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Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

oh my god retroarch is just THE WORST

it was easier to set up multiple controllers for an emulator twenty years ago

when you got your ROMs on a CD-R off a tarpaulin on the pavement outside a bowling club in Manchester, because when the internet screamed EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-EEEE-BRLGHBLRRBGHLEGHREE for forty seconds it'd still take half an hour to download Ghouls and Ghosts, when you had to start MAME from DOS, using multiple controllers was easier because at least you didn't have to deal with the emulator trying to help

two decades later these retroarch lads have put Clippy in your controller and I've spent literally five hours trying to figure out what the hell retroarch is trying to do, but I'm no closer to figuring out how to tell it to stop

5 June at 14:05 | Open on retro.social
9 comments
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Me, playing Raiden 2 quite happily until the MAME devs put more effort into emulating the copy protection, more perfectly emulating its ability to know it's a bootleg and crash, killing the game for years: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

Me, two decades later, trying to connect a controller: 🦝 This is a retro-gaming elitism thing isn't it

5 June at 14:10 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

I work in coin-ops, I want my controls to break because a rat chewed through a wire or someone puked on it, I don't want it to break because the software got too complicated and tripped over its own arse

Like how is this hard it's 2024 for heck's sake, I thought we had joysticks pretty much sorted out in the 70's

5 June at 14:14 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

When I was sixteen years old I took one of these drawer-style cassette racks and drilled holes in the top to accommodate an arcade joystick and ten buttons.

I took apart a PlayStation controller, sanded off the solder mask, and soldered wires directly to the copper traces, running from the PlayStation pad to my arcade stick's microswitches. Then I went to a computer market and bought a PlayStation to parallel adaptor and plugged this abomination into my printer port because I was still waiting for someone to invent USB, then spent a merry afternoon figuring out how to get DOS to see it, then get MAME to see it, then I enjoyed me some Sunset Riders.

THAT

was an EASIER CONTROLLER SETUP

than FUCKING RETROARCH

When I was sixteen years old I took one of these drawer-style cassette racks and drilled holes in the top to accommodate an arcade joystick and ten buttons.

I took apart a PlayStation controller, sanded off the solder mask, and soldered wires directly to the copper traces, running from the PlayStation pad to my arcade stick's microswitches. Then I went to a computer market and bought a PlayStation to parallel adaptor and plugged this abomination into my printer port because I was still waiting for...

cassette rack, a black ash box roughly the ideal size to make an arcade stick out of
5 June at 14:32 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Hahaha, the pictures are still online!

Arcade joystick crudely made out of a cassette rack, a beige CRT and computer in the background
5 June at 14:41 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Look at this crap, I only had access to the wiring through holes the size of cassette tapes

Still easier than RetroArch

the same crude joystick, but with its cassette drawers open so you can see the wiring stuffed inside
5 June at 14:44 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

You see what I had to squeeze my hands into here, STILL EASIER THAN RETROARCH

A spaghetti wiring nightmare lurking in a tiny box like a spider shying away from the light
5 June at 14:52 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller, breaking both.

RetroArch has a database of controllers that it can, in theory, automatically set up properly; in practice, they're guesses, Clippy for your controller. To fix this problem, I had to erase all the guesses (KILL CLIPPY) and write my own .cfg files.

Sounds hard but honestly that was super easy, it worked pretty much just like 90's MAME or whatever, just press each button to get its code then copy it into the file, the part that took three nights of fiddling was *figuring out that Controller Clippy was the problem.*

Right, last night I FINALLY figured out how to use a bluetooth joypad under RetroArch, with the buttons in the right places, and without killing the built-in controller on the #gameDad.

I'll do a full write-up for gamedad.club later in the week, but as for the general gist, there's a bug in RetroArch where saving a controller profile associates your bindings with the wrong bit of hardware, so when you exit and reload, it loads the bindings for the Bluetooth controller onto the inbuilt controller,...

6 June at 14:30 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

The phases of owning a #gameDad are curiosity, delight, finally getting over your awe and actually playing some games, fiddling, frustration, satisfaction, finally getting over the fiddling and actually playing some games, fiddling some more,

6 June at 14:34 | Open on retro.social
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops replied to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops

🐿 People who start the game
🦝 People who sniff around the options menu and then start the game

Broadly,
🐿 Straightforward people who want to get on with doing the thing they wanted to do in the first place.
🦝 FIDDLERS. They FIDDLE with things. They can't help it. Fiddling with the thing's settings or whatever is an integral part of their enjoyment of the thing.

People who get interested in Game Dads or retro emulation in general tend to be 🦝, because these machines are fiddly by nature, and kinda self-select for 🦝.

EVERYBODY ON THE FEDIVERSE IS 🦝. Fedi's filter bubble isn't its leftiness or its gen-x'ness, it's SCRAPYARD-FINGERED FIDDLERS.

By an overwhelming majority, most people are 🐿.

By an overwhelming majority, 🦝 find it hard to remember that most people are 🐿.

🐿 People who start the game
🦝 People who sniff around the options menu and then start the game

Broadly,
🐿 Straightforward people who want to get on with doing the thing they wanted to do in the first place.
🦝 FIDDLERS. They FIDDLE with things. They can't help it. Fiddling with the thing's settings or whatever is an integral part of their enjoyment of the thing.

6 June at 14:46 | Open on retro.social
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