Mala with AdvanceMame help

[Clavius]

Hi everyone, I've done some poking around and couldn't seem to find anyone else having this problem so I thought I'd post here.  I'm using MALA v1.7.4.0 and AdvMAME v0.89.  I was previously using MAME for windows but because I have a Betson Kortek arcade monitor I decided to see if I could squeeze a bit more out of my monitor and get more accurate display resolutions and refresh rates.

When I go into the MALA options and select advmame.exe as the MAME emulator and click okay, I get the Advance MAME message window showing me some of the command line switches and whatnot.  Everything seems okay at this point.  But as soon as I click the okay button to close the message, MALA gives me an "Unexpected Error" and then terminates.  Here's what it prints in the log file:


2011/10/29  17:35:57.39   Error: Exception Message: List index out of bounds (0), Object Function: AppDeactivate, Exception Class: EStringListError, Object Class: TTabSheet


I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong but have no clue what it could be.  Previously, MAME for windows was working fine in MALA and so are all the other emulators I have setup.  It just doesn't seem to want to work with AdvanceMAME for some reason.

Any thoughts?

[Gray_Area]

You're not doing anything wrong. There seems to be an xml issue or something.

So. Put a copy of .89 baseline mame in the directory. Click the 'search' button, and select that. Then edit the line, adding 'adv' to 'mame'. (And of course change the emu name to Advancemame, or whatever you want it to be.)

Understand?

[Clavius]

Thanks Gray_Area, I'll give it a shot this weekend and report back the results!

[Gray_Area]

Oh, I forgot a small bit: AdvanceMAME by default names it's games folder to 'rom'. MAME names it 'roms'. Make sure your folder is named appropriately, or changed in the rc file. Dig?

[Clavius]

I'm a little bit further along now, but still having trouble.  I copied mame.exe for windows into the MAME folder and pointed MaLa to it and had it generate an xml file and everything seemed to work.  So I then added the "adv" to the beginning in the path and it worked fine.  Thanks, Grey_Area!

Here are some things I've run into:

1) For some reason going back to 0.89 seems to have removed the ability for MaLa to read the various zip files (i.e. snap.zip, marquee.zip, flyer.zip).  If I unzip these things into those folders MaLa sees them fine, but if they're left zipped MaLa won't display them.  Normally I wouldn't care, but I could have sworn that when I was using a different (newer) version of mame before this wasn't happening.  I also recently updated to the newest version of MaLa around the same time I started trying to get advmame to work, so maybe that's related?

2) When I try to launch games I get the message:  No monitor clocks specification 'device_video_p/h/vclock'
     I tried following this guide to fix it:  http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=75993.0
     When I get to step #7 and run advcfg, I get a garbled display when I try selecting monitors and testing the display, then computer bsod's.  I stopped after trying about 4 times with various display settings and failing... I figured it can't be too good for my monitor or my computer for me to just keep guessing like that.
     If anyone can give me some advice, here's the hardware/software I'm using:
          Pentium 4 3.2GHz
          Windows XP SP2 - 32bit
          ArcadeVGA R9200
          Betson Kortek KT-2914

3) I have the roms path set correctly in the advmame.rc file, but when I try to launch games with .chd images (Killer Instinct for example) it can't seem to find them.  Totally confused about this one.

4) It seems all my control panel settings got lost somehow when I made this switch to an older mame.  I'm using a SlikStik Classic (a slight variant of it, actually) and I have the slikstik.cfg file that came with my control panel but I have no idea where to put it or how to get mame to reference it.


I worry that I'm in over my head now!  

[Gray_Area]

1. I have all my image files unzipped.

2. your video card isn't programmable. Use an Nvidia 6800 or lower. (You might be able to get an ATI 7000-9200 working. I know, your card is an R9200 - but it doesn't have a stock ATI bios.)

3. chds have to be in their own folder (by romset name) within the roms folder. That's how it used to work, anywys.

4. control panel files go in the 'ctrlr' folder.