Help for Mouse/Trackball/Dial/Spinner not working in MAME

[jamos]

There's a good wiki explaining the basics of setting it up in retropie but not much recent info on how to set up MAME2003 MAME2010 etc. for using a Mouse/Trackball or Dial.

I would suggest you first upgrade your Retroarch to the latest version currently 7.6

Next you have to point Retroarch to the right input explained here
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Spinners,-Trackballs,-Lightguns,-and-other-Mouse-Devices

the above page works great for setting up Advanced MAME and I would suggest using it for vector games.

But it really doesn't cover how to get MAME and mouses/trackball/dials to work in games. Sure games that support mouse will work but many MAME roms support trackballs or dials.

All you have to do is add two lines to your \retropie\configs\all directory retroarch-core-options.cfg file

mame2003-dial_device = "mouse"
mame2003-trackball_device = "mouse"

this way MAME2003 will pick up your mouse for roms that use dials and trackballs.

You can do the same for MAME2010 etc. just add MAME2010 where MAME2003 is in same file.

currently I have MAME2003 MAME2010 and MAME2014 working with my mouse and dial on my arcade machine.

If you want to use your dial/spinner (I have a dial and a trackball on my arcade machine) then just save a custom config for that game in Retroarch to use the input you want . In my case my mouse was 0, my dial is 2. Viola now I can play all MAME games with Mouse or Joystick.

As for advanced MAME i like it for some games but as far as I know you cant save states with it which I love to do for games I need to walk away from.

Now I need to add a couple of buttons to my arcade machine to save and load states :)

thanks,
Jamos