anth72

Indeed the Mame devs changed qberts inputs in 118 so as to only allow a single directional input in the default map. By creating an ultramap with the diagonals mapped to ordinals (essentially a copy of the 4-way diagonal but replacing the upper right with UP the lower right with RIGHT, Lower Left with DOWN and upper left with LEFT) I was able to program and play the qbert games correctly. Hopefully this saves any time and hopefully is an easy addition to the plug-in.

This looks great, I have been looking for a plug-in for this. I actually wrote a small script to create the 6,000 some odd ugc files so as to be able to map using a shell command from Gameex. This actually works great and now that I have the files, adding them isn't a problem but an automated plug-in is by far the way to go. Thanks for this! One note to the prior poster, I recently upgraded to mame 119 and am not able to send multiple joystick directions to a 4-way diagonal game. Whether my sticks are in analog,8-way or 4-way diagonal, the game only sees one of the directions. This is only the case with all of the q-berts ( I just upgraded and discovered this last night) So I am not sure this is the plug-in, it could be Mame. Does anyone know if the Mame devs did something to these 4-way diagonal games? I could see that all 4-way input games may not even accept the multiple signals now. Which would only really be a problem for the diagonal games that commonly get mapped to two directions being input at once. Since they really are only 4 way games with the joystick rotated, I could foresee this being a problem when trying to use a diagonal only map. Can someone tell me how this plug-in maps for q-bert? And are you able to program qbert in Mame119 with this map?

I have made the changes to my system and am able to play games in attract mode some of the time. However I have confirmed that it indeed "hangs" on certain games. They will sometimes stay for several cycles, then finally switch. When this is is the case, hitting a key causes a jump to the next game in attract mode, versus exiting. When this attract mode is "stuck" hitting the coin will insert a coin but any other key will jump it to the next game (exit). Are there settings that can cause this? I am using mame106. I am thinking of going to version 119 to see if it helps. However it runs fine on my other system with 106 as far as not getting "stuck" on a game. On that system pressing a key always exits to the menu. I don't have that one set to play yet. All help is greatly appreciated.

That makes sense, I just didn't want to program my buttons differently unless I knew it was set to work with 5 and 6. My plan is to make it so my coin ejects key a button mapped to "insert coin". I have an old tekken-3 modded machine that Gameex really has improved. Tom and everyone else who helped have done a great thing here.

I have read most of the forums and haven't seen exactly what I am looking for as far as a solution to my problem. I have 2 setups and I am not able to play games from the attract mode. Do the coin keys have to be mapped to "1" and "2" etc? I have my coin 1 mapped to "numenter" in Mame. When I hit this key it does put a coin in, sometimes it exits attract mode after a few seconds. Other times it exits when I press any other key on the game, such as start 1 player game, or jump, fire, etc. I am under the impression that once you put in a coin, it isn't in attract mode anymore. Is this correct? I could see that the coins would need to be mapped to 5,6 or whatever the default mame setup is for this to work. On a side note, I have a setup that seems to hang on certain games. It appears that sometimes it hangs on a game for several cycles (time between games in config for attract). When one game is exited it goes direct to another game which needs to be exited before returning to the main menu. So that is a "hang" problem of sorts. How does Gameex actually kill the mame process? Does it run the "launch before" or "launch after" commands between games? It appears to. Please forgive me if I have missed this attract mode stuff here or in the documentation.

Ok so it is the ability to skip to the next letter of the alphabet that is Enabled or Disabled in the configuration. Not the ability to jump to the first game starting with the letter of a key that is pushed. That is always on it appears. I was confused because I use a cabinet and most of my buttons are mapped to other keys in Gameex so only a few actually cause a jump to the page in the list starting with the letter that the button is mapped to. I thought that was "alpha paging" I admit I don't read much documentation initially, but should as it is clearly called out.

I actually am not able to turn off alpha paging on one of my setups. I haven't spent tons of time trying to fix it but am curious what it could be. The config file appears to be correct. Can anyone give me some ideas of where this setting can possibly be set other than in the main part of the config?

Sorry for the confusion, The correct information in the Gameex.ini file is this: ShellBeforeLaunch=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\[ROM].ugc" ShellOnExit=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\8-Way.ugc" Your file has the ShellbeforeLaunch= and ShellOnExit= in there twice, It should read exactly as above. You don't need to add the entire line, simply find the enteries ShellBeforeLaunch= and ShellOnExit= in the gameex.ini file then add the part after the equal sign so that it reads as written above exactly. That was definitely a problem in your ini file. One other thing I realized is that I only put the game maps in the zip file. I have attached a file that also contains the default mappings such as 4-way and 8-way. That would have prevented the mapping back to 8-way upon exit of a game. So please your current C:\ultramapsmame with the maps from the file attached to this post. Now an easy way to test this is to open notepad and paste in the following: C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\8-Way.ugc" Save the file with the name Test.bat, make sure notepad is set to save it as "all files" else it will save it as test.bat.txt Now open ultramap, program your joysticks to Analog, and then close ultramap. Double click and run the batch file created above. Now open ultramap, Are they set to 8-way? If not it is either a path issue or the fact my files are created with 2 joysticks (Ids 1 and 2 in ultramap) if you have more joysticks or less that could be the problem If the batch file doesn't work, just let me know how many joysticks you have and what Ids they have in ultramap and I can help you with the setup. The seamless switching between games is worth it for sure. This does work with mame32 as well. ultramapsmame.zip

