How to disable pop-up settings menu in AdvMAME

[triggerhappy]

I'm seeing an annoying behavior in AdvanceMAME where a little white rectangular settings menu suddenly pops up at the bottom of the screen while I'm in the middle of playing games. The menu allows changes to Volume, Gamma levels, etc.

I presume this is a hotkeys behavior triggered by some combination of button presses and/or joystick movements, but I can't for the life of me figure out what that combination is so as to open or close it intentionally. Instead, it only seems to appear when I don't want it to, frequently going unnoticed at first until I see it at the bottom of the screen, cycling haphazardly thru and making unintentional adjustments to various settings as I move the joystick.

When this happens, I basically end up having to exit the game because I don't know how to close the menu. More frustratingly, it's not clear to me whether the changes I made inadvertently persist when I reopen the game since I don't know how to reopen the menu deliberately to check.

Does this pop-up menu have a name (I've tried googling, but I can't seem to find anything useful)? Is it possible to turn off that feature? And if the settings changed unintentionally are saved on exit, how would I restore them back to defaults?

Hopefully it's not an all-or-nothing scenario with re. to hotkeys. I still want to be able to hold down the P1 button to exit a game, for example, but I'd really like to disable the hotkeys associated with this menu.

Thanks!

[dee2eR]

I don't believe I've experienced this before. Happy to check it out and see if I can replicate it. Any particular game? (it will help me narrow down which version of AdvMAME has the issue if nothing else)

As I haven't seen it before I'm guessing it's the new version of AdvMAME. There's possibly a new/different input for something that is causing the issue.

[triggerhappy]

Thanks dee2eR.

Hmm, it's weird... Pretty sure it's happening in games running on AdvMAME 0.106, which is the same version I've had on the ARpiCADE since I got it several months ago, but I don't think I noticed this behavior until relatively recently. Maybe I activated the feature somehow w/o realizing it?

Anyway, I don't remember which game I was playing the last time I saw the menu pop up - think it was some shmup or the other. Will make a note next time it happens and post it here.

[dee2eR]

AdvMAME 0.106 hasn't been included on ARpiCADE in years, possibly only the earliest releases I did - not sure anymore. There's a bunch of AdvMAME versions since still based on that particular MAME release. 0.106 is the MAME version AdvMAME stopped updating the MAME (and romset) core to newer versions of MAME, after that AdvMAME changed it's versioning system and it doesn't line up with MAMEs anymore as AdvMAME is still MAME 0.106 (+ other bits, sometimes from later MAME releases, added on).

Offhand I think the versions in use on ARpiCADE 3.X are AdvMAME 1.4 (using SDL) and AdvMAME 3.7 (not using SDL) but both use almost identical MAME 0.106 romsets (any differences are for particular games that have been added/updated in AdvMAME, eg. Toaplan games with sample support added) so there's only one rom folder. The actual version being used is decided by the logic in the launcher.

That may explain why you may not have had this issue previously.

[triggerhappy]

Mystery solved! That little pop-up menu is known as the "On Screen Display" in AdvMAME.

I pinned it down to the following line in my advmame.rc file:

Code: Select all

input_map[ui_on_screen_display] joystick_button[0,1] joystick_button[2,5] joystick_digital[0,0,1,1] not joystick_digital[0,0,1,0] joystick_digital[0,0,0,1]

I should note I did not personally customize this control mapping. However, to test that it does in fact correspond to the menu I have been seeing, I modified it to trigger when I press the Enter key instead (this can be done by setting the value of the above line to keyboard[0,enter] or by bringing up the Tab menu in a game and changing the Input (general) -> User Interface -> On Screen Display setting. Sure enough, when I pressed Enter after editing that option, the menu popped up at the bottom of my screen just as I had seen it before. BINGO!

So now that I know how to trigger the OSD, I went ahead and disabled it altogether by un-mapping it.

[triggerhappy]

AdvMAME 0.106 hasn't been included on ARpiCADE in years, possibly only the earliest releases I did - not sure anymore. There's a bunch of AdvMAME versions since still based on that particular MAME release. 0.106 is the MAME version AdvMAME stopped updating the MAME (and romset) core to newer versions of MAME, after that AdvMAME changed it's versioning system and it doesn't line up with MAMEs anymore as AdvMAME is still MAME 0.106 (+ other bits, sometimes from later MAME releases, added on).

P.S., My bad in reporting the incorrect version of AdvMAME. I just assumed I am running 0.106 because the ROMs in question are located in the /boot/romsArcade/mame-106 folder. Guessing this is just an old naming convention which does not reflect the actual AdvMAME version on the ARpiCADE?

[dee2eR]

Glad you figured it out, thanks for posting the answer too.