AdvanceCD bootable Linux distro for arcade cabs

[manig]

From the advancemame-users mailing list:

"AdvanceCD v1.0.0 has been released at:

http://advancemame.sourceforge.net

Advance CD is a bootable ISO image of a minimal Linux distribution
containing the AdvanceMAME and AdvanceMESS emulators
and the AdvanceMENU frontend.

You can boot this CD in any PC and play the contained games
without any installation. The default distribution contains
the arcade games Gridlee, Poly Play and Robby Roto and it
uses only 16 Mbyte leaving the whole CD for your roms."

Andrea strikes again. I've been waiting a while now for a non-DOS arcade cab bootable CD. I'm going to pop this into my arcade cab tonight and see how it goes!

-Mani

[eightbit]

Very cool... I'm very interested to see how this works. I'm burning a cd of it now.

[manig]

This is kind of a bummer, from Andrea:

"Please note that AdvanceCD works with PC monitors. It doesn't work with Arcade monitors or TVs."

I wonder why ...

[canardo]

Thanks for this will give it a go

[eightbit]

Didn't work in my IBM thinkpad. I didn't think it would but why not, I tried it. It couldn't find a video driver.

It worked in an old 300mhz Compaq deskpro but didn't find the soundcard. I didn't try adding any roms or using anything other than the keyboard for controls. Its interesting but you'd have to be looking for a super simple free interface to use this. I guess thats the point of it though.

My review- It worked and I think it has potential. I can always take it on the road with me and astound other computer geeks when I attend training sessions, during the breaks I can whip out my arcade game and easily sidetrack a class for a week.  

[Howard_Casto]

I had problems with it, but it does work.  I burned the blank iso and left the session open as it says in the instructions.  Well although the screen resolutions it choose were a little hokey it worked great.  This is amazing because I can't get a linux distro to work on my generic vid card period.  

So I thought, "wow this is pretty cool, let me load it up with roms"  So I burned all of my cps2 roms to the cd on the advance/rom folder like the instructions said.  Now it won't boot.  I think the instructions as to what type of session you need to burn and what program they used to burn the cd need to be included in more detail.  

If anybody can help me out with this let me know, I see this as a good solution to some of my more annoying friends that want mame setup on their pcs instantly.

[dhansen]

I had the same problem Howard,  I wonder if you used an ISO extractor, added your games and the converted the files back to ISO....hmmmm...

Doug

[Howard_Casto]

that might work
i have an image browser/maker...... i will try that sometime tonight and see what happens

[jerryjanis]

Yeah, I tried it (only for those games that were on the CD).  Sound and Video worked fine (Soundblaster 16 and Geforce 3).  When I played a game for a while, though, it would freeze up and I couldn't escape out of it or anything and had to reboot.  (This happened several times).

It is sure nice to see the games running full screen in Linux, though.  I was having trouble getting that to work in Linux myself (I'm pretty new with it).

[OSCAR]

To add a rom collection to the ISO image file, this is the only thing I've found that works under Windows so far.  I've tried various Windows ISO editors like WinISO and such.  They wreck the RockRidge ISO and make it non-bootable.

First, download cdrecord for win32 from here:  ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/win32/cdrtools-1.11a12-win32-bin.zip

The following is a post copied from the AdvanceMAME users list.

From: desmatic desmatic <desmatic@ho...>
 Re: AdvanceCD burn info  
2003-01-11 14:02  
 AdvanceCD works great in Windows.  While I couldn't add any roms to the
 advcd.iso using Nero or Cdrwin, the cdrtools worked perfectly.
 
 Windows howto
 --------------
 
 Unzip cdrtools-1.11a12-win32-bin.zip to c:\cdrtools
 Unzip advancecd-1.0.0-i586.zip to c:\cdrtools
 Make a new folder named advcd2 in your cdrtools folder
 Then make a new folder named advance in your advcd2 folder
 Then copy all of your rom, snap, and sample folders to your advance folder.  
 You should now have the following directory tree
 
 c:\cdrtools
 c:\cdrtools\advcd2\advance\rom
 c:\cdrtools\advcd2\advance\snap
 c:\cdrtools\advcd2\advance\sample
 
 Open up a command prompt (Go to Start\Run enter command and press OK)
 Then enter in the the following commands
 
 c:
 cd \
 cd cdrtools
 cdrecord -scanbus > scanbus.txt
 notepad scanbus.txt
 
 make a note of the x,x,x numbers that correspond to your CDROM device, for
 example mine were 1,1,0  Once you have the numbers for your device, close
 notepad and at the command prompt enter the following commands replacing
 x,x,x with your device numbers in dev=x,x,x
 
 cdrecord -multi dev=x,x,x advcd.iso
 cdrecord -msinfo dev=x,x,x
 mkisofs -M advcd.iso -C 0,19962 -r -J -o advcd2.iso ./advcd2
 cdrecord -multi dev=x,x,x advcd2.iso
 
 
 Below are the commands I used on my machine
 
 cdrecord -multi dev=1,1,0 advcd.iso
 cdrecord -msinfo dev=1,1,0
 mkisofs -M advcd.iso -C 0,19962 -r -J -o advcd2.iso ./advcd2
 cdrecord -multi dev=1,1,0 advcd2.iso
 
 
 If you get an aspi error or something similar, go to http://www.adaptec.com, click
 on search and enter  aspi   Download and install the latest aspi set 4.71
 (note, you shouldn't need to install any aspi drivers for windows 98).



I tried the above under WinXP and it works great!  I packed a CD full of roms/snaps/samples and AdvanceMenu found everything with no problem.

However I did run into a couple of snafus.

1.)  The minimal linux distro didn't include RAID controller drivers.  I had to disable the onboard RAID controller in my BIOS to get Linux to load.  Since everything is included on the CD, my hard drives weren't necessary anyway...

2.)  It did not like gamepads (to be honest, I didn't even read the readme file, this may be mentioned!   ). AdvanceMenu freaked out if I had either a USB Gravis Gamepad Pro or a gameport Gravis Gamepad Pro connected to the PC.

Hardware in my test PC:
 LeadTek Geforce 2 MX (agp)
 SBLive Value soundcard
 

[SirPoonga]

Kelsey. I run cdrecord -scanbus and get

D:\cdrtools>cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.11a12 (i586-pc-cygwin) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 J

[OSCAR]

Kelsey. I run cdrecord -scanbus and get

D:\cdrtools>cdrecord -scanbus
Cdrecord 1.11a12 (i586-pc-cygwin) Copyright (C) 1995-2001 J

[SirPoonga]

now I did, but still have issues, dang

I tried just burning the iso with dj, won;t boot.