“What does this button do?”  The words more dreaded to any Mame cab owner than anything else. Trying to explain the functions of multiple controls and buttons to newbies is enough to make someone pull their hair out.  Of course with modern cabinet designs often offering several buttons, controls and hot-swappable panels, even us experts can run into the dreaded issue of not knowing what to do when the game starts.  Johnny 5 is designed to fix all of that.  This application reads your controller files, config files and Mame settings and somehow magically brings up a graphic of your panel with each used button or control labeled with its function for any game specified.  J5 does this by painstakingly reading Mame’s settings, your user defined layout file, Mame’s listxml and the controls.ini to get as accurate a display as humanly possible with the available information. 

That isn’t the extent of Johnny 5’s usefulness though.  J5 also supports the very popular command.dat, allowing special moves for various characters to be displayed.  Due to the sudden popularity of lighted control panels, J5 can also control various hardware devices to light up and color your buttons/controls for you using the accuracy of the controls.ini coupled with a rather accurate color list found in the colors.ini.  To take things even further, johnny5 is capable of displaying icons for labels, control panel images and instruction card images. 

But wait, there is even more!  Johnny 5 utilizes the use of various plug-ins and tricks to allow theoretical support for any emulator, not just Mame!  Already available is a plug-in for Daphne support and most console emulators can have support added manually quite easily.

So in short, Johnny 5 is your all in one “what does this button do?” solution!

Please read the included documentation for details on how to use Johnny 5.

Controls.dat Project (Home of controls.ini)

Mr. Do’s Arcade Page (Home of the official cpo images)

Tiger-Heli’s Johnny 5 page (Although outdated, the most extensive write-up of J5 on the net)

If you are totally confused by the robots in the logo and the name of the app then I can only assume you haven’t seen the 80’s masterpiece that is Short Circuit.  By all means, you need to go watch it now!  Seriously, you need priorities and anyone lacking knowledge of this film has a serious hole in their pop-culture database!