MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: MAME - Track & Field Controls

Hmm never really thought about it before. But yeah there has to be some sort of upper limit.

There are two (possibly 3) settings you can change that may make it better. There are 2 settings in the control panel in windows where you can control repeat rate and delay rate. From my rusty memory the best you can do is 35 chars a second. I think the default is in the 10-15 range. I have not seen the 3rd setting in a long time. But in older boxes you could control it also from the bios screen. The best I could ever manage was about 5ms button press which is about 20 per second.

There is a decent amount of junk between the keypress and an application seeing the click. All the way from the click to the chip with a 16 char buffer in it, the interrupt to pick it up, with newer computers the usb stack is involved as well, then the windows keboard driver, kernel mode, context switch, etc. On top of all of that mame has its stack where it decides what to do. Not sure what the limits on that are including the delay as well as mixing it into the emulation on a scanline/tick. Does anyone know if the keypress is evaluated at scanline or screen refresh or other? Mix in an HDMI LCD TV and you can get some weird screen delay effects too. It could be the emulation is piling the key presses up too quickly and basically the loop in the game is missing it?

Something you could try to narrow it down is use a controller (like an usb xbox controller). That may at least eliminate the keyboard repeat part? From what I remember the keyboard is actually a fairly poor input device as it was not designed for what you are trying to do. The downside is if I remember the game you are talking about it is not nearly as satisfying as bashing the buttons as the keyboard more closely mimics that.