Hey SGT-
Great guide. I bookmarked this months ago & finally got to this phase of my MAME cab development this week.
I got much of the way through this but am having an issue near the end. I'm trying to incorporate my Daphne games first, & then I'll do the handful of MAME games that require different revs of MAME to run right (or at all).
I originally had Daphne set up in its own non-MAME list in MALA, w/ a launch bat for each file.
Here's an example:
C:\Emulators\Daphne\launch_bats\Astron_Belt.bat is:
C:\Emulators\Daphne\daphne.exe astron vldp -framefile C:\Emulators\Daphne\vldp\astron\astron.txt -min_seek_delay 1000 -seek_frames_per_ms 20 -homedir . -bank 0 00000000 -bank 1 00000000 -sound_buffer 2048 -fullscreen -x 800 -y 600
1 - did your additional.xml + mame.xml trick & put the various snaps, cabinets, panels, etc pics in my appropriate MAME directories. My Daphne items show up great in the MaLa menu alongside my MAME games.
2 - set up MaLa with the %rom% %path% command line, pointed it to a 2nd rom path directory (C:\Emulators\Daphne\launch_bats) w/ dummy Daphne zip files, etc.
3 - made a mame.cmd file that looks like this (I'm using MAME 115, optimized for Pentium Pros, hence the funny executable name):
if "%2" == "C:\Emulators\Daphne\launch_bats" goto daphne
mamepp115.exe %1
exit
:daphne
start/wait C:\Emulators\Daphne\launch_bats\%1.bat
exit
4 - MAME games launch fine
5 - Daphne games flip to a blank screen then back to MaLa instantly.
6 - I added the echo code to my mame.cmd to see that the rom & path were being passed correctly to the mame.cmd script:
echo %1 > test.txt
echo %2 >> test.txt
creates this test.txt file:
Badlands_Laser
ECHO is on.
Shouldn't that 2nd line be the rom path that MaLa is passing to mame.cmd? If so, the path obviously never looks like the path to my Daphne bats & zips, so mame.cmd is never getting to the daphne portion of that script.
I switched MaLa to not hide the command prompt window when launching games and, if I hold down the "1" key to repeatedly launch Badlands_Laser from MaLa, I can get a better glimpse of the command prompt window and, indeed, it's still using the MAME app to try to launch the Daphne file (I can see it listing a few games that have approximate name matches). I just tried this from the command prompt & confirmed it: mamepp115 Badlands_Laser returns the approximate name matches indeed.
Any ideas?
Thank you very much,
-Jason