@jdoc said in How to get 8-Way / 4-Way joystick controls in Defender and Stargate:

Just had to nuke and pave my system, but discovered that mame2003 changed a bit. This cheat still works, but “mame2003-cheats” has changed to “mame2003-cheat_input_ports”.

So changing mame2003-cheat_input_ports = “disabled” to mame2003-cheat_input_ports = “enabled” will make this work again.

Thanks for this. This may be the reason that the MS Pacman speed button stopped working a few years ago, too. I'm gonna give this a try and see if it helps there.

EDIT: Confirmed. This fixed the issue. I posted on this forum about it ages ago and nobody had any idea what was wrong. Thanks!

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.