap of an input while in the GUI menu which changes it to a <NOT>, so if you do several inputs in rapid succession, before MAME accepts an entry, you can make some combinations that work in interesting ways.

Here's a mapping for a single 8-way joystick to control two tank sticks like Battlezone:

Game Control Mapped to Right/Up Up <not> Right or Left <not> Down Right/Down Down <not> Right or Right <not> Up <not> Down Left/Up Up <not> Left or Right <not> Down Left/Down Down <not> Left or Left <not> Up <not> Down

There is an odd situation for Keyboard controller users in lr-mame2003 that requires you to first set all retroarch inputs to NUL using a per-rom config file if you want to do this. You can read about it here.