MAMEDEV Forum

I update mame monthly, but the most frustrating thing is re-mapping all my keys with a new mame.ini file. Is there a way to preserve those keymaps? I understand that I can't just keep the default.cfg file if there are updates to the emulator, there just has to be a better way than every month going through and fixing all the keymappying. At one point I tried to hard encode my controllers to match mame defaults and just have my other emulators match the mame input scheme.

cmftblynu wrote: ↑Sat Jan 29, 2022 6:52 pm I update mame monthly, but the most frustrating thing is re-mapping all my keys with a new mame.ini file. Is there a way to preserve those keymaps? I understand that I can't just keep the default.cfg file if there are updates to the emulator, there just has to be a better way than every month going through and fixing all the keymappying. At one point I tried to hard encode my controllers to match mame defaults and just have my other emulators match the mame input scheme.

Nothing in the binary package (for Windows at least) overwrites or deletes your mame.ini or contents therein. Individual mappings for inputs is also handled outside of mame.ini in your CFG folder and in most instances are 100% compatible to previous versions unless major refactoring is happening (which is pretty rare). The biggest problem people seem to have with inability to keep mapping from a controller (plugged in) and after remapping you start MAME with the said controller not plugged in has a chance of wiping out your defaults. Recent releases AFAIK has put in some safeguards to prevent erasure like this happening.

So, what exactly is happening? What you describe shouldn't be possible unless you are modifying the files/overwriting things yourself.

When I update mame, I always create a new ini and compare it to the previous one to see if anything has changed. it if has I bring over all my settings and directories. I thought the default.cfg was overwritten when I extract the new mame exe to the new directory. I used to always lose my keymaps every version and had to start from scratch, now it seems like only player 3 and 4 loses theirs and I only have to remap those. It is so annoying, because once a month I have to redo this...

If you copy the default.cfg file from your previous one, it will retain the settings of the keys.

NB, you must run Mame and a game first before you do this!

I created a batch file that overwrites the file automatically or you can simply copy the file from the previous Mame folder.

Hope that helps, because I also found it really frustrating to have to do that every time.

One thing that is frustrating at the moment for me is having to keep setting the folders each time.