uh, keep the keyboard?

Cheers! yeah if it sends me in the right direction ;o)

First, what I would try:
boot up with your ipac/minipac and keyboard plugged in, then type lsmod That will list all of the modules loaded. Then restart with the keyboard unplugged and do it again. figure out if there are any modules not being loaded.

you may want to give this a try (there are instructions for wheezy and jessie):
http://www.kasploosh.com/weblog/14000/14016-debian_jessie_usb_keyboard.html

as far as I can tell, advancemame doesn't handle controls the way that you are hoping. I think that 'or' is about its extent. You can probably find a utility that will allow you to map multiple buttons to specific combos. There's a utility on windows called 'autohotkey' that lets you do that sort of stuff. There may be a linux based version.

so, the script. The script will run through the advmame.rc file looking for a specific regular expression pattern:

pattern = re.compile("((?<=\]\s)|(?<=scan0\]\sor\s))keyboard\[\d,\w+\](?!\sor\skeyboard\[\d,\w+\])")

the pattern looks for keyboard[#,text-or-number] preceded by either '] ' or 'scan0] or' and then it requires that it is not followed by ' or keyboard[#,text]'

so basically it is looking for patterns like this:
input_map[coin1] keyboard[1,scan0] or keyboard[0,1]
input_map[coin2] keyboard[1,2]

and would turn them into this:
input_map[coin1] keyboard[1,scan0] or keyboard[0,1] or keyboard[0,1]
input_map[coin2] keyboard[0,2] or keyboard[1,2]

but it would ignore these lines:
input_map[coin1] joystick[1,1] or keyboard[0,1]
input_map[coin2] keyboard[0,2] or keyboard[1,2]

*note: the pattern is not super robust, so you need to make sure that there are no spaces inside of the brackets ( i.e.- keyboard[1,a] not keyboard[1, a] )

awesome. I'll add that to our configs.