Hello.
I didn' find a section for a first post / presentation of myself, so I will do it within this post, better thant nothing I hope.
I built my own arcade cabinet last year, with an LCD, Raspberry Pi3, and an IPAC. I first used Retropie, but after months, decided to put a PC inside, in order to have more power and be able to run more recent PC games also.
I first tryed Hyperspin (HyperFreeSpin in fact), but spent too many days working on it, reading forums, and it was so a hard work, with mixed results, that I decided to give up last week-end. It was the 3rd complete week-end of work, added to every evenings during the last 3 weeks...
I then discovered GameEx, and I found it to be very nice, well developped, and the concept seemed very pleasant. I choosed a complete lifetime pass, in order to be able to use everything, and started to install and configure.
But I'm stuck, in the middle of nowhere.
I found a few posts/topics, concerning the IPAC (which I know is a keyboard encoder). I know also that we must replace the firmware of the newer versions (post 2015) with a special one which makes the gamepad function inactive (which helped a lot on Retropie and other distributions). I followed the entire advanced wizard, and saw where to assign keys (generated by the IPAC) in order to control the GameEx interface, but I can't find where to remap keys emulator by emulator for game controls using a GUI. It seems there isn't any GUI for that, inside GameEx. I saw the "advanced config" exe, which seems to help remapping keys, but I'm not sure I must use it. I searched also in the different ini files, but never found a simple, comprehensive section in these files, where I can see :
- Coin 1=
-Coin 2=
- Start 1=
- Start 2=
- button A=
- button B=
- button X=
- button Y=
- button L =
button R=
... and so on, as in any other frontend I tryed in the past.
I only found sections with button 1, 2, 3... 15 as I can remember, but how to make the relation between these numbers and the usual controls (A, B, X, Y, L, R, coin 1/2, start 1/2) ?
Must I do it all manually, using the virtual key codes (I saw that in a few posts), corresponding to keyboard inputs, and assign them to the different buttons numbers ? but how to know how to map them ?
Also, tell me if it's better replacing the original keys generated by the IPAC 2, with letters only, instead of "tab", ctrl", etc... This is important, as these keys are originally choosed because they are the keys used as standard in Mame... (even if I know it can be reconfigured later in Mame, for all games, or game by game). (For information, I attached the IPAC default keys)
And what about the other emulators ? Is it like in other frontends, for which you must configure control keys for each emulator ?
So as you can understand, it's very disappointing (maybe it's not the right word, sorry, I'm french), because I'm lost. I thought GameEx was a big GUI, nearly plug and play (as Retropie), compared to Hyperspin, but in my case, with an IPAC, it seems it's not...
I'm very sorry if I seem like "another newbie"... but I've searched and read a lot in this forum, without success... maybe i missed something... not sure...
Thank you for your help.
Stephane.
IPAC2 keys.pdf