ugh...what am I doing wrong??

[Fullasoul]

First off, hello.....my first time here, only just found out about Game EX 3 days ago, and although I'm already at a snag, I GREATLY look forward to how much I can seemingly do from within this nice frontend

So, today I spent the day graphing out a custom key layout that would correspond with Game EX, MyTheatre, and MAME...all within one "template" for my programmable gamepad. I assign everything to keyboard strokes (NOT gamepad buttons), and both Game EX and MyTheatre have reacted just as I expected them to. But perhaps it's just been a long time since I've tweaked with MAME and I'm missing something, because for the life of me, I CANNOT get it to hold my custom keystrokes in default.cfg! I have "initialize joystick" DISABLED in GameEX (since my gamepad is only emulating keyboard strokes), I have "0" next to "joystick" in mame.ini, I've tried both editing the default.cfg from WITHIN MAME (using the "Input - General" screens) AS WELL AS manually in a text editor. Each time I set it the way I want it, I start up Game EX and miraculously, my default.cfg has been overwritten by a new one with MAME's default key assignments! I even tried making default.cfg read-only...and interestingly, enough, while my default.cfg file remained unaltered, the settings were not used when I got into MAME (only the standard MAME defaults again!!).

Could someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong? I mean I know it's been a couple years since I really spent some time with MAME, but this step really shouldn't be brain-surgery.....

Thanks in advance,

Fullasoul

[djrobx]

I don't know what causes this either, but somewhat recently I started having this same problem. With the same build of MAME I was running that used to be fine. I need to investigate further. In my case it doesn't seem to be totally consistent. Sometimes MAME tosses out my settings, other times they're fine.

Are you running MAME from a network share?

-- Rob

[Fullasoul]

nope...running it locally....right now I'm using the newest version of fastmame, but just for the sake of ruling things out I will go and try it with the latest "official" MAME. I've configured and reconfigured MAME more times that I care to recall over the years, but admittedly it's been awhile....so I was hoping that this came down to either me making an oversight somewhere, or there being a switch/option in Game EX that I'm not familiar with that's causing the ruckus. By all logical accounts, and especially when it very quickly and easily will hand me game-specific cfg's, there simply is no reason why it won't edit/save/use/reuse my default.cfg without wiping it out each time I start up....

Fullasoul

[Fullasoul]

well whadayaknow....I'm NOT crazy after all

Turns out it was indeed the build of MAME I was using (fastmame). I installed plain 'ol MAME and it works perfectly

Of course I'd donate limbs if I could ever figure out how to get ADVMAME working on my TV, but that's a lost cause...

Fullasoul