MAME Menus

Introduction

To show the main menu while running an emulated system in MAME, press the Show/Hide Menu key or button (Tab by default). If the emulated system has keyboard inputs, you may need to press the Toggle UI Controls key or button (Scroll Lock, or Forward Delete on macOS, by default) to enable user interface controls first. You can dismiss a menu by pressing the UI Back key or button (Escape by default). Dismissing a menu will return to its parent menu, or to the running system in the case of the main menu.

You can hide a menu and return to the running system by pressing the Show/Hide Menu key or button. Pressing the Show/Hide Menu key or button again will jump back to the same menu. This is useful when testing changes to settings.

Emulated system inputs are ignored while menus are displayed. You can still pause or resume the running system while most menus are displayed by pressing the Pause key or button (F5 on the keyboard by default).

If you start MAME without specifying a system on the command line, the system selection menu will be shown (assuming the ui option is set to cabinet). The system selection menu is also shown if you select Select New System from the main menu during emulation.

For more information on navigating menus, see the relevant section.

Input Settings menu

The Input Settings provides options for assigning controls to emulated inputs, adjusting analog control settings, controlling toggle inputs, and testing input devices. You can reach the Input Settings menu by selecting Input Settings from the main menu. The items shown on this menu depend on available emulated inputs for the running system. Available emulated inputs may depend on slot options, machine configuration settings and DIP switch settings.

Input Assignments (this system)

Lets you select assign controls to emulated inputs for the running system. See the section on configuring inputs for more details. This item is not shown if the running system has no enabled inputs that can be assigned controls.

Analog Input Adjustments

Shows the Analog Input Adjustments menu, where you can adjust sensitivity, auto-centring speed and inversion settings for emulated analog inputs, and see how the emulated analog inputs respond to controls with your settings. For more details, see the analog input settings section for more details. This item is not shown if the running system has no enabled analog inputs.

Keyboard Selection

Shows the Keyboard Selection menu, where you can select between emulated and natural keyboard modes, and enable and disable keyboard and keypad inputs for individual emulated devices. This item is not shown if the running system has no keyboard or keypad inputs.

Toggle Inputs

Shows the Toggle Inputs menu, where you can view and adjust the state of multi-position or toggle inputs. This item is not shown if the running system has no enabled toggle inputs.

Input Assignments (general)

Lets you select assign user interface controls, or assign default controls for all emulated systems. See the section on configuring inputs for more details.

Input Devices

Shows the Input Devices menu, which lists the input devices recognised by MAME.

Toggle Inputs menu

The Toggle Inputs menu shows the current state of multi-position or toggle inputs. Common examples include mechanically locking Caps Lock keys on computers, and two-position gear shit levers on driving games. You can reach the Toggle Inputs menu by selecting Toggle Inputs from the Input Settings menu. Note that available emulated inputs may depend on slot options, machine configuration settings and DIP switch settings.

Inputs are grouped by the emulated device they belong to. You can move between devices using the Next Group and Previous Group keys or buttons. Names of inputs are shown on the left, and the current settings are shown on the right.

To change the state of an input, highlight it and use the UI Left and UI Right keys or buttons, or click the arrows beside the current setting.

Keyboard Selection menu

The Keyboard Selection menu lets your switch between emulated and natural keyboard modes, and enable or disable keyboard inputs for individual emulated devices. You can reach the Keyboard Selection menu by selecting Keyboard Selection from the Input Settings menu.

In emulated keyboard mode, keyboard and keypad inputs behave like any other digital inputs, responding to their assigned controls. In natural keyboard mode, MAME attempts to translate typed characters to emulated keystrokes. The initial keyboard mode is set using the natural option.

There are a number of unavoidable limitations in natural keyboard mode:

  • The emulated system must to support it.

  • The selected keyboard must match the keyboard layout selected in the emulated software.

  • Keystrokes that don’t produce characters can’t be translated. (e.g. pressing a modifier key on its own, such as Shift or Control).

  • Holding a key until the character repeats will cause the emulated key to be pressed repeatedly as opposed to being held down.

  • Dead key sequences are cumbersome to use at best.

  • Complex input methods will not work at all (e.g. for Chinese/Japanese/Korean).

Each emulated device in the system that has keyboard and/or keypad inputs is listed on the menu, allowing keyboard/keypad inputs to be enabled or disabled for individual devices. By default, keyboard/keypad inputs are enabled for the first device with keyboard inputs (if any), and for all other devices that have keypad inputs but no keyboard inputs. The enabled keyboard/keypad inputs are automatically saved to the configuration file for the system when the emulation session ends.

Input Devices menu

The Input Devices menu lists input devices recognised by MAME and enabled with your current settings. Recognised input devices depend on the keyboardprovider, mouseprovider, lightgunprovider and joystickprovider options. Classes of input devices can be enabled or disabled using the mouse, lightgun and joystick options. You can reach the Input Devices menu by selecting Input Devices from the Input Settings menu or the General Settings menu.

Input devices are grouped by device class (for example keyboards or light guns). You can move between device classes using the Next Group and Previous Group keys or buttons. For each device, the device number (within its class) is shown on the left, and the name is shown on the right.

Select a device to show the supported controls for the device. The name of each control is displayed on the left and its current state is shown on the right. When an analog axis control is highlighted, its state is also shown in graphical form below the menu. Digital control states are either zero (inactive) or one (active). Analog axis input states range from -65,536 to 65,536 with the neutral position at zero. You can also select Copy Device ID to copy the device’s ID to the clipboard. This is useful for setting up stable controller IDs in controller configuration files.

Audio Mixer menu

The Audio Mixer menu allows to establish connections between emulated speakers and microphones, and system audio inputs and outputs. It uses the standard up/down arrows to select a device and/or current mapping, left/right arrows to change a value (system audio port, level, channel...) and [ ] to change column. In addition the (by default) F key adds a full mapping, C a channel mapping, and Delete clears a mapping.

A full mapping sends all channels of a speaker to the appropriate(s) channel(s) of the system output, and similarly retrieves all channels of a microphone from the appropriate(s) input(s) of a system input. For instance a mono speaker will send audio to both channels of a stereo system output.

A channel mapping maps between one channel of speaker or a microphone and one channel of a system input or output. It can be a little tedious, but it allows for instance to take two mono speakers and turn it into the left and right channels of a system output, which is useful for some cabinets.

Every mapping has a configurable volume associated. When changing the volume, optionally hold shift/ctrl/alt keys to adjust the step amount.

The mapping configuration is saved in the system cfg file.

Some OSes propose an external interface to change mappings and volumes dynamically, for instance pipewire on linux. Mame does its best to follow that and keep the information in the cfg file for future runs.

Audio Effects menu

This menu allows to configure the audio effects that are applied to the speaker outputs between the speaker device and the audio mixer. In other words, the output channels as seen in the audio mixer are the outputs of the effect chains. Each speaker has an independent effect chain applied.

The chain itself is not configurable it is always in order:

  • Filter

  • Compressor

  • Reverb

  • EQ

The parameters of each are fully configurable though. A configured parameter shows as white, a default as grey, and Clear allows to go back to the default value. The default parameters for the chain of a given speaker are the parameters of the Default chain, and the default parameters of the Default chain are fixed. The default chain allows to create a global setup that one likes and have it applied everywhere by default.

In addition, this menu allows to choose the resampler to use when converting sample rates between emulated devices. The type allows to choose between a fast, lower quality one, "LoFi", and a slow, high quality one "HQ". The HQ resampler is configurable. The latency indicates the max latency of the resampler, which allows better quality when higher, the filter length balances quality and speed where a high value is highest quality but slowest speed, and phases balances quality and resampler creation time, with once again higher means better but slower.

Filter effect

This effect proposes an order-2 high-pass and order-2 low-pass filter. The high-pass filter allows to remove the DC offset some emulated hardware has which can create saturation when not needed. The low-pass filter (defaulting to off) allows to reproduce how muffled the sound of a number of cabinets and TVs were.

The Q factor defines how sharp the transition is, the higher the sharper. Over 0.7 the filter starts amplifying the frequencies around the cutoff though, which can be surprising.

Compression effect

This effect implements a somewhat complex compressor which is a reimplementation of the Versatile Compressor by Alain Paul. The general effect of a compressor is to amplify sounds under a volume threshold while keeping the louder sounds as-is. It's particularly useful when one is not in a very quiet environment and softer sounds are just lost otherwise.

The parameters are:

  • Attack: reaction time to loud sounds to reduce the amplification.

  • Release: reaction time to allow the amplification to go back up.

  • Ratio: maximum amplification.

  • Input gain: amplification level at the input.

  • Output gain: amplification level at the output.

  • Convexity: shape of the relationship between distance to the threshold and ratio value. Steeper the high it is.

  • Threshold: level at which the amplification fully stops.

  • Channel link: at 100 all channels of the same speaker are amplified identically, at 0 they are fully independent, intermediate values have intermediate behaviour.

  • Feedback: allows to loop back some of the output to the input.

  • Inertia: makes the ratio move slower.

  • Inertia decay: tweaks the impact of the inertia.

  • Ceiling: maximum allowed level at exit, just before the output amplification. Does soft-clipping at that level.

Reverb effect

Not implemented yet.

EQ effect

The 5-band parametric equalizer allows to amplify or reduce certain bands of frequency in the spectrum. The three middle filters, and also the extreme ones if configured as "Peak", change frequencies around the cutoff. The Q factor selects the sharpness of the peak, the higher the sharper. The extreme filters in "Shelf" mode move all the frequencies under (or over) the cutoff frequency.