A few questions about configuring buttons and PlayChoice-10

DigDugged

I am using PiMame to "stealth MAME" an original Dig Dug machine - doing my absolute best to preserve all of the wiring and not alter the physical machine at all.

I have 4 buttons and a joystick - 1P, 2P, Left-handed Pump and Right-handed pump. I just read in the FAQ that pressing 1P+2P will kick me back to the AdvMAME game selection menu, which is awesome! Anyone know how to get it to kick back to advmenu if you've booted directly to a ROM? I could have it boot to advmenu and then have admenu immediately load DigDug upon first boot, maybe? I want it to boot to DigDug when I power on the Pi, then have the ability to select another rom from advmenu.

So now I need to figure out how to set up a button for "Insert Coin" - anyone figured this out? I might set 2P to do this. Can a button have two functions assigned to it? For example, if I wanted the "Right-handed pump" button to be the 'game select' button in AdvMAME, and also do the pump action in Dig Dug, will that work?

Also, I'm noticing that AdvMAME doesn't recognize half of the ROMS I throw at it - these are all early-mid 80's games, nothing fancy. If I put 80 ROMs in the /roms directory, perhaps 30 will show up in the menu, and I've set the filter to show everything (working, non-working, etc). Turns out I just need to find v0.0106 of some ROMS. Got it, working on that.

But it doesn't seem to show any PlayChoice-10 games at all - can anyone point me in the right direction? I've googled like crazy, but it seems like no one has ever tried to run a PlayChoice-10 on a Raspberry Pi before.

mastersurrealist

A good trick on coin-up by the Mame guys is to put a cherry switch behind the reject button or just shave a button down and put it inside the reject tray.
On the ROM issue I know there is a program that will batch convert/DL roms to whatever version you need. You might just register then search on a MAME forum.
A question for you is if the Pi performs better than a 60-1 board?

DigDugged

A quick update -

Insert Coin button - I mapped the 2 button (i.e. Player 2 button) to also be the Insert Coin button. All of these old Vertical, one joystick games had hot-seat multiplayer anyway, so a "2 player" mode won't be missed. I could have just as easily set "1P + Right Pump" to be the Insert Coin button, whichever.

I also remapped the "Player 1 action button 1" (AKA L-ctrl) to the Enter button. Why? So I can use the enter button to select games in Advmenu. Probably a way to do the opposite (map the select button to L-ctrl in Advmenu) but I'm an idiot and I can't figure it out.

Gave up on how to boot directly into a game with the option to load advmenu when you quit that game. Just booting straight into advmenu.

Temporarily giving up on ROM compatibility - I really just want a handful of classics, don't want to build a master box of all 600+ vertical ROMs. Doesn't seem to matter what MAME version of each ROM I use, even tried clrmamepro.

Also giving up on Playchoice-10 for now - tried everything, just doesn't seem like advmame on the Pi will run them.

I would absolutely recommend this over some 60-1 board - but then again, I'm far more interested in tinkering with software than I am tinkering with electronics. The cost is about the same, after you buy the Pi and all of the wiring needed.

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