I'm playing "Food Fight (Rev. 3)" (foodf.zip) using SDLMAME 128u1. I played the original game while a teenager in the 1980's, and was happy to find that I could dork around playing this game again. But, I discovered two annoying problems with that game I am unable to resolve, and would like some tips or help on the matter. Here are the two annoying behaviors I see:
- When the game is first initialized, and I begin playing using the joystick (a Logitech Cordless RumblePad 2), and then let go of the joystick, the character moves to the right as if the joystick is pressed to the right. This continues from game to game within the same MAME session, until for some unknown reason, it stops this behavior, which leads me to the second mode of behavior.
- The second mode of behavior is similar to the first above, but instead of moving to the right when I let go of the joystick, he just looks to the right without moving.
Both of these conditions really hampers game play. The first one is a bit more severe than the second, as it means I can't really pause and have to keep moving. The second hampers a main strategy I could use on the real machine: I need to rotate the character around without moving very far from the spot containing the fruit items to throw, so that I can repeatedly pick up bits of food, aim, and then fire, thus racking up points. This issue is most frustrating on those levels of the game containing watermelons which offer an inexhaustable supply, unlike bananas, parsley (don't ask), etc., but since I can't stay on the melon, I get to die quickly. <sniff> 
When I approached the people on the SDLMAME forums, I was thinking that this problem was due to misconfiguration or a bad joystick. The helpful folks at the SDLMAME forum helped me work through the obvious questions about a bad joystick, and eliminated that possibility. Reference the long post at Logitech Cordless RumplePad 2 stuck to the right for more background and detail. You will note from that forum posting that others see similar behavior, even on a completely different OS, leading me to wonder if this is a bug in the ROM or a bug in input handling in the underlying MAME that SDLMAME builds upon.
All of that was leadup to ask these questions:
- Did the original Food Fight game suffer from this flaw? I'm hoping someone that reads these posts has access to the real game and can check out what really happens when they let go of the joystick: Does it spring back, and if so, which direction does Charlie Chuck look? I would expect him to stay looking in the same direction in which he is walking. Also, can you stay mostly put by moving the joystick around in a circle?
- Related to the above, is the original Food Fight joystick of the spring-back kind, or was it one of those that just flops around (like the flimsy plastic kind that came with the Tandy (Radio Shack) Color Computer)?
- Can someone point me to some info on how the values produced from this joystick are mapped into values the Food Fight ROM expects? Specifically, where in the MAME code is that translation done? I would want to instrument the code with additional diagnostics (printf's, or equivalent MAME-specific data dumping macros) to monitor: (a) what MAME sees from the OS's joystick device (On Linux, this would be from the /dev/input/js0 device file) as compared to (b) what it stuffs into the ROM's RAM for it to monitor?
Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated. I really like MAME and would like to continue to use it to play this little Food Fight game again!
Thanks,
bgoodr
My name is ${SLICK_TALKING_POLITICIAN}, and I endorsed this message.
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Food Fight Rev 3 looking or walking to the right when not touching joystick
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