Reset MAME controls to defaults / advmame-0.94.0RC

Rustypipe

Hello all,

So I was trying to remap my MAME controls so my X-arcade Tankstick controller to try and make it as convent as possible to be able to switch between Mame and other emulators. I did this by loading up any MAME game then pressing Tab and selecting Input (In General). However in the process i accidentally removed the Enter button and disabled my ability to fix this problem. After some digging I found out that MAME's gui that allows you to change the controls updates the following file/files:

advmame-0.94.0.RC and advmame-1.4.rc

This allowed me to remap my Enter button so I could go back into the GUI and finish changing the controls. However after a while I wasn't sure if the new changes would be great and I wanted to revert back to the default settings. However I cannot find a way to do this.

The MAME wiki states the following:

AdvanceMAME and Mame4all-Pi

While in a game press Tab to open the menu to set up controls

Mame4all Menu (RGUI) Configuration is stored in

/opt/retropie/configs/mame-mame4all/cfg/default.cfg

Other files in this cfg directory are ROM specific configs.

Note: Should your input configuration or other aspect of the RGUI configuration need resetting to defaults, remove the default.cfg or ROM specific .cfg file, and it will be re-created with default values next time you start Mame4all or modify the ROM configuration.

However this default.cfg does not exist. I even tried creating it with no effect. I also tried renaming the advmame-0.94.rc and advmame-1.4.rc files to see if the program would re-write them as defaults but it didn't. The MAME launches just crashes if those files are not there. So how does one reset the MAME controls back to default?

One other question, when mapping a track ball would you use the same TAB GUI interface in the Input General to map the track ball?

Please let me know,

caver01

@Rustypipe Yeah, I think the wiki is simply incorrect to lump AdvanceMAME together with Mame4all-Pi. AdvanceMAME stores everything, even individual game configs in the single .rc file (you can point to a different config in your commandline, but we aren't doing that). So, that said, you are correct to dive into the .rc file for edits of this kind. Other versions of MAME use the cfg files, but not AdvanceMAME as far as I can tell.

I always make a copy of the original before I start editing so I can refer back to it or revert if I ever need to, but mine might already have a few changes to it. Could you reinstall this emulator using the RetroPie setup? Otherwise, the source file has to be out there for you to download somewhere.

Regarding trackball setup, you can read the wiki page I wrote on this topic which takes a deep dive into analog controls for AdvanceMAME. And, NO, you are not able to fully control your input mapping for a trackball by just using the in-game GUI menu. There are some things you need to do in the .rc file first (and a few linux tests that are worth your time as well).

Rustypipe

Thanks for the quick reply.

Yeah I guess I'm going to have to source out the source file. As the setup doesn't seem to replace the file from the reading I've done unless I nuke everything and just start over. I noticed the Input this game has the default settings still. Which RC files this game sit in. I could always copy that into a new .rc file for the global config if I want to revert no?

caver01

@Rustypipe I just checked my backups and I have two original versions I can post.

caver01

@Rustypipe I grabbed some backups of my originals from March. I added the display_width and display_height that were added by Buzz recently. These two settings default to 640 and 480 respectively, and ONLY affect the resolution of vector games.

I also recommend fixing the sound latency line like this: sound_latency 0.05

advmame-0.94.0.rc

advmame-1.4.rc

Rustypipe

Thank you very much. I'll keep this handy in the event I need to revert back or something goes horribly sideways again.

Cheers

mmquayno

Hi!

I've done something similar and thoughtless started editing MAME controls when accidentally selecting Input (In General) and removed the ENTER button. I'm having trouble resetting the (In General) Inputs to it's default settings. Can you tell me where in the GUI you were able to amend this problem...??

Cheers

caver01

@mmquayno You might try adding the line: input_map[ui_select] enter to change it to enter, but if you mapped this to something else, check the .rc file for this line assigned to something else and just fix it.

mmquayno

@caver01 Excellent!! Problem solved. Thank you very much.

JasonSample

How do I get access to and alter an *.rc file? I need to do it to get my spinner to work, but I have no idea how to alter that file in the first place. I don't know where it is.

Thanks,
Jason

caver01

@JasonSample You probably want to use AdvanceMAME 1.4 and the config file for that version can be found here:
/opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame/advmame-1.4.rc

You could use nano at the command line to edit the file, but setting up a spinner properly in AdvanceMAME would have you scrolling so much to find specific lines you would be better off loading a GUI desktop and editing the file in an editor that makes it easier to search, copy and paste, etc. I always access these over a network connection and open the configs folder where you will find the same file under the mame-advmame folder.

JasonSample

@caver01

Thanks a bunch. I am really not very good with computers anymore so I might have a hard time doing what you have described. I will give it a try, though.

Peace,
Jason

caver01

@JasonSample You won't get your spinner working in AdvanceMAME without editing that file. You might have better luck using lr-mame2003 which will basically work without configuration.

JasonSample

@caver01 Thanks so much. I will try that again. I think that it what I am running Arkanoid and Tempest on.

Jason