Not sure which joystick setting to use (analog or digital)

General
#1

I bought a Qanba Carbon joystick (fight stick) to play MAME and FB Alpha games on my Windows 7 desktop PC, and on the joystick there’s a button to set it to either D-Input (default) or X-Input. There’s another button to set it to Directional Pad or Left Analog Stick. I’m new to joysticks, but since I’m only playing MAME/FB Alpha, which settings should I use? I’m just trying to figure out the best performance for the joystick. Mainly playing platformers, beat-em-ups, shoot-em-ups like Golden Axe, Final Fight, R-Type.

Also, within Retroarch --> Input --> User 1 Binds, should User 1 Analog to Digital Type be set to None, Left Analog, or Right Analog? I’m not using any other controllers or the keyboard to play games, just this joystick. Thanks.

#2

You have a few options that will all work fine.

Up-to-date MAME treats the left analog stick as the joystick, while FBA uses the dpad, so you can either set analog to digital type to ‘left’ or use the dpad/analog hardware switch to go back and forth depending on whether you use FBA or MAME.

In FBA, in quick menu > controls, you can change your device type to “modern” and it should all “just work”. For MAME, you may need to go into the MAME OSD/tab menu and remap your controls there, as it doesn’t support the quick menu > controls menu, IIRC.

1 Like
#3

OK, thanks! Does Input --> Analog Stick Deadzone in RetroArch work with MAME? I tried setting it to 0.05, 0.5 and 0.95 and didn’t notice any difference with my joystick playing MAME games, and I do notice some difference when I change Options --> Default System Options --> Controllers --> Joystick Deadzone when I’m just playing in the standalone MAME program.

Is there a way to directly edit the MAME config (or ini) file in the RetroArch folders to modify that MAME Joystick Deadzone value?