MAME cheats
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:01 am
I was asked on KLOV about using MAMEs cheats so I figured I repost this here in case anyone else is interested.
I have no experience with the cheats in MAME but you can get the cheat menu to appear in the MAME menu by editing /home/pi/mame172/mame.ini and changing cheat from 0 to 1 in the 'CORE MISC OPTIONS' setting. (same is true for 192). The cheat menu only has autofire options unless you add a cheat.7z (keep it in 7z format) to /home/pi/mame172/ (or mame192). I couldn't find a cheat.7z for 192 so tried one from 187 which seemed to work, it was the newest I could find.
For advmame the option is called misc_cheat (change no to yes) (/home/pi/.advance/advmame.rc, advmame-0.94.rc && advmame.nosdl.rc or advmame.sdl.rc - depending on ARpiCADE version). AdvMAME will also need the file cheat.dat placed in the /home/pi/.advance/ folder (or point the rc file elsewhere with the option misc_cheatfile).
If you cannot access the home folder from your desktop (or network or however ou normally do these things) you can put the files on /boot and copy to /home/pi/[emulator] using the Midnight Comander file browser from the service menu or using the normal Linux terminal copy commands. As far as I know the cheatfiles correspond to their specific MAME versions but I could be wrong, or there may be some wiggle room - I don't know for sure what will or won't work (187 seems to work in 192, 106 seems to work for all advmame versions in use).
If having the cheats enabled doesn't effect stability or add any wierdness I will make them available by default on the next release.