Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part II: Advanced Hacks, Tools, and Techniques

Begin by opening up a sample file, and place a bunch of known characters

for each port. Run the KE72LOAD.EXE program and open Notepad. Now

just start pressing keys, and write down what you see on the screen for all

the Player 1 and/or 2 and MISC buttons. Once you’ve completed this step,

it is a simple matter to track down which character you assigned to which

port and to begin replacing that character with the MAME characters. If

you like, you can trace all the wiring back into the ribbon cable and all the

way down, but this can be tedious and error-prone. When you press the

keys and observe the results, you’re guaranteed to know which

port connects to what.

Once you’ve programmed all the keys, spend some time check-

ing out a few games and playing around with the config file.

It’s probably a good idea to go into the TAB configuration in

MAME and set up all the files (even if you basically use all the

same keys) for the General Control. For example, in games

that use two joysticks for one player control, like BattleZone

and Bezerk, MAME doesn’t use the Player 2 joystick as the

Player 1’s right joy. So go into the General Control and change

it so that all two-joystick games will be set up this way. Also,

MAME doesn’t have Player 2 buttons 5 to 10 assigned to any

keys. This can be fixed here also. Once ...