Step1 Make sure your UltraMap is installed at C:\Program Files\Ultramap if not replace C:\Progra~1\Ultramaps with the path to your installed ultramap Note that C:\Progra~1 is the dos short name for "C:\Program Files" Sorry for any confusion that may cause, I think you can use quotes to get around the problem that the space in Program Files creates. Step2 Put all the ugc map files in C:\ultramapsmame Step3 Edit the Gameex.ini file You will find both of the lines ShellBeforeLaunch= and ShellOnExit= in that file. Make them read ShellBeforeLaunch=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\[ROM].ugc" ShellOnExit=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\8-Way.ugc" Then save. OR for step3 You can also just use the "Advanced Configuration Tool" and then go to "advance Mame" You will find both of these enteries there as well. Just add the part after the = sign and hit save. Sorry for the confusing post above.

The ultrastick plugin only worked during one of my many cycles at attempting it. I felt like upgrading the software had done the trick, however it could be that my testing of it actually working was flawed. What always worked was the programming into 8-way mode while entering the program. However it never changed the mappings when entering a game. I could set the joystick to 2-way left right, then enter the game and it would be 8-way, but if I played a game like 1942 that I had set to 2-way, it would leave it 8-way, also It is easy to tell in games like donkey kong or btime that it never was programming it to 4-way when entering a game. The ultramap interface never showed in any situation. The UGC files I posted will work if you have 2 joysticks. Possibly one. You can use this command while running Gamex in a windowed mode to see if any errors are generated. ShellBeforeLaunch=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\[ROM].ugc" /errorgui:25 again the paths are relative to my setup but if installed ultramap to the default and put the ugc files into a folder C:\ultramapsmame your joysticks will be programmed. You can test it by removing the "ShellOnExit=" command. Program the joysticks using the Ultramap to Analog, then start Gameex, run dkong, then exit, start the Ultramap, and note that it is now 4-way. Ultramap only reports the correct mapping as it starts, so you can't leave it running to see if the mappings are changing. This is probably way too much detail but I spent too much time trying to figure out if that plugin was working or not. It doesn't seem like many have posted here about it so I hope this helps. I found Gameex in search of a front end that would let me map my joysticks easily. It provides that plus so much more, thanks to Tom and everyone who worked on this elegant program.

I was able to get this plugin to work very briefly. I tried every thing I could think of, very systematically trying to figure out what made it work. I thought it was the updated Ultramap that fixed it. Possibly it was because I was using an older Gameex version as I was just trying it for the first time. I am pretty convinced that this plugin does not work with the current gammexx software. However it is super easy to have Gameex program the joysticks for you. Put this in the config: ShellBeforeLaunch=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\[ROM].ugc" ShellOnExit=C:\Progra~1\UltraMap\UltraMap.exe "C:\ultramapsmame\8-Way.ugc" Where "C:\ultramapsmame" is the location of the ugc files After I configured the games in the plugin, (some are wrong by default), I took the config.XML then parsed it to create a couple of batch files to create the individual game UGC files from the basic mapping UGC files. The plugin xml output seemed like the easiest place to find the correlating data between games and mappings. I ended up correlating them to the shortnames (roms) because of the illegal file characters in the long ones. Note that you want to disable the plugin after doing all of this. Here is a zip file of all of the ugc files that I use. You could just use this and the commands above, then use the Ultra Map program to manually change any of the files that aren't correct. ultramaps.zip

I recently tried Gamex as a front end for my Mame machines and find that it is a very elegant front end. After discovering that there was a plugin for my Ultrasticks, I couldn't have been happier. I have mame118 as mame.exe in the c:\mame folder My ultramap is located at C:\Program Files\Ultramap and gamex is in the c:\Program Files\Gamex folder with the proper files in the C:\Program Files\Gamex\Plugins\ultrastik_plugin directory. I will post my xml file if need be. I was able to configure the plugin, with no problem, it created the complete list. When I change one for testing purposes to 2-way or 4-way diagonal, it doesn't change it in the game. It did save the changes to the xml file It does change the stick to 8-way when loading Gamex as well. So I do think it is making a call. I added a few maps to see if the plugin would pick them up in the configuration mode. It didn't, It still only had the original ones. I did remove the xml file and have it recreate it. My question is, would the plugin find any maps if the Path were wrong? It seems to me this may be a path issue as it doesn't "see" any of my additional maps in the Ultramap directory. any other considerations? I still have the free version, am using Mame32 for my emu, but have tested with mame with the same results. This plugin is my missing link to a super user friendly multi-arcade machine. Thanks for the work on this. Just an update, it turns out an updated Ultramap did the trick. Thanks for this great software!