Shannon's Blog - Awesome control panel utility

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Now that I have the two discs that was missing from my software set for the unit I will be posting pics of those as well as talking about the "Awesome control panel utility". This handy dandy utility lets you reprogram the control panel whichever way you like. Although for compatibility with the original Awesome hard-drive / OS it is best to leave them alone.

 

Here is the current configuration..

 

CODEPlayer 1:

 

Up, Down, Left, Right

 

mapped to arrows keys

 

Buttons:

1 (Red) -> space

2 (Yellow) -> X

3 (Blue) -> C

4 (Green) -> V

5 (Orange) -> B

6 (Purple) -> N

Player 1 -> 1

Audio

/Credit -> F2

 

Player 2:

 

Up -> R

down -> F

left -> D

right -> G

 

1 (Red) -> T

2 (Yellow) -> Y

3 (Blue) -> U

4 (Green) -> I

5 (Orange) -> O

6 (Purple) -> L

Player 1 -> 2

Menu/Exit -> Escape

notes:

(6 is mapped to L to allow P to be used for Pausing built into all games)

buttons 7 & 8 on both players are not mapped to any keys.

 

Here is a picture of the interface. It is pretty simple, nothing really complicated. Select the button you want, enter the keypress you want it to use. There is also a menu option that lets you reset to the default P1/P2 or P3/P4 configuration. The fact they included P3/P4 configuration kinda implies what may be to come in the future from the awecades team.

 

Awesome Control Panel Utility

 

Oddly enough the "default" configurations are not what the control panel currently uses. So it is best to read the current config and save it as backup. In fact the original default configurations actually match the MAME defaults practically to the T.

 

As tempting as it is I'm probably gonna go ahead and play it safe and shoehorn my alternate hard drive keys to match those of the defaults. That way if I somehow destablize my personal set-up and I can still fall back on the awecade drive without wearing out the MCU's flash.

 

Anyways.. Here is the cool part. If you look closely at the interface you will see what is known as a shifted key. What this does is allow you an extra 23 alternate keypresses (27 if you count the missing buttons 7&8 for each player). As Curt put it, here is how the shift key works...

QUOTEYou can assign a specific button to act as a shift key and that will allow you to give all of the pin assignments other functions -

 

Example - Button 10 could be set to be a shift key, when pressed buttons 1-9 could go from their standard functions and you could assign them to do functions like for MAME - F2 (Advance) F3 (Reset), etc.... it gives you a lot more expandability allow you to have more inputs for more complex games.

This will come quite handy for assigning a few "missing" pre-defined keys as well as other unusual key configs used by various emulators, and even the "TAB" key which mamewah makes use of.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=2131