So I have MAME 2014 with retroarch 3.6 and it works awesome. I got a couple fight sticks for the more authentic arcarde feel, and that works awesome. The arcade itch = scratched, with one exception, f’ing pong.
I got pong running in MAME just fine. By default the stick is set as the analog controls, but the analog controls for this game is crap. The slightest touch sends the in game paddle flying to the top or bottom of the screen. I set the incline and decline controls to the negative y and positive y axis, and that works ok. Messing around with the sensitivity got something close enough for my tastes. Multiplayer is fine too.
There are two problems though. The first might be an artifact of my stick - it takes full actuation of the stick to get any movement. There is no acceleration, and there is a massive deadzone. Not ideal. The other problem is that I cannot redirect the ball by moving the in game paddle. In the original pong game, scrolling up as you hit the ball changes the directory up. In MAME, the directory is unchanged, so eventually the ball ends up a straight path along the x axis with no change in the angle. Bad.
I considered looking around for a console port of the game, but I haven’t been able to find one that is faithful to the original and uses analog controls. The atari 2600 version is the closest, but watching videos of it, there are a lot of important differences that make the atari version really a very different game than the original.
I was wondering if anybody else has run into problems with pong and has some suggestions on how best to configure it? Thank you!