Can I install and configure all of my emulators and then burn to DVD

[unclet]

I was wondering whether I could simply install and configure all my emulators in a common directory to be used with MameWah and then simply burn the complete directory structure to multiple DVDs.  This way, if I ever have to reinstall everything from scratch (which has happened to me once) then all I would need is to copy DVDs back to the harddrive.

The only problem I see where this might not work is whether or not when the emulators (or MameWah) are installed for the first time, then they install files, settings, etc to locations which are not within the "common directory" I wish to use (ie: DLLs, registry settings, etc..)

Any thoughts about whether this is a true concern?

I have the following emulators (not a complete list):

Mame
Visual Pinball
Nintendo
N64
Sega Gamegear
Gameboy
Gameboy Color
etc..
etc...

[Sasquatch!]

I don't think that any of the emulators make whacky registry edits / DLL plants / etc.  At least none that I'm aware of.

A bigger concern would be that any file that you burn to DVD will be read-only, so you'll either want to ZIP them up and then burn the ZIP file(s), or make sure to set them back to read/write once you copy them back to the hard drive.

[unclet]

Sorry, the DVDs I would make would be solely for data storage .... (ie: not to be used for executing emulators) .... so no worries.   I would just do a bulk copy back to the harddrive if I had to reinstall my OS at some time and did not want to have to reconfigure everything.


PS: I like the older smily faces better in the posts..... just had to finally say that .... I can not stand the current ones.  Very hard for me to distinguish what faces are doing what....  ok... I feel better now.

[jcrouse]

A couple come to mind that have install routines, ePSXe and FreeDO. Maybe Chankast. They probably use the registry to store setting. If you reinstalled them you could probably copy your backups over top of them and be ok.

John

[daywane]

That is what I do.
after a format on hard drive, I reinstall all  programs and
drag all my saved files to the same folder.
over write all files,
works on most every thing I have done so far

I have often wondered how hard will it be to backup the
registry?

[Brad]

A couple come to mind that have install routines, ePSXe and FreeDO. Maybe Chankast. They probably use the registry to store setting. If you reinstalled them you could probably copy your backups over top of them and be ok.

John

I actually have done this myself and it runs no problem. Mamewah, emulator, roms and artwork. Mind you I don't use Chankast but the rest go great!

Cheers,

Brad

[quarterback]

PS: I like the older smily faces better in the posts..... just had to finally say that .... I can not stand the current ones.  Very hard for me to distinguish what faces are doing what....  ok... I feel better now.

You can change them back to the ones you liked.  go to profile->Look and Loyour preferences (on the left)->Current Smiley set dropdown menu.

[unclet]

Excellent .... just reset my profile  .... life is once again in order....

[Fat_Trucker]

I have all of my emulators sitting in their own named folder in C:\ which all my mamewah ini's point to. Each folder contains folders for snap, boxart, etc for that emu.

I created a folder called mamewah burn and copied and pasted each emu folder (minus roms but including all the snaps, cfg files etc) into it. Then I did the same for my mamewah layouts folder and ini folder and all of the supplemental stuff, like the mamewah system files zip, xvid codec etc.

This folder contains everything except the roms for 20 different emu's that I have running with mamewah and comes in at 4.5Gb. Burnt the whole lot to a single dvd.

I have rom sets for each emu on DVD so whenever I need to re-install or put them on another PC its a simple matter of just opening the mamewah burn dvd, dragging and dropping all the emu folders into C:\ , unzip and run the emulator .exe in each folder, then unpack mamewah, drop the layouts and ini file into it, and mamewah and my emulators are all set up, configured and ready to go. Then its just a matter of transferring all the roms into the various rom folders.

It actually takes about 15 mins to get all 20 emu's set up and working, with all the layouts, sounds etc with mamewah from scratch using this method but the rom transfers afterward can take up to 6 or 7 hours as it runs to almost 80Gb.