Replicating A Mame Setup

[Roughy]

I feel kind of weak just for asking this, but I kinda have to.

It's been over a year since I built my cab--and I've come into a second one for a song.  I've just picked-up a dirt cheap box from Fry's (even had XP Home on it) and I want to (basically) replicate the EXACT setup that is on my existing cabinet box.

All the settings (except that the new box may have a different keyboard mapper), the GUI, the ROMs, etc.

I'd love to think it's as simple as "copy (all of this) to <location (disk, network, etc.)>, copy to <new machine>, DONE!" but I'm guessing it's not.

And, I'm posting this as I begin to do the work, so I'm kinda a bit bad about it all, but my luck isn't so good as to have it work that way.

Any advices or suggestions?

Thanks!

[somunny]

That's what I did.  I partitioned the hard drive and labeled it the same as my original mame drive (e:).  Then just copied everything over.  There were a few little tweaks needed but otherwise it was totally painless.

[BamBam]

Just copy it.  I do all my graphics work and Mame tweaking on my main computer and then copy it to my arcade.  Just make sure that the path is the same ie. C:\mame.  If you copy it to a different drive letter, you will have to ammend the mame.ini accordingly.

[spacies]

Yip, just copy it all.

If you run MAMEWAH you will need to run the system file again on the new PC.

[jelwell]

You're going to lose any Windows settings/changes, especially any work you've done to hide windows. You could try Ghosting it. Although if your motherboard/cpu is different you're likely to cause more problems than you'd solve.
Joseph Elwell.

[eccs19]

You're going to lose any Windows settings/changes, especially any work you've done to hide windows. You could try Ghosting it. Although if your motherboard/cpu is different you're likely to cause more problems than you'd solve.
Joseph Elwell.

Agreed, if your just copying Mame, then you should be fine, but if your planning on copying the OS, then unless the 2 computers are identical models, Windows will need at LEAST a repair install, and if all goes well, then you should be good to go, but even with extreme hardware changes, a repair install still may not work.

[Bill Mote]

If you're wanting to get a 1:1 copy of everything then you can use Ghost as well as a utility on the XP CD called "sysprep."  It's in the support folder inside a cab file named deploy.  If you have Ghost then that's a valid option.  Syspreg guts the machine of all it's hardware specific settings and forces the machine through mini-setup (enter your key, machine name, etc.)

I seperated my OS from my MAME stuff so that I could capture periodic (as major changes happen) ghosts of the OS.  The MAME stuff I backup excluding the ROMS, SNAPS, etc. folders.

dot