Can't seem to get off-screen reload working on Mame32

Question

I'm trying to play some light gun games on Mame and Mame32. I tried mame gamename -offscreen_reload -mouse, and that didn't work, even though the wiki faq specifically says that this is the way to make this possible. It's supposed to make Player 1 Button 2 an 'off-screen reload' button.

I tried with multiple roms.

Answer

Offscreen reload is only an option if you're using a light gun - it overrides button 2 of the light gun to set the position of the gun off the edge of the screen and also counts as a "fire" operation.

The MAME manual describes it thus:

Controls whether or not MAME treats a second button input from a lightgun as a reload signal. In this case, MAME will report the gun's position as (0,MAX) with the trigger held, which is equivalent to an offscreen reload. This is only needed for games that required you to shoot offscreen to reload, and then only if your gun does not support off screen reloads. The default is OFF (-nooffscreen_reload).

I dug into the source of the input code, and found the section where it checks the offscreen_reload switch. It's only used when lightguns are used for input. The command line switch is mapped to a instance variable called "m_device.lightgun_reload_button" which is only checked if the input device is a lightgun. See src/input/emu.c for more details.

Therefore, this won't work with the mouse - you'll have to move the cursor to the edge of the screen and press FIRE, and this will only work if you're playing a game that supports offscreen reload (not all games had a "reload" function).

It seems like it might be possible to change the source to add a feature like you'd want, but that's something you'd probably want to ask the developers of MAME with assistance with.

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Name of retro 2d shooter game

Question

I'm trying to find a game I used to play on the coin-op something like 15-20 years ago. It is a 2d shooter game, seen from the top, with vertical scrolling. Your character hat to shoot and destroy or enemies, like tanks, and armored aliens. It was ambiented in extraterrestrial planets, space plants, etc. You started with simple guns, then could find much more powerful weapons. My favorite one with a violet/purple "bubble" that went around you and had a large rage. You also had a number of bombs that you could use, where you were in difficult situations with a lot of enemies, or that you could throw again the final monsters.

I found it for MAME a few years ago, but then lost it...

Any help is appreciated!

Answer

FOUND! It is OUTZONE gamerfish.com/action/outzone

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Crash and Reboot When Running mame.exe (MAME Emulator)

Question

I downloaded the latest version of the MAME Emulator (version 0.142 - mame0142b.exe) from the address below recently:

http://mamedev.org/release.html

Unfortunately, when I execute the mame.exe file from the command line it just crashes (screen goes black for a second, then PC reboots by itself - no error is shown). I've tried running it without any ROMs, but still got the same problem.

I have the latest drivers installed (275.33) for my NVIDIA GeForce 6100 nForce 405. I am using Windows XP Home SP 3.

Could you please advise how to get the emulator to run without crashing?

Here is the error I received (after disabling automatic restart):

Technical Information:

STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0xBD1B1642, 0xB1078658, 0x00000000) nv4_disp.dll - Address BD1BD1642 base at BD012000, DateStamp 4dd7387f

Answer

A video driver bug is the most likely culprit. Try running mame in a window instead of fullscreen with the switch -window. You could also try -video gdi.

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