The scenario I have in mind is that I have an Ultimarc Ultra-stik 360, which is a USB HID device that has a small utility for Linux that uploads a "map" to the device so that the analog stick is treated like a digital device where particular positions within the range correspond to "digital"-like behavior (4-way, 8-way, etc.) Under Windows, some of the MAME shells have a provision to launch the corresponding utility with a command line that tells the stick which way to behave before the game starts. I'd love to do the same thing with PiPlay, so, for example launching Qbert would be 4-way diagonals only, or Sinistar would be full analog, or Joust is left-right only, and so forth.
Is there a Pi-Play feature that would allow this kind of preconfiguration from the rom selection menu?
if you edit the 'command:' section for each emulator in the /home/pi/pimame/pimame-menu/config.yaml file, you can prefix your command to the original command. I believe that you just separate them with ' && '
I think that doesn't quite do it: While the command to invoke the utility is always the same, it needs a parameter that specifies which controller map to upload to the stick which will potentially be different for every ROM. So the global config.yaml can't do the job. Is there a rom-specific overlay or override section for this?
On second thought it occurs to me that since the config.yaml allows you to point to a different executable, and obviously must include the romname as a parameter, I could write a trivial script to point PiMame at instead, which would upload the right stick config based on the romname, and THEN launch mame4all.