How to get 8-Way / 4-Way joystick controls in Defender and Stargate
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Defender and Stargate use a 2-way joystick that's limited to just Up and Down. To go left, you would hit a button for Reverse that switches your direction. Apparently Williams put in a 4/8 way joystick mode in the software. Older versions of MAME had the code in there, but it had to be enabled. I dug around in MAME 2003 and discovered this functionality exists!
To see what I mean, connect a USB keyboard to your Raspberry Pi and start either Defender or Stargate in MAME 2003. Hit the TAB key to get to the MAME menu and select the "Input (this game)" option. You will see left and right controls at the bottom. You will not be able to assign them to the left and right joypad actions (or any other action for that matter.) To enable this function, we need to turn cheats on. You don't actually have to add a cheat XML database. Just turn the ability for cheats on.
Brows to
\\retropie\configs\all(or/opt/retropie/configs/allif you are using ssh) and open the retroarch-core-options.cfg config file. Search for:mame2003-cheats = "disabled"change it to
mame2003-cheats = "enabled"and save the file.
Reboot. Next time you run Defender or Stargate, the input controls for left and right will be AUTOMATICALLY mapped to the gamepad! You don't even need to edit the settings.
BTW, MAME4ALL has this mode on by default, but the emulation in MAME 2003 is much better.
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Currently running 4.4 with latest updates, Pi 3 b+
I'm resurrecting this topic because this doesn't seem to work anymore. I put mame2003-cheats = "enabled" into retroarch-core-options.cfg but no 8-way movement.
This WAS working last year so some change has been made to mame2003 since. Can we please put this back the way it was? I don't think anyone here wants to have to use mame4all.
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