This has been solved. Solution available here:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=115377.0
Hi everyone, I've had this account for a while but I think this might be my first post. Anyway, I've been slowly working out the details for my MAME cabinet and I've thought of a feature that I think some people might find interesting.
In most fighting games it can be a pain in the butt to select a difficulty level. You can usually choose from 8, but it would be nice to be able to let friends playing your cabinet do so without giving them access to the service menu.
Another problem is setting up a two-player match. After one person wins, the loser can put another coin in for a rematch, but only the loser has a choice to change characters.
These problems also apply to some puzzle games, and other games as well.
My solution is to have nine small buttons across the top of the control panel. The buttons are physically mapped to the 0 through 8 keys on a keyboard encoder. In MAME, 0 through 8 are all mapped to load state.
1.sta is a save state where the difficulty is set to 1.
2.sta is a save state where the difficulty is set to 2, etc.
I think you can see where I'm going with this.
0.sta is a save state where both players are ready choose a character on the character select screen.
As you can see, when you are playing you can simply double tap 1 through 8 to reset the game on a different difficulty, or 0 to start a two-player match.
I already have this working perfectly, the one problem is that during the process the messages "Select position to load from" and "State successfully loaded. Warning: save states are not officially supported for this game" are displayed. In this application, these messages look awful and don't make any sense to the end user on a cabinet.
So, to get to my point (finally), I'm wondering if there would be anyone willing to write a .diff that would disable these two particular messages from displaying? I can't do this myself as I have no knowledge of programming in MAME, but I could pay someone some cash through PayPal if need be.
The .diff would have to be compatible with hiscore.diff. I don't mean that I need high scores to be carried over after a load state, I realize that constantly loading state will constantly reset the high scores. This is not a problem. I'll just have to make a decision for each game whether I'd like to use save states or enable high score saving; it's usually not much of a conflict. Games which could use my load state feature (like Street Fighter II) are usually oriented around defeating the computer player or having repeated two-player matches; whereas games that are oriented around getting a high score (like Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong) generally have no need for my load state feature. Anyway, what I need to say is that I will still need the nag-screen and loading-screen removing feaures of hiscore.diff in every game, but high score saving is only needed in games which won't use save states.
It would be optimal to make the buttons load state with one press, instead of double tapping. It could also be neat if the messages were loaded from a .txt file. That way they could be changed to say something more appropriate, or simply left blank to hide them. These would be added bonuses, but I think simply disabling those two messages would be fairly adequate.
Please let me know if anyone is willing to do any of this. Also let me know if there are any other places I should be asking.
Thank you.
Edited by R-Cade (10/19/11 11:38 PM)
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