What's the Best Way to Access Arcade Bookkeeping?

AlphaBetaPie

I find that most arcade games are a bit too difficulty to enjoy on their default settings (usually fighting games, which were designed to suck quarters and make the arcade owners money). If it were a SNES game, the difficultly could be easily adjusted in the menu. Obviously, MAME is a different animal. I was wondering how most handle needing to access these kinds of back-end screens on their arcade games that were never meant to be seen by the public. Is there a universal default or hotkey in Retroarch that lets you pull most of these menus up? I'd hope I could do it on the fly with my controller or arcade stick. Or will I always need a keyboard for that sort of thing?

AlphaBetaPie

Anyone have a good tips on this? Would be nice to easily change out my arcade settings on the fly (when the quarter-munching starts kicking my ass and I need to dial down the difficulty)

gomisensei

@alphabetapie i believe if you use advanceMAME, you can blanket set difficulty levels for many games with one config file entry. Otherwise, you'll need to set up a keybind to the "service menu" which is default f2 in mame based emu's.

Crush

Depends on which emulator you use, enable the menu from the retroarch menu, or press and hold start.

lostless

@alphabetapie depends on the game and emulator. Some games have it built it into the games software. To access that menu on FBneo, hold start for 5 seconds. In MAME, f2 on a keyboard is the default.
Other games, mainly older ones from the 80s, used physical switches (dip switches) which can be virtually switched on and off. In FBNeo, those are located in the retroarch Options menu. In mame, the default is tab on a keyboard and go down to dip switches.

IanDaemon

If you're in lr-mame emulators you can just hit TAB to get to the "mame menu" and most (not all) games have a difficulty setting.