Hi all,
Just to update my previous post, I'm running 64-bit Windows 8.1 and Maximus Arcade 2.10.
So I've been experimenting with different settings and I think I finally got Mame working correctly in Maximus Arcade. In the event that someone else who is equally as frustrated as I was stumbles onto this post, hopefully this will help steer you in the right direction...
The version of Mame that came pre-loaded on my X-Arcade PC was several years old, though it did seem to work with the roms that were in MA. If you're in the same boat and you're happy with what you've got, more power to you - have fun!
If, however, you want to upgrade your version of Mame to something newer, there is some work to be done. It seems some of the newer versions of Mame may not be as perfectly compatible with MA, but I downloaded Mame 0.163, the newest version available at the time. I ended up having the most luck with the MameUI version which is a little more visually friendly anyway than the standard Mame program - a Google search of MameUI will find the latest version.
A word about the MA Preferences interface - you can pull this up by pressing the RIGHT Control key (not the left) + P when MA is running. For whatever reason, there is no Save button in Preferences so any changes you make will revert back to their default setting every time you reboot the machine or turn it off completely and turn it back on later. In order for your changes to be permanent, you have to exit Maximus Arcade to the desktop, go to the folder where you have MA installed and open the "default.ini" file using Wordpad or Textpad - any basic text editor. All of the individual fields and default options inside the Preferences interface are listed out here, tho some require some searching. (It's probably wise to make a back-up copy of the your "default.ini" file before you started making edits so you can always restore it in the event that you totally hose something up.)
So if you want to use your newer version of Mame, you have edit the default.ini file - do a search for "Mame" (or just scroll down) and you'll find the right section - there's a section here for all of the emulators that are selectable in the MA Preferences interface. Scroll down to the line with the Mame executable path and update that path to the executable in whatever folder you have your newer version of Mame installed in. If your roms are in any other folder other than the default path, you can update that line in the default.ini file as well. Now every time you boot up your PC, Maximus Arcade will look to the newly selected path for the Mame executable and Mame roms. Step 1 complete.
One of the other things I had to figure out the hard way is the right combination of Preferences settings to make your re-scans of the roms folder work - anytime you add additional roms, you'll want to rescan your Mame folder to capture those roms so they show up in your front-end list. Here's the catch - whatever version of Mame you're using, you also need to find the mame.dat file from the equivalent version. So I'm using Mame 0.163 and subsequently need the Mame 0.163 dat file to make this process work. I found the links in the MA Preferences Database tab no longer work - a quick Google search for progetto-snaps should yield what you're looking for. You'll want to download the Mame dat file and save it to your C: drive - it may be in an .rar or .7z format but it seems Maximus Arcade wants the dat files (there's three of them in the bundle) to be in a zip file so unpack the dat file from whatever compression is used and once you have the resulting dat folder, right click on it, choose Send and select zipped archive (or however your OS works - it just needs to be in a zip format to make MA happy).
This is the magic sequence of options and choices inside the MA Preferences interface for my re-scans to work - there may be other ways but ANY derivation from this results in an invalid media location error when MA is starting, at least for me:
1) On the Configuration tab, select Mame and check the "Force rescan of media folder" button below.
2) On the Database tab, where it says "Update the selected database file...", click on the dropdown and choose mame.dat - the default option is cps3.dat.
3) On the same Database screen, click on the "..." button (just to the right of the mame.dat drop-down) which lets you select where on your computer the dat file is located. Navigate to the zip file you made of your Mame dat file and select it - you have to hit Yes or Ok on the resulting dialogue box but you should get a confirmation that the new dat file has been copied/loaded.
4) On the Options / MAME tab, select "Mame rom description built using ClrMAME Pro database (mame.dat)” - the default choice is the XML gamelist underneath that but I've never been able to get a scan to work choosing the XML option.
5) Click the Close button and when MA restarts (hopefully) it has re-scanned your rom folder using the Mame dat file you downloaded which matches the version of Mame that you're using.
This method found the vast majority of my roms - there's a still a few that show up in MameUI but don't show up in the MA Mame front end game list but most of them are there.
I did run into a few roms that worked fine in MameUI but would not work in Maximus Arcade - I got a weird error about the path to zip file being incorrect. So, here's where doing homework on this site and some Google searches really pays off - on the MA Preferences Configuration tab for Mame, change the Path to Media drop-down from "short" to "long" - this was the last piece of the puzzle to get those few remaining roms to work. And remember, you have to exit out of MA to the desktop and edit the Maximus Arcade default.ini file (just like before to set your Mame executable and rom locations) and change the line in the Mame section about media path from short (the default) to long.
When you reboot your PC from now on, MA should remember your Mame executable location, the rom location and the media path will default to long.
Again, I am by means an expert at this but these instructions have worked for me - I do hope anyone else new to Maximus Arcade or emulation in general who has decided to jump into the nostalgia gaming pool (as I did), will find this helpful.
I still have not been able to figure out how to get the full Mame game title (including the version) to display in the front-end game list. On every MA screen shot you see, the game list shows something like...
1941 (Japan Version)
1941 (US Version)
...but on my MA front-end, all I have are two rows that both say "1941" with no identifiable version...
1941
1941
...which is frustrating because you're not sure which version of the rom you're selecting. The full description/version text displays correctly in MameUI so I know the data I want to display is there somewhere...
If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the full Mame game name and description to display in the MA game list, I would be most appreciative for the guidance. I thought perhaps it was a setting in the X-Arcade theme that came pre-loaded in MA but I get the same truncated name list even when I choose another theme/skin...
Thanks, all - game on!