Question about control images

[srakonza]

I recently "finished" my game cab and was going through all of my favorite games. When I got to Defender, I noticed the controls are set up wrong. That's no big deal. I know how to reassign the keys in MAME; and I can modify the "defender.png" image to reflect my remapped controls. Although, the default for defender really should be changed.

My first question is, where does the default database for controls come from? What would be the process for getting the default controls changed? Just curious.

My next question is, are these control panel images generate programmatically from MAME configuration files? If so, does it make sense to move this process to the client? That way I could create an image that exactly matches my control panel, AND my custom mappings could be honored.

I am using GameEx. Does it make more sense for GameEx to do this? They already have the concept of Themes. They could use the same concept for the control panel preview.

Thanks.