mame, binding keyboard keys to gamepad.

[rweth]

All I am working with the old starwars rom (1983 atari edition)

I have the newest MAME, MAMEPLUS, and v.174 (64bit + NoNag + Hi-score + Forced Directinput)

I am trying to get the Microsoft sidewinder dual strike to work with this game with and any all of them and so the first thing I got was xpadder and mapped some buttons for

•     the mouse left click and the mouse right click (since I don't have nor want XP and that controller is part of another project not nativley supported by MS anymore)
•     the numeric digit 5
•     mouse x & y axis

The mouse input  works for moving the cursor works fine .. but the keyboard not so much.

I cannot get any keyboard action and I have tried a number of crazy uninformed stuff for about 2 hours. ( read data suggests direct input is the solution, but not empirically sadly)

I thought I cracked the case with:

c:\mameplus>mamep.exe -contrast 2.0 starwars
Assign joystick SideWinder Dual Strike USB version 1.0 to player 0

Because it said it assigned the joystick .. but NO. Also this silly thing

"-keyboardprovider dinput"    ... -mouse .. and sorta everything but the kitchen sink .. NOTHING. The really weird thing is one of the buttons (the D whatever that is) is mapped to none but generates a

mouse click. How could I begin to either read up on or get the keyboard input to this game. Frankly the control input for the game map via tab is a absolute mystery to me .. no idea how one navigates through this. Anyway yes complete nube any and all help appreciated.

 

[rweth]

Ok I think I got it .. sometimes you just need a break. So I used the mame v.174 (64bit + NoNag + Hi-score + Forced Directinput)

with the following:  > mame64.exe -contrast 2.0 -keyboardprovider dinput starwars

The mapping of keys suddenly started to work. One semi dumb thing was thinking the left | right mouse click triggered the laser from teh starwars rom .. it doesn't. Its the space-bar .. so when I mapped that to my fore control using xpadder things seem much brigther.

Im thinking this is resolved. Must say I really love MAME and look forward to many happy hours of fruitless digital activity!