How to play MAME arcade games remotely?

Hello!

I take it you know about MAME (Multiple Arcade Games Emulator) that can play almost all known classic arcade games (Pacman, Tetris, Street Fighter II, you-name-it). Occasionally I would like to access my home PC (Windows 11 Pro 24H2, MAME installed) from another computer, such as a friend's PC. I can play any Windows Store game and many other games remotely, connection-permitting so I get a smooth image, but not MAME. I can load MAME, scroll through the games, but when I launch a game the keyboard doesn't work. I have tried AnyDesk, RustDesk and the good old AMMYY, but none can pass keyboard data to MAME. It seems like it reads the keys directly from the hardware and ignores any virtual key strokes since the physical keyboard is not used. I found a setting (see photo) to enable multiple keyboards, but it only enabled input from the on-screen keyboard. Not very useful, you cannot play a game by clicking the respective keys on the virtual keyboard, you are dead in seconds. Is there any workaround I haven't thought of? Has anyone else used MAME remotely? The behavior is similar to accessing a virtual machine remotely without having installed the virtual drivers and tools yet. Some old Windows versions ignore remote keyboard input until you install the virtual drivers and tools. Also, I don't think is relevant, but my physical keyboard is PS/2, would there be any difference if it was USB? I haven't found any keyboard-specific setting in MAME. If I would see anything at all, I would try to toggle it on/off to see if it makes a difference. Only the multiple keyboards and the steadykey support which didn't make any difference.

Thank you a lot.

Not what you're looking for, but...


I just play the old, old games, online.

Thank you, I added it to my favorites. I will wait for a workaround for a while... I read in some sites that I have to change the value "keyboard provider" from "auto" to "dinput" or "raw" in mame.ini There is no mame.ini file in my MAME version, only mameui.ini which has not this setting. I found an ___empty.ini file which had a similar value, but changing it didn't work. I also did found the "keyboard provider" setting in the Controller mapping section, but changing it to "Direct Input" or "raw" made no difference. Any other ideas appreciated.

Regarding other emulators, such as DosBox for DOS games, they have not this bug. I can play my favorite DOS games remotely by simply loading DosBox and then the game. PopCap games, such as Dino Eggs, Pants vs Zombies, also work remotely.