“It just works”: MAME OS X & Totally Cheap GamePad
I recently had a hankering to play a bit of classic video games and downloaded MAME OS X. Awesome port; Dave Dribin has done a completely kick-ass job!
Of course, playing via keyboard is painful. Especially for a 7 year old.
So, I browsed over to amazon and looked up USB game pads. Finally, I settled on the one pictured at the left. Why that one? Cheap and delivered via Prime.
Ordered and received.
Opening the box revealed no drivers. Going to the Logitech website revealed only Windows drivers. Searching around revealed some HID hackery that might work with some god-awful keyboard mapping things.
Wait — maybe MAME OS X has a clue in its documentation. If it has any.
It does! Built in! And it says:
Using Joysticks and Gamepads
USB joysticks and gamepads should be detected when the game starts up. MAME OS X does its best to map joystick buttons and inputs to MAME inputs. The player mappings should be based on which USB port the joystick is plugged into. If you have multiple joysticks, and the player order is incorrect, try swapping the USB ports.
OK… here goes!
It just works.
Dave, dude, you rock. Beers on me the next time we are in the same city. Thank you.
The game pad, btw, is about what you’d expect for $10. It works, but doesn’t compare to real arcade sticks. Maybe I’ll rip it apart when I get home and solder it into my big old honkin’ scrap wood arcade control deck.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:50 am
*blush*… thanks.
BTW, if you’re serious about using real sticks, I’d suggest looking at a keyboard encoder, like the I-PAC. It’s a tad more expensive, but it’s less hacking and ultimately more flexible.
-Dave
November 9th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
[...] Now — more than ten years after it was built — MAME is all the rage and Dave Dribin has produced an awesome port of MAME to Mac OS X. As well, USB technology has evolved such that “HID Compliant” devices are fairly common and cheap. That plus some awesome work in MAME OS X means that plugging in any HID compliant game controller “just works”. [...]
April 29th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Looks like a good pad, specialy if it has digital controlles then you can hack it up for MAME usage, but like Dave i can also recommend the I-Pac and use microswitch joysticks. One can program different controlsets for all the emulator/games.
Working great here!
August 7th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
VERY VERY excited to play on old fav called Wardner. Got an adaptor to use PS1 controller. Plugged it in and it worked. Problem was, it was using an unusual button arrangement so I went into the menu that alters the controls for the game. I went to Button 1 and hit enter, it awaited the new button input. I hit the square button on the controller… nothing… I hit all the buttons… nothing. I hit the spacebar. It added the spacebar to the list of buttons that it would now consider to be button 1. I somehow figured out that holding function and escape would restore the button to default. However, now the game no longer recognizes my PS1 controller AT ALL.
Please help
Thank You