Mouse Master-function

[sittingduck]

When playing games there is sometimes a crack-intro that requires the user to use the mouse to move up and down in the trainer-menu. And sometimes the user also has to press the right mouse button to exit these menus. This is a drag when playing two player games with two joysticks, because you have to press F12 to change port 0 to use the mouse input, return to the trainer-menu and make selections, then press F12 again, change port 0 back to joystick before being able to play the game.

When I used my real Amiga all those years back I actually had a little piece of hardware - called a Mouse Master - that you plugged both a joystick and the mouse into and then you plugged the Mouse Master to port 0. Then I didn't have to continously switch between a joystick and a mouse in port 0 as the Mouse Master had a small switch that let me decide whether I wanted to use one or the other. And it worked great.

Would it be possible to add some kind of quickswitch for something like this in WinUAE? Maybe by pressing a specific button on the keyboard would switch between the selected input in port 0 and mouse input without having to exit the game by pressing F12.

[DamienD]

Ah, I've also experienced this a few times.

That would be cool thing if possible to emulate under WinUAE

A good example would be for Second Samurai (1993)(Psygnosis)[cr FLT][t +10 FLT]. Basically you need a mouse to get past the crack / trainer menu but when in the game you need to change the mouse over to joystick in order to get play as Player 1...

[sittingduck]

Toni, could you comment on this?

[Toni Wilen]

Manual quick switching: no, going to Ports-panel and switching mouse<>joystick isn't that difficult or slow

Automatic switching (moving mouse/clicking buttons = enable mouse, moving joystick/pressing buttons = enable joystick): Possible in future version.

[sittingduck]

Toni, thanks for answering.
In the absence of quick switching, automatic switching would also be very welcome and I'm crossing my fingers that you will implement it sometime. Keep in mind, though, that if just a tiny movement of the mouse would be all it took to switch from joystick to mouse a lot of two player games might suffer from this. So I vote for switching by using fire- and mouse-buttons only. Thank you for a fantastic emulator.

[Toni Wilen]

What about this generic solution:

- supports all physically connected joysticks/pads/mice
- press button 1-4 -> input device is connected to port 1-4, old device is removed (3 and 4 = parallel port joystick adapter)
- joystick/pad up/down/left/right can also be used to switch ports (if joystick/pad has only one button) eg. Move fully left = connect to port 2 etc..
- only devices that are not connected to any Amiga joystick/mouse port can be switched on the fly.

Anything I missed?

[sittingduck]

Obviously I think switching would be great. But it would be optimal to not exclude keyboard configs because that is what all people running Amiga games on a Mame arcade are using, I think. But I do understand your point that auto-switchable keyboard configs could make it all a little too interesting. That's why I initially proposed some kind of hotkey-combination (eg. CTRL+something) for this. To satisfy my personal needs, all this combination would have to do was to switch between the currently assigned config in port 0 and the mouse and back again.

But I know that you don't like this solution and I respect that. Either way I'll keep enjoying WinUAE - regardless of some tedious joy-switching or not.

[Toni Wilen]

I don't like keyboard shortcuts because they have to be something like END+something+something+Fx. Never forget that Amiga has build-in keyboard...

Also there is another problem with key shortcuts, mapping shortcut keys to joysticks/mice may be quite "random" if done automatically.. I also hate to implement new GUI options

My solution is "automatic", hopefully quite intuitive and there is no need to modify GUI or add new keyboard shortcuts.

[sittingduck]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I don't like keyboard shortcuts because they have to be something like END+something+something+Fx. Never forget that Amiga has build-in keyboard...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this means that you don't want to "steal" keys from the Amiga side and use them on the WinUAE side. But I don't think this would cause any problems with the problem at hand. Because almost everybody who has a Mame arcade use specific keyboard encoders which "translates" the joystick movements to simple key presses from a keyboard. And these encoders can be programmed to access a complicated key combination with just one button press. So you wouldn't have to "steal" any keys for this to work.

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Also there is another problem with key shortcuts, mapping shortcut keys to joysticks/mice may be quite "random" if done automatically.. I also hate to implement new GUI options

Sorry, but I don't quite understand what you mean by this...?

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

My solution is "automatic", hopefully quite intuitive and there is no need to modify GUI or add new keyboard shortcuts.

Would the GUI really need to be modified for this to be implemented? Isn't it basically just an added key shortcut, like eg the F12 key?

Anyways, thanks for replying.