After waiting two weeks for a USB mouse to arrive, which was listed in the UK but came through Hong Kong customs on its way here, I could finally get on with the Classicade updates. As you may have read in the previous ramblings about the Classicade, I replaced the PC at the heart of the machine and then had some minor irritations one of which was no right mouse click to sort out Mala Frontend and some other problems.
With the keyboard and mouse plugged in a USB port I tried to get to the options for booting up so I could reset the resolution which kept changing while playing games to something the monitor couldn’t cope with. That took several attempts and 3 different USB ports before it worked, but I set the resolution then hunted for something which had a shortcut which changed the resolution. It turned out to be a setting in the graphics card software which had preset key presses for various resolutions to be set. I disabled those as one of them was ctrl/alt/down arrow and these are mapped to the joystick board as they are used by MAME.
Once again though nothing is ever that easy, the settings on the graphics software kept reverting to their original status. Several attempts later they eventually stayed off. Now I could look at MALA Front end again which needs a right mouse click to open the menu. Once in there and a few settings had been changed it was ready for a test, and we had a front end which worked to choose a game for MAME, but I couldn’t change to a different emulator. More fiddling with settings and menus and then the joystick could be used to move left and right through different emulators and up and down to the desired game, then the 1 player start button can be used to start the selected game.
With all the emulators tweaked to run the games using the joystick and buttons on the Classicade it was time to set MALA’s option to start up with Windows. That set and the computer restarted, and straight into the nice new Frontend of MALA and all ready to rock again. Next on the agenda is adding support for a Wii mote to use on gun based games. One stepat a time though…
