Mamewah - Winvice - Zip - And the Wrapper.

[DreamWeb]

Hi guys.  I downloaded the entire gb64ren Commodore 64 collection.

The problem is.. is that if I unzip the files the naming scheme makes it very difficult to determine what game is what.  However, the names of the zips are great.

So, I started investigating whether or not Winvice had ZIP support.  It does... but you have to download and throw an unzip.exe into the main directory.

Great!  So, I set everything up in Mamewah... BUT..  after winvice loads, it minimizes itself.  It works fine..  but it's minimized.  If you ALT-TAB it back, everything is good.

this is fine if you're using a keyboard... but, I'm not.

I have a feeling that the addition of the unzip.exe step causes the wrapper to do something funky... resulting in winvice becoming minimized.

Has anyone else had any experience with this?  Any luck?  I've tried all combinations of dosbox/safelaunch.  No luck.

d.

[Minwah]

I have a feeling that the addition of the unzip.exe step causes the wrapper to do something funky... resulting in winvice becoming minimized.

Or unzip might just be stealing focus, then closing leaving nothing with focus.  My only advice is to unzip your games, they're tiny anyway...incidentally this is partly what got me to finally add support for multiple rom extensions (see the beta at the Mamewah board) - I know there are several C64 extensions!

[LJHalfbreed]

A friend of mine had this problem, and we made an AutoHotkey script to run as part of the 'pre-emulator' program.

Autohotkey is nifty, because it lets you make small scripts that you can actually run as exe files.

What he ended up doing was making a script that, when mamewah opened a game, first ran this program, then ran the game. It waited for about half a second, then put focus on winvice (instead of on the unzip.exe). Then, he made another script that 'killed' the first one for when you closed the emulator in mamewah (to prevent 40000000 copies of the script running on your computer).


I'm trying to remember how it went, but I think the ahk script was something like:

sleep, 1000
Controlfocus, Winvice (or whatever the title of the window/process is)


and the killscript was:

Process, close, WinviceHelper.exe


Check out autohotkey if you can... it's free, and can do just about anything from joystick-to-keyboard mapping to advanced things like keyboard/mouse macros. It's awesome for cab software, and a great compliment to frontends since not all emulators allow for easy configuring of controls/functions.

http://www.autohotkey.com/

Fiddle around with it a bit, and use my advice, and I'm sure you can create two tiny scripts that get the effect you want in no time.

[DreamWeb]

Thanks guys.

Minwah... I initially had it setup with unzipped files... but... all of the games have 8 character filenames..  Which makes figuring out the title of a certain game difficult.  The zips, however, have the full name of the game.

There are over 17 thousand games...  so, renaming them isn't an option.

Definitely losing focus.. yes.

I'll check out autohotkey!  Thanks

David

[LJHalfbreed]

whoops... it was 'winactivate' (had to open up ahk earlier and figure it out....)

So... you'll make a small script that has the sleep command (wait x milliseconds) and the second command would be Winactivate, Winvice   (or whatever the proggy's window name is